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Mileposts
A blog from Classic Trains columnist Kevin P. Keefe
4

30th Street won’t be the same without Solari

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
In an article in the March 2011 issue of Trains, I made a claim that ruffled some feathers, namely that Philadelphia’s 30th Street is America’s finest railroad station. The story engendered a few howls, mostly from devotees of Grand Central Terminal and Los Angeles Union Station. I thought I was pretty careful in my criteria: the best station has to be busy; it has to be downtown; it has to offer both commuter and intercity service; it has to have classic architecture on a gran...
0

Amfleet is headed for the history books

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I can’t recall the train or the location, but I distinctly remember my reaction the first time I boarded an Amfleet car in 1975. I probably said “wow.” That might surprise some who recall being underwhelmed by the new equipment. There was plenty to criticize, I suppose. They were austere in appearance, especially with those inside-bearing Pioneer trucks adapted from commuter service. The traditional Dutch doors in the vestibule were gone, replaced by automatic sliding doors th...
6

A boxcar pitted us against DPM

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Among the handful of mementos that stare down at me each morning in my office, one grabs my attention most. It’s an HO-scale boxcar, bright yellow with a bright red Trains magazine logo on its flanks, sitting atop a section of track mounted on a small wooden base. I look at it frequently, occasionally dust it off, and treat it like a fragile and treasured work of art. A work of art? A bit of an exaggeration, you say? Not to me, not given the memories it conjures up — memor...
13

Putting the ‘South Bend’ back in CSS&SB

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
They don’t call the South Shore Line “America’s last interurban” for nothing. There’s really nothing else in the U.S. that compares. Where else can you find an electric line occupying much of the exact footprint it did in 1908, wearing the same colors it has for perhaps a century (orange and maroon), running past steel mills and through cornfields, and still operating for a substantial distance in the street? Those are credentials of historic proportion. So when bi...
8

Setting the bar for 2019

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I’ve never been one for New Year’s resolutions. There are too many I should make, so I quickly run away and hide. But now that I have this very public blog, maybe listing a few will get me off the dime. Embarrassment is a great motivator. Of course, they all have to have that classic railroad flavor. Now that we’re already three days into 2019, here are a few I came up with: • Organize my slides. I can hear some friends laughing. “Keefe, you’re not a photograp...
4

If the 'Texas' could talk

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
The locomotive is mostly black now, but it sparkles as its brass fittings reflect the spotlights shining down from above and the sunlight streaming in from giant windows along West Paces Ferry Road. As you sit there on a bench, contemplating the machine filling the vast room in the Atlanta History Center, it’s possible to feel you’re in the company of royalty. That’s the reaction I had last week during an afternoon spent with Western & Atlantic 4-4-0 No. 12, famo...
6

The gifts under the tree were stamped ‘NYC’

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Anyone reading this blog probably does the same thing I do every year when it comes to the holiday season: associate it with trains. The festivities go hand in red glove with train travel, maybe some new railroad books, and probably most often an O-gauge train under the tree. I watch the movie A Christmas Story every year at least once, and my favorite moment is when we see Ralphie and his little brother falling asleep to the sounds of steam whistles in the wintry night. Writer Jean S...
3

Amtrak fire sale is a tribute to Budd

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
The car, Amtrak 8502, sits forlornly behind the old erecting halls at the Beech Grove Maintenance Facility outside Indianapolis. It’s a proud old diner, with a royal lineage. Once upon a time, it was part of a mighty fleet that momentarily transformed the fortunes of the American passenger train. The car carries its original name: Silver Cuisine. That word, silver! It conjures images of the original California Zephyr of 1949, the ultimate cruise train, a gleaming visio...
1

Riding the rails with President Bush 41

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Like millions of others, I plan to spend at least part of today watching the historic passage of the Bush Funeral Train, scheduled to run this afternoon from Spring, Texas, to College Station, where George H.W. Bush will be buried alongside his wife, Barbara. As they have so many times over the past 150 years, Americans will gather trackside to pay their last respects to a president.  That flag-waving railroad, Union Pacific, will do the honors as its specially decorated SD70ACe No. 4141, ...
12

