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15

European railroads see climate change as an opportunity

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

Railroads across the pond see a huge opportunity to gain freight and passenger volume as part of a European Green Deal that aims to significantly reduce greenhouse gas emissions. Last month the Community of European Railway and Infrastructure Companies, their version of our Association of American Railroads, argued that boosting rail’s share of the freight market to 30% by 2030, up from 17% today, would go a long way toward making transportation carbon-free by 2050. Already, the CE...

16

Not in the Public Timetable

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

While I made a number of trips to Monroe, Virginia, the Southern Railway’s division-point yard north of Lynchburg, during my college years, the dismal-looking afternoon of January 23, 1969 was the only time that I either saw or photographed this train, number 21. It and northbound counterpart 22 were the mail-and-express runs on the Washington-Atlanta main line, with 21 departing Washington, DC’s Union station in the early afternoon, while 22 left Monroe early in the mornin...

10

The Neighbo(u)rhood Has Changed

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

According to its current proprietor, the Toronto Railway Historical Association (TRHA), “A switcher type locomotive, CP Rail 7020 (class DS10-b, serial 72855) looks like she was 'ridden hard and put away wet' ". (Background/historical information was taken from the group’s excellent webpage, http://www.trha.ca/locomotives.html). Delivered in October 1944, the 7020 was both a “war baby”, and, by birth, a Yank. Built by Alco in Schenectady, New York, this m...

2

Being somewhere, even if only for a minute

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

One of my favorite aspects of train travel is that, when looking out a train window — or even better, in a dome, on an open platform or at an open Dutch door — you feel like you’re in a place rather than just passing through. This is especially true when an on-board narrator or written route guide informs you about what you are seeing. I was reminded of this when, in the middle of a two-week business trip to Oklahoma City this month, I rented a car to drive from there to the Oz...

26

F-units aren't Forever?

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Since their regular-service advent in the 1940s, one could have been forgiven for thinking that the statement above might not have been true. Those of us that can be classified as “Boomers” (in the non-railroad sense of this word) grew up with them and their ubiquity; for us, they have always been part of the North American railroad/railway landscape, so it would have been a waste of time to contemplate that this might turn out to be correct at some point in our lifespans. ...

10

BNSF's art collection captures the American West

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

When you walk past four stainless steel passenger cars and into the visitor’s entrance to the BNSF Railway headquarters in Fort Worth, Texas, it’s immediately clear the company is proud to be a railroad – and is equally proud of its long history. The museum-like reception area is filled with railroad artwork and artifacts, from drumheads and steam locomotive diagrams to track components and a velocipede. The BNSF campus also is home to a magnificent 800-plus piece art col...

37

White flag of surrender

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

From a volume standpoint, the third quarter was a doozy. Railroad traffic slumped for a variety of reasons, not the least of which was increased competition from trucks. If there was a theme on the Class I railroad earnings calls last month it was that volume is not going to get better until trucking capacity tightens sometime in the middle of 2020. It’s a point driven home by the ratings agency Moody’s, which now projects rail traffic will fall by as much as 3% next year. But here...

14

By the Dawn's Early Light, Times Two

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Those of you that know me, or have seen my photographic work online, including on Flickr (https://www.flickr.com/photos/georgehamlin/), are aware that a location that I frequent in our local area is Neabsco, where CSX’s Washington-Richmond, Virginia main line crosses the creek of the same name on a high trestle, just east of the point where the stream flows into the Potomac River. Broadside shots here favor afternoons (unless you have access to a boat), since the bridge is roughly on ...

35

115 years later, the New York City subway still amazes

Posted one year ago by Justin Franz

On Oct. 27, 1904, at approximately 2:35 p.m., “New York’s dream of rapid transit became a reality.” At that moment, Mayor George B. McClellan Jr. piloted the first run of the New York City subway, known as the Interborough Rapid Transit Company. The mayor was originally only supposed to serve as motorman for a few stops, but according to an account by the New York Times, he had so much fun that he stayed at the controls from City Hall all the way to the 103rd Street Station. T...

28

What makes Precision Scheduled Railroading different?

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

Three times in the past month I have heard rail executives utter the same phrase about Precision Scheduled Railroading: “It’s not rocket science.” And when you listen to skeptics of PSR, you get the feeling that the operating model is nothing more than Railroading 101. Case in point: Earlier this year BNSF Railway’s chief executive, Carl Ice, said that most of what PSR railroads do – setting schedules for individual cars, focusing on terminal dwell, running lo...

