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I hired out in 1944 with the Santa Fe as an agent/operator apprentice and in August was assigned to the agent/operator pool. In about a year I was 26th up from the bottom of the list, so I was able to successfully bid on some openings. One night in about 1946, I was working relief […]
During my career as an engineman on the Southern Pacific, I ran and fired locomotives carrying from 185 to 300 psi of superheated steam. The engine in this story was a 3700-class 2-10-2 which carried 200 psi of steam at 510 degrees F. Every road locomotive had two water glasses, one on the engineer’s side […]
Before a 1960 line-relocation project, the two main tracks of the Santa Fe Railway’s transcontinental main line split at Supai, a few miles west of Williams, Ariz. The westbound track followed a more circuitous route, enabling trains to more easily climb the steep Supai hill. Twelve miles west of Williams the tracks met again, at […]
All the high excitement, thrills and tensions of railway experience are not the exclusive province of the operating department employees. Many a trackman, carman, and other railway workers have anxieties and thrills in the course of performing their daily tasks. As superintendent of motive power, I had my share of pressing situations that extended a […]
In the small town of Goshen, Ind., where I grew up, one was always aware of the New York Central. Goshen was astride the New York-Chicago main line, so the railroad was not only a key to the city’s economy but also part of its very consciousness. For my own generation of high school boys […]
I’m awakened by the sound of the phone ringing and his muffled voice saying, “It’s two-thirty. They probably want W-2 pushed east.” The old stairs squeak under his weight as he quickly descends them to answer the phone. “Hello?” “Yes, it is.” There is a long pause then he repeats bits of the message, “Ridgway, […]
Many of us didn’t want to believe that the steam era was drawing to a close — that diesels, those cousins of the automobile with their garish tin shrouds, were winning the battle over the noble iron horse — until a dreary Sunday afternoon in the summer of 1953. After that, we could no longer […]
At age 4, I looked forward to 2 p.m. That was the hour my grandfather would return to our house on Wicome Avenue in Newport News, Va., for his afternoon break, followed by our daily trip to trackside. Shortly after Granddaddy’s cup of coffee, we would drive in his white fin-tailed Cadillac over to the […]
It goes without saying that the smooth handling of Seaboard Coast Line’s Florida streamliners was a matter of personal pride for the line’s customarily well-tenured passenger engineers, and never more so than when an office car containing the railroad’s top brass was added to the consist. Even so, a road foreman of engines always rode […]
We have nothing special planned for June 6, 1957 — the 13th anniversary of the D-Day invasion — but it turns out to be a memorable day for the Daily family. My dad is an engineer on the Nickel Plate Road working out of Frankfort, Ind. I am a 22-year-old, newly promoted engineer on the […]
John was one of the many engineers I fired for on passenger trains on the Southern Pacific between Sparks and Carlin, Nev., after World War II. He made his firing date in 1912, and his engineer’s date in 1920. In those days, running a passenger train was like a miracle, for there were 149 engineers […]
At 1:45 p.m. on a sunny spring afternoon in 1955, the pace of activity at the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy depot in Brookfield, Mo., quickened. Due at 1:57 was train 36, the Chicago-bound Kansas City Zephyr — a streamliner led by two sliver E8’s. Automobiles began arriving and discharging passengers and their baggage. Station personnel […]