CUT shines again, for the moment without Tower A

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
It’s been an unusually good year for grand old big-city railway terminals. Chicago Union Station has nearly completed the restoration of its “Great Hall”, a.k.a. the waiting room. In Detroit, Ford announced it would sink a billion or more into crumbling old Michigan Central Station. In Los Angeles, Union Station even got back its old Fred Harvey restaurant — with a microbrewery to boot. But top bragging rights should rightly go to the Queen City. After a $228 million res...
19

A libertarian shoots the passenger train

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I have some sympathy for Randal O’Toole. The economist, author, and Cato Institute senior fellow has written a book that must have sparked some inner conflicts, even for someone with a prodigious talent for the sober analysis of statistics. The book is called “Romance of the Rails,” published by Cato. In it, O’Toole posits a simple philosophy: almost all rail transit is inherently cost ineffective, scandalously so, therefore it should receive no government support. That ...
6

Back to the future in Milwaukee

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I felt giddy when I stepped out of the car on an uncharacteristically warm, sunny day last weekend in Milwaukee. There, a hundred feet or so ahead, a crowd was gathering on the platform of a small transit station, everyone looking expectantly down Ogden Avenue to the west.  Soon the object of all the excitement came into view: a gleaming new articulated white-black-and-gold streetcar, ambling down the street over a pristine stretch of double track, its digital bell chiming as it rumbled &m...
3

For PM 1225, the right man at the right time

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Every time you see a steam locomotive operate in 2018, you can be sure there are legions of dedicated volunteers who made it happen. There’s no way an engine runs without a core group of people who are knowledgeable, organized, and dedicated (some would say crazy) enough to make it happen. Within that group, there are always a handful you could call indispensable — people who went the proverbial extra mile, people who stuck their necks out, people without whom the engine would never...
3

Last Sox-Dodgers series was good for the New Haven

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Out here in Milwaukee, some of us are still nursing our wounds over the Brewers’ loss to the Los Angeles Dodgers last weekend in the National League Championship Series. To come within one game of going to the World Series in 36 years, is, well . . . painful. Now it will be the Dodgers going up against the Red Sox starting tonight at Fenway Park. Certainly the powers that be at Major League Baseball like this matchup of major media markets. If you’re a baseball fan, you probably lik...
10

The John Gruber I knew

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I never knew when the phone would ring, but it did, with some regularity. “Hello, this is John Gruber. You free for lunch this week?” It was a ritual John and I shared frequently in recent years. He was always the instigator, and I don’t think I ever turned him down. We’d meet somewhere in the Milwaukee area — he liked a variety of restaurants, not necessarily the meat-and-potatoes railfan spots — and the agenda generally was his. Sometimes it was the busine...
3

In praise of Joliet Union Station

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
A recent afternoon of enjoying nonstop train action at Joliet, Ill. — my first visit back in perhaps 20 years — left me with this question: from the viewpoint of the fan, is Joliet Union Station the finest suburban hot spot in the U.S.? If the criterion is train frequency, great railroad architecture, a variety of railroads, no-hassle access to platforms, nearby amenities, and an intriguing history, then I think the answer is “yes.” That’s certainly the feeling I c...
2

A golden anniversary for Passenger Train Journal

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
It’s hard to imagine a worse time for the American passenger train than the spring of 1968. Railroads were dropping services with increasing regularity, and train-offs were a staple every month in the news section of Trains. Among the lost that season were Southern Pacific’s Lark, Rock Island’s Golden State, and the joint Milwaukee Road/Soo Copper Country Limited. There would be so many more to come.  None of that deterred a determined young passenger ...
3

Return to Crooked Hill

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Driving along I-75 through eastern Kentucky, you might never know that off to one side of the freeway or the other, out of sight, is one of the great old railroads of Appalachia, the former Louisville & Nashville main line from Cincinnati to Atlanta.  While not as rugged as the coal country to the east, this section of the “CC” Subdivision was a deceptively difficult place to build a railroad when L&N surveyors first punched through these ridges in 1882. The railroad wa...
13

