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Zephyr passenger cars last trip — Looking beyond a sea of Amtrak Phase IV, the stainless-steel design and neon lights spell out California Zephyr on the tail end of Amtrak’s westbound No. 5 of the same name at Chicago Union Station. It’s a scene reminiscent of the 1950s with the same equipment that carried the […]
Santa Fe 2401, a 1937 Electro-Motive model NW, switches heavyweight tourist sleepers in the road’s coach yard in Chicago. Special signs on their sides indicate the cars are assigned to the Chicago–Los Angeles Scout, which ceased to operate as a Chicago train in 1949. Classic Trains coll. […]
Ex-Army 0-6-0 No. 7 of short line Virginia Blue Ridge switches covered hopper cars at Dominion Minerals’ plant at Piney River, Va., in the early 1960s. VBR dieselized with SW1s in 1963. William E. Warden Jr. photo […]
Bad Day at Black Rock filming location: “Bad Day at Black Rock” sounds like the perfect name for a western, but really, it’s a taut present day crime drama that explodes onto the screen when one-armed John McCreedy steps off the train just after the opening credits. And what a backdrop for the credits; a […]
Canadian National train 101 from Toronto and Hamilton, Ont., has just arrived at the CN-Wabash station at Niagara Falls, Ont., on Oct. 24, 1953. Wallace W. Abbey photo […]
Classic Trains editors are celebrating the history and heritage of Delaware, Lackawanna & Western Railroad all through March 2022. Please enjoy this photo gallery of Lackawanna freight trains selected from the archives of Kalmbach Media’s David P. Morgan Library. The Delaware, Lackawanna & Western’s main line extended from Hoboken, N. J., northwest through Scranton, Pa., […]
The Alco Black Marias, a trio of prototype cab units, were the builder’s initial attempt to enter the mainline diesel locomotive market after World War II. The U.S.’s World War II War Production Board closely monitored the railroad locomotive builders and what they could and could not produce. Loosely, EMD was manufacturing mostly road locomotives […]
The Santa Fe built a large, new freight station at Argentine, Kan., in 1961. The office building portion included offices for agents, the railroad’s transportation company, and division freight traffic personnel. The facility featured indoor tracks and automated cart tracks for more efficient operation. Santa Fe photo […]
Pennsylvania Railroad E3sd 4-4-2 2999 passes B Tower in Bethpage, N.Y., with an eastbound Long Island Rail Road train in the 1930s. Controlled by the Pennsy between 1900 and 1966, LIRR often borrowed power from its parent. Pierre M. Ditto photo […]
I’d been hired as second-shift railroad station agent at Channing, Mich., for the Escanaba & Lake Superior Railroad in June 1980. The railroad had taken over operation of the Milwaukee Road’s lines north of Green Bay, Wis., three months earlier. I was 23 years old and had no qualifications for the job, other than I […]
44-ton locomotives in North America: There was a time in North American transportation where railroads were the king of moving goods and services, providing every industry whether it be 50 cars or one, a spot on their daily switch list. When steam was being dethroned by internal combustion, many railroads replaced them in-kind with similar […]
My first road-switcher cab ride started with the wub, wub, wub, wub, wub sound of the engine at the Illinois Railway Museum in Union, Ill. After a full-body experience aboard Frisco 1630 earlier that day, I settled into the cab of Union Pacific road-switcher No. 1848. (For the details folks, this is a diesel- electric, […]