19

Red, White and Green

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Outliers; interlopers. These, and other terms signifying the unexpected and/or unusual certainly apply to the subject matter of this color photo taken by my friend, and well-known photographer, Mel Lawrence, at Washington, DC’s Ivy City engine terminal, on May 16, 1978. In a number of ways, neither Amtrak 52 nor Southern 6901 belong here this late in the 1970s. Both, of course, pre-dated the advent of the National Railroad Passenger Corporation. The Southern Railway ...

6

A route of superlatives through B.C.’s heart

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

[Part 2 of 2 - read Part 1 here] After hitting a local microbrewery and getting a few solid hours of sleep in a quiet cabin just outside of Jasper, we were up early the next morning and back at the historic station by 6:15 AM, ready to board Rocky Mountaineer for my first time. From the moment we checked in with Rocky’s staff, we knew we were going to be in the lap of luxury. We were embarking on a three-day journey that included two hotel nights in cities along the way, and not only were...

31

Hunger Pangs and Heartaches

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Yesterday, October 1, 2019, was the end of a long passenger railroading tradition in the U.S., with the arrival of the final ‘staffed’ dining car on Amtrak’s eastern routes. My friend Ralph Spielman provides more details: http://trn.trains.com/news/news-wire/2019/10/02-staffed-dining-cars-make-last-runs-on-eastern-amtrak-routes Earlier in the northbound Crescent’s run I had been able to photograph its Viewliner diner performing this mission, as seen in the pho...

5

Two days on a four-car streamliner across northern B.C.

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

[Part 1 of 2] I returned a week and a half ago from an excursion to western Canada to travel over two new (to me) and reportedly scenic rail routes and to sample VIA Rail Canada’s Touring Class service and one of the offerings of Rocky Mountaineer, a private luxury rail tour operator that, in part, competes with government-supported VIA for the international tourist market in the Canadian Rockies and British Columbia. The trip was timed around my birthday, but also to take advantage of le...

12

The Great Retreat

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

Over the past two years, three of the Big Four U.S. rail systems have dropped intermodal service between hundreds of points, curtailed steelwheel interchange in Chicago and other gateways, and de-emphasized or even closed some intermodal terminals. By one analyst’s estimate, these service reductions represent 1 point’s worth of the 4% year-to-date decline in intermodal volume. You could call this the Great Retreat. This trend, part of the industry’s embrace of Precision ...

10

Photography of Trains

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Recently, I’ve given a presentation to several groups that has a one-word title: “Trains”. The presentation’s subtitle (no, not a reference to foreign language translation) sheds more light on the content, however: “A less locomotive-centric look at railroad photography”. Railfan photographers often concentrate their efforts on the locomotive(s) leading the train; the typical “grade crossing wedge” has the train’s consist trailing off ...

8

Timeless Tehachapi

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

If you love art, you visit the Louvre. If you love beer, you head to Munich. And if you love watching trains, well, you have to go to Tehachapi. I’ve longed to see this rugged mountain railroad in Southern California since I was a teenager, when the pages of Trains Magazine introduced me to Tehachapi Loop. Over the years circumstances always prevented me from visiting. I was in Long Beach, Calif., this week to cover the Intermodal Association of North America’s annual Intermodal Exp...

36

How to accentuate train travel’s singularity

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

Amtrak announced the retirement of its lone surviving dome car, the former Great Northern Railway Great Dome dubbed Ocean View, from its fleet last month. To mollify disappointed passengers who were looking forward to the dome’s annual thrice-weekly autumnal appearance north of Albany on the New York-Montreal Adirondack, one of the most scenic routes in the east, the passenger carrier’s press release promised that the Adirondack would soon be reequipped with new coaches offering larg...

4

The Queen of Ely

Posted one year ago by Justin Franz

Ask me what my favorite steam locomotive is and I honestly don’t think I’d be able to give you a straight answer. Sure, I might be able to give you a list of potential contenders, but putting that list into some sort of actual order would almost certainly be impossible. Canadian Pacific 4-6-2 No. 2317 and Canadian National 2-8-2 No. 3254, the two main line locomotives at Steamtown National Historic Site in the 1990s, were the first large steam locomotives I ever saw and both w...

7

Wall of Light

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

I’d submit that the more photography of all kinds that you attempt will improve your railroad photography. Part of this is simply an extension of “practice makes perfect” (or, in the realistic world, at least moves you in that direction). In addition, however, if you can capture a competent, or better yet, interesting, photo of something where the subject matter isn’t your primary objective, it will be helpful when you’re trying to add an evocative r...

