Three Pacifics share the shop floor with several 2-10-2s at the New Haven Railroad’s system locomotive backshop in Readville, Mass. Classic Trains coll. […]
New Haven steam under repair
Kansas City Southern 2-10-4
Kansas City Southern’s last new steam locomotives were 10 class J 2-10-4s built by Lima in 1937. As this postwar photo of No. 905 indicates, they were massive machines — those are 70-inch drivers under that giant boiler. Harold K. Vollrath photo […]
Hudson scooping water
New York Central J-1 Hudson 5236 takes water from a track pan near Huron, Ohio, in the 1940s. Water columns stand ready to serve engines that stop for water. Richard J. Cook photo […]
Fuel train on the Tonopah & Goldfield
Built during the gold rush years of 1904-05, Nevada’s Tonopah & Goldfield ran 100 miles southeast from an SP connection in the desert near the California border. An Air Force base near Goldfield brought traffic to the road during World War II — these two slide-valve 2-8-0s are hauling aviation fuel — but the boom didn’t […]
Southern Railway passenger trains remembered
Southern Railway passenger trains remembered All through June 2022, Classic Trains editors are celebrating the history and heritage of the Southern Railway. Please enjoy this Southern Railway passenger train photo gallery selected from the files in Kalmbach Media’s David P. Morgan Library. This gallery was first published in March 2019. Only from Trains.com! […]
Flexi-Vans on the IC
Flexi-Vans on the IC The Illinois Central was one of several roads that used Flexi-Vans for mail. Here, two Flexi-Van flatcars (four containers) are tucked behind the engines, and a third flatcar with a single container brings up the rear, on the Land O’ Corn at Rockford, Ill., in March 1967. Mike Schafer photo […]
Early Pennsy piggyback
A single-axle Pennsylvania Railroad trailer with the “Keystone Merchandise Service” logo on the front is positioned on a flatcar in Chicago in 1954. Soon the PRR led the formation of Trailer Train, known today as TTX. Pennsylvania Railroad photo […]
Doubleheaded Pennsy 2-10-4s
Pennsylvania class J1 Texas types 6486 and 6488 move Lake Erie-bound coal north out of Columbus, Ohio, in September 1955. PRR’s 125-strong J1 fleet of 1942–44, based on a Chesapeake & Ohio design, accounted for more than a quarter of all 2-10-4s built. Philip R. Hastings photo […]
Stories working as a railroad fireman
Working as a railroad fireman: It was the end of summer. Billy, Wimpy, and I had finished cleaning up after the last threshing job and watched Mr. Hedrick slowly drive the rig out to the road and head west to the winter storage building behind his blacksmith shop. The rig consisted of a Huber […]
Electro-Motive history: From upstart to undisputed champ
Electro-Motive history: Steam was king, its supremacy uncontested, in 1922 when Harold L. Hamilton and associates rented office space at 17th and Euclid in Cleveland, Ohio, for their fledgling Electro-Motive Engineering Co. Established to design, market, and maintain gas-electric railcars for light-density passenger service, the modest enterprise could hardly be considered a threat to […]
Consolidation in Minnesota fog
Duluth & Northeastern No. 27, a former Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range 2-8-0, emerges from morning fog with empty log flats at Cloquet, Minn., in August 1962. The short line dieselized in August 1964. Russ Porter photo […]
CB&Q and PRR diesels in Chicago
A Burlington Route switcher prepares to move several baggage-express cars at the Railway Express terminal near Chicago’s Union Station in 1961. In the foreground, a Pennsy switcher moves motive power — two E8As and an E7B — for a train into position at the station. J. David Ingles photo […]
