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Check out what Trains staff and industry experts say
about railroads, train-watching, and more, in our blog.
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In mid August, after a severe traffic slump brought about by the worst recession in decades, railroad carloadings showed new signs of life, rising about 6 percent. And that bump-up in business held steady — too steady, it turned out. If the economy is coming out of its long funk, rail carloadings should have continued the rise begun three months ago. But they did not, hovering between 610,000 and 615,000 units (including trailers and containers) week...
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Guest post from Rush Loving Two weeks ago, when Warren Buffett announced his purchase of Burlington Northern Santa Fe, a number of journalists seemed surprised that anyone would want to buy a railroad. "A railroad might strike many people as a bit old-fashioned-more 19th century than 21st," said The New York Times . Some TV network reporters referred to railroads as if they still were in the 1800s. Nevertheless, they all were quick to explain...
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What do you get when you cross a rules-obsessed road foreman of engines with an engineer skilled at finding locomotive defects that don’t really matter? A train that can’t move. I witnessed just such an event recently. The moment I enter the lead locomotive, I wish I hadn’t. The engineer sits idly in the conductor’s seat. In the engineer’s chair is a trainee on his final qualifying run, while the road foreman of engines lords over both of them, then...
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So there I am sitting down to dinner last Friday night at my daughter’s favorite dining establishment, Chili’s. Our hostess presented my girl with her menu, which doubles as an activity book. I’m not sure how often Chili’s changes the activity book theme, but this was the first time I saw this one on transportation. Chili’s recurring characters all took charge of a mode of transportation. Hal flies a jet that uses a rocket engine, Sunny drives a solar...
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Railroad photography just keeps getting better. It’s always been great with passionate photographers, great optical equipment, and the most thrilling subject on the planet (in motion, lighting conditions never the same twice, equally fascinating up close or in panorama). But today it just seems that the digital revolution has just made a great art form even better, and Trains is going to showcase more great railroad photography on our Web site. Starting...
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From noon Friday, November 13, through 8 a.m. CST Monday, November 16, all the great features that are available only to registered users or Trains magazine subscribers will be available to everyone, including you. For free! Find out what you've been missing! Check out these exclusive benefits: Trains News Wire — Get caught up on the day's railroading headlines written by Trains staff members, featuring about 30 stories a week! TrainsTube...
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by Matt Van Hattem, Senior Editor If you’ve ever stopped to glance at the cover of a fashion magazine (admit it — we all have), you may also know that the “photo” is often a composite of different pictures of the same model, knit together seamlessly with the magic of photo editing software. At Trains magazine, we usually strive for realism on our covers. That doesn’t mean we won’t, say, remove a patch of dirt from the lead engine’s nose. But to do...
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I’ve been puzzled by the buyout of Burlington Northern Santa Fe. Warren Buffet has said many times that railroads make lousy long-term investments. “It [railroading] will never be a fabulous business,” he said once again last year. “It’s too capital intensive.” Then the chief executive of Berkshire Hathaway turns around and makes the biggest investment of his life by buying the 77 percent of BNSF (parent of BNSF Railway) that Berkshire doesn’t already...
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The towns along Minnesota Northern Railroad’s Warroad Subdivision could form the backdrop for Garrison Keillor’s stories, or provide set locations for the Coen Brothers’ movie Fargo . Tall gray grain elevators provide the only vertical relief; each fall, they fill with the bounty of the fields that stretch north into Manitoba, and south until they transition to marshes on the Red Lake Indian Reservation. In summer, Warroad sees its share of visitors...
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The world is at war. Our nation has just emerged from the Great Depression and is fighting for its survival as a free people. Yet, life still goes on. Santa Fe’s twice-weekly, all-Pullman Super Chief, headed from Chicago to Los Angeles, is stopped for servicing at Albuquerque, N.M. Water and diesel fuel from tank cars are being pumped into the bowels of the twin locomotives. Passengers step out for a break; some walk up to the head end. Everyone wears...
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Talk about awesome. Talk about vertigo. I’m at the side of a dirt road in Iowa, looking straight up. And what I see is weathered spider steel on the right and massive concrete superstructure on the left. Engineering wonders, a century apart. Either one is enough to take your breath away. And here they are, side by side, reaching toward the sky. This is what I’d set out to see this morning, only much better than I’d imagined. I was in Omaha for the...
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I don’t harbor much hope that our $13 billion commitment to high speed rail ($8 billion now and $1 billion each of the next five years) will be spent rationally. The Federal Railroad Administration is analyzing applications for more than $50 billion in projects. Because there will be more losers than winners, political log-rolling is almost guaranteed. But wouldn’t it be nice to put the money to work where it would do the most good? In that regard...
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Imagine that you’re the VP-operations for a big U.S. railroad. One day your office door opens and standing there is the person you least like to see, the VP-law. He or she sits down uninvited, right in front of your face, and says, shape up, Bunky, or we’ll be paying Amtrak instead of the other way around. What am I talking about? I’m talking about the sensational improvement in on-time performance by Amtrak trains over the past two years. My sources...
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In Part 1, you read the challenge put to the Lexington Group in Transportation History: Name the men who really got it right in railroading the past half century. In Part 2, you read the picks of the moderators of this discussion, David DeBoer and Jim McClellan. Now it’s my turn. Once again, the rules: Nobody is eligible who left the railroad scene before 1960, or who still runs a railroad. I think Dave and Jim did an outstanding job framing the environment...
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In the first installment, I told you about the question posed to the Lexington Group in Transportation History by Jim McClellan and David DeBoer. They described the challenges facing railroad leaders in the past half century, grouping those challenges under four headings: new markets and distribution systems; technology and productivity; finance; and industry structure and public policy. The best CEOs made breakthrough contributions to the industry...
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