32

Canadian National’s latest smart move: Trucking

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

Over the years some Class I railroads have viewed the acquisition of trucking companies as the road to intermodal riches. Instead, all they did was prove that the best way to make a small fortune is to start with a big one. Consider the experience of Norfolk Southern and Union Pacific. In 1984, NS acquired North American Van Lines for $315 million. Fourteen years later, NS sold North American to an investment firm for $200 million. UP shelled out $1.2 billion for Overnite Corp. in 1986. The rai...

5

Today, Yesterday and Tomorrow

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

This eastbound Southern Pacific manifest is at Salinas, California on February 5, 1987. It’s being led by a “Flare”, i.e. one of the SP’s massive fleet of EMD SD45s, followed by a Union Pacific SD40-2, and a pair of Espee “Tunnel Motors”. According to Wikipedia, the SP was the most prolific original operator of EMD’s 3600 horsepower C-C, with 317 units, to which should be added the 39 rostered by the St. Louis Southwestern, the “Co...

12

Almost, but Not Quite

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

I suspect that many of you are familiar with the famed “Triple Crossing” in Richmond, Virginia, where three different railroads intersect in the same place, on three different levels. Using their heritage identifications, from top to bottom, the players were Chesapeake and Ohio; Seaboard Air Line; and the Southern Railway. Essentially adjacent to the James River, the crossing is virtually surrounded by highways today. Needless to say, it’s been an objective for p...

5

Sometimes good things do come in small packages

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

When you explore, you just never know what you might find. Case in point: The tiny former Grand Trunk Railway depot in Gilead, Maine, a speck of a town on the New Hampshire border. After a Fourth of July bike ride I was wolfing down a sandwich in the shade in front of the depot when a car pulled up. The driver asked if we were interested in seeing inside the station. Of course, I told the gentleman, noting that we’d passed by many times and I’d always been curious about the depot, ...

46

The cheapening of American train travel continues

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

Though my interest in trains goes back much farther (and I had ridden a few tourist trains, New York City and Washington, D.C.-area commuter trains and subways, and a couple of short Amtrak trips before then), my first experience with an overnight Amtrak ride came in 2002, at the age of 16. By that time, my father and I had made our way from Greensboro, N.C. to the New York City area every summer to see my aunt in the city and my grandma in Madison, Conn. for about a decade, but we had always fl...

36

On the Property

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Back in the “good old days” of mythological memory (of whatever prior era suits you), it was often possible for non-employees to enter onto railroad property in pursuit of their interests and hobbies, and in many cases, to return to the “outside world” sans being accosted, ejected and/or threatened with arrest. Of course, there were instances where these untoward events occurred, but by and large, they weren’t in the majority. In the process of do...

12

Why VIA Rail Canada’s high frequency rail plan is a dud

Posted one year ago by Bill Stephens

Normally a proposed passenger-only rail route is cause for celebration in North America. Pop the champagne cork for the high-speed route Virgin Trains USA is building to Orlando, Fla., for example, or the Texas Central Railroad’s ambitious plan to link Dallas and Houston. But don’t break out the bubbly for VIA Rail Canada’s dream of cobbling together a dedicated passenger route from abandoned, lightly used, and new rail lines in its crucial Toronto-Ottawa-Montreal-Quebec City ...

13

Step in the Right Direction

Posted one year ago by George Hamlin

Like many other railfans, I was pleased when the Norfolk Southern announced its “Heritage Unit” program in 2012, particularly based on their decision to use historically-correct paint schemes, adapted as necessary to conform to the shapes of present-day locomotives. Yes, the original Union Pacific program was a nice step in that direction, although it combined elements from different eras, in some cases; Amtrak’s modest fortieth anniversary repainting of a small numbe...

7

Ontario’s passengers have much to celebrate & anticipate

Posted one year ago by Malcolm Kenton

Last week I attended the American Public Transportation Association’s annual Rail Conference, which is held in a different North American city each year. The setting of this year’s conference in Toronto was appropriate, as Ontario is a hotbed of propitious activity in passenger train and rail transit development. First, rail transit continues to grow and thrive in greater Toronto. North America’s largest legacy streetcar system continues to be well-loved and well-used by...

5

Why reinvent the wheel?

Posted one year ago by Tyler Trahan

On my blog post last week about the Wheel-Rail Interaction Conference, a commenter asked “Why reinvent the wheel?” and noted that the same basic wheel shape has been used since at least the 1870s. I don’t mean to single out this commenter. It’s a good question. My answer, and I welcome others in the comments, is in two parts: Because everything above and below the wheel has also been reinvented Because the process isn’t intended to change the...

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