MOBILE, Ala. — With the sound of shattering glass and a big splash of champagne, Genesee & Wyoming short line CG Railway on Wednesday christened one of its new rail ferries that can haul up to 135 freight cars across the Gulf of Mexico. Virginia Reeves, a 34-year G&W employee who works in corporate communications, […]
Pacific Car & Foundry boxcar Scale: HO (1:87.1) Price: single car, $54.95; six-pack, $329.70, six-pack Era: 1972 to present (varies depending on paint scheme) Manufacturer: Rapido Trains Inc., 500 Alden Road, Unit 21, Markham, Ontario L3R 5H5 Canada, 905-474-3314, rapidotrains.com Pacific Car & Foundry boxcar features: Separate, factory-applied metal grab irons, uncoupling levers, and door […]
2.0 Electro-Motive Division SD70M-2 diesel locomotive Scale: HO (1:87.1) Price: Direct-current with 21-pin NEM connector, $249.98; with dual-mode SoundTraxx Tsunami 2 sound decoder, $339.98 Era: 2005+ to 2019+ (varies depending on paint scheme) Manufacturer: Athearn Trains, 2904 Research Rd., Champaign, IL 61822, 800-338-4639, athearn.com 2.0 Electro-Motive Division SD70M-2 diesel locomotive features: All-wheel drive and electrical pickup […]
MONTREAL — Quebec’s pension fund may withhold support from some members of Canadian National’s board of directors to protest the lack of French-speaking board members, Reuters reports. Caisse de depot et placement du Quebec — CN’s 10th-largest shareholder — is considering the move, a source told the news service, after previously criticizing a move that […]
TREGO, Wis. — Wisconsin Great Northern Railroad opened its scenic bed and breakfast and dinner trains May 10, 2022, after being closed to passenger operations for 784 days due to the COVID-19 pandemic. The popular scenic train operates over two former Chicago & North Western Railway lines in Northwest Wisconsin, based out of Trego, just […]
OTTAWA, Ontario — Canadian Transport Minister Omar Alghabra has criticized Canadian National Railway Co. for maintaining an English-speaking-only board of directors in a bilingual nation where 7.9 million citizens – 22% of the population – speak French as their first language. “It’s unacceptable that the board of directors does not have a francophone representative on […]
SAN DIEGO – Union Pacific and autonomous trucking company TuSimple have delayed plans to begin driverless truck moves between the railroad’s Tucson intermodal terminal and the Phoenix area. The companies in February said they’d launch the service this spring. But the service has been pushed to the third quarter because TuSimple and UP have shifted […]
WAPELLA, Ill. — Short line Illinois Terminal Belt Railroad has added to its fleet of former Illinois Central Gulf Paducah rebuilds with the addition of Midwest Locomotive Leasing (MWLX) No. 602, a former GATX Rail Locomotive Group diesel built as Illinois Central Railroad No. 9130 in January 1956. The 65-year-old locomotive was rebuilt as ICG […]
WINNIPEG, Manitoba — A track-repair error led to a rail-joint failure, causing a 2019 derailment of a Canadian National oil train, the Transportation Safety Board of Canada said in its summary of a report released Friday. The Feb. 16, 2019, accident near St-Lazare, Man., led to the derailment of 37 cars of a 110-car crude […]
Amid lot of talk, just what is Precision Scheduled Railroading? It began with a simple lesson. In the late 1960s E. Hunter Harrison was working in the tower in Frisco’s Tennessee Yard in Memphis when Bill Thompson, the railroad’s operations chief, dropped by. Thompson pointed to the yard tracks, chocked full of freight cars, and […]
Modeling freight car loads: Kalmbach Media will be releasing Keith Kohlmann’s new book Model Realistic Freight Car Loads at the end of June. The 112-page book will feature a variety of loads, including farm machinery, heavy equipment, steel and metal products, assorted vehicles, forest products, and building materials. Seeing the announcement for the book on […]
Let’s set aside the railroad industry’s current bout of temporary service problems and discuss something more important. Class I railroads’ local service — which ranges from OK to downright embarrassing — for years has been where the rubber meets the road. Shippers divert rail shipments to trucks when a local regularly fails to show up, […]
