Here’s an idea for someone wanting to break into print in TRAINS or Trains.com: A feature story on industrial switchers along the Overland Route. Somewhere west of North Platte, Neb., today it occurs to me that I have seen more than a dozen of first...

I anticipate spending some quality time today on BNSF Railway’s Chicago-Kansas City artery, near Carrollton, Mo., where, due to joint track and trackage rights, you never know whether you’ll next see one of its trains or those of Norfolk Southern...

My wife says I’m crazy. She doesn’t actually say that. What she says, when I tell her this afternoon that I had reached eastern Illinois, is, “I’m just glad I’m not with you.” That’s a woman’s way of saying you’re crazy. Let’s examine that idea...

The answer: domestic intermodal containers, and I trust you sense the irony. Here we are in mid-2010, coming out of an economic Armageddon, with 369,090 freight cars (23 percent of the fleet) in storage, and railroads and their intermodal customers...

When railroads these days want to add capacity — say, some double track or Centralized Traffic Control or a big new intermodal terminal — the first place they look for money is the government. As I stood on a bridge watching Norfolk Southern trains...

It’s 8 o’clock in the morning when you drive into Bulls Gap, Tenn. This is the fifth time you’ve been here over the past four years, and each time two things remain constant: It’s always overcast. And you always see a train. Today is no different...

You’re hearing a great deal of debate these days over the hard choice to be made between high speed trains some years from now, versus higher -speed trains (and more of them) in the here and now. We can’t have all of both because money doesn’t...

Almost from the day he bought the Indiana Rail Road from Illinois Central in 1986, Tom Hoback set his sights on acquiring what had once been Milwaukee Road’s Terre Haute Division. President and part owner of the Indiana, he envisioned the Chicago-Louisville...

I’m sure all of you (okay, a few of you) wish there were a place you could go after work and order a beer or wine or other drink while right beside you, one train after another rushes by. I found such a place: Tim’s Riverside Restaurant & Crab...