J.D.I. has left the building

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I was a nervous 23-year-old when I walked through the front door at 1027 N. Seventh Street, Milwaukee, on August 12, 1974. It was my first day on the job as the sales promotion manager in Kalmbach’s Sales Department.  What had me apprehensive wasn’t the job so much as it was the prospect of suddenly walking the halls with some very imposing names: David P. Morgan, of course, but also George Gloff, Rosemary Entringer, Harold Edmonson, Bill Akin, and George Drury. Luckily the fir...
3

The blue stamp meant great train pictures

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I was in the Classic Trains library recently, thumbing through black-and-white prints, when an old familiar name popped into view on the back of a first-rate action photo of Boston & Albany steam. Seen here, it shows a pair of B&A A-1c “sport model” 2-8-4s, rumbling through West Warren, Mass., with the 5,000 tons of eastbound train BA-6.  The photo is directly credited to Ray E. Tobey, a name unfamiliar to me. What was not unfamiliar was the big blue stamp nex...
10

Wanted: more railroad biographies

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
One of the Facebook pages I check regularly is called “Railway Book Collectors and Readers.” Maybe you’ve seen it. The page is a place for railfans to compare notes on their personal libraries — often with photos of jammed, groaning shelves — as well as exchange information, opinions, and quips about what makes a good railroad book. A discussion thread last week caught my eye. One of the page’s regulars, Kurt Bell, asked the group to name a subject or topic t...
3

Great expectations: Santa Fe 2926

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Drivers on 8th Street N.W. on the north edge of downtown Albuquerque were likely doing a double take one day last week as they crossed a nondescript industrial siding near Haines Avenue and looked immediately west. There, back among some small buildings, a group of people wearing hard hats and safety vests were clambering all over an immense steam locomotive, like Lilliputians attending to Gulliver. Voices called out commands. Eventually a column of smoke rose steadily from the stack. Occasiona...
4

Marion Union Station’s unsung hero

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
If you sat down with pencil and paper and decided you were going to design, from scratch, a nearly perfect place to watch trains in the Midwest, you’d likely come up with something a lot like Marion, Ohio. Want lots of trains? Check — maybe 60 a day on three Norfolk Southern and CSX lines. Perhaps a nice depot? Check — Marion’s handsome Union Station has a 1902 pedigree and a museum inside. A secure place to hang out, close to the action? Check — the spacious platf...
8

A reverie at San Diego’s Santa Fe Depot

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Is San Diego’s old Santa Fe Depot the most attractive big-city station in America? I found myself asking that question after a brief visit not long ago. It’s a logical question, and for a lot of reasons. First, there’s the sheer beauty of the station building. With its elegant twin campaniles, finished atop in tile with the Santa Fe “cross” emblem on all four sides, and its spacious promenades outside, it’s a nearly perfect expression of Spanish Mission archi...
8

Cotton Belt 819 deserves to run again

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
When the first of Northern Pacific’s Class A 4-8-4s rolled out of Alco’s Schenectady plant in 1926, a new standard for North American locomotives was set. The “Northern,” as it was ultimately dubbed, not only produced unprecedented power at speed in both passenger and freight service, it turned out to be an ideal platform for all the other improvements bubbling up in steam technology, from feedwater heating and combustion chambers to disc drivers and roller bearings. Wit...
4

Remembering Kalmbach’s Jim King

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
I suspect that many of you reading this were, like me, devoted readers of Trains magazine back in the 1960s. Devoted might be putting it mildly. As a teenager, I got to where I was so enthralled by the magazine that I made a point of trying to read every last word in every last issue. That even meant the editorial masthead on page 3, including the list of Kalmbach’s corporate staff, way down at the bottom in tiny agate type. I knew all the names, including that of the second guy on the li...
5

Storybook ending for Morehead & North Fork No. 12

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
A couple of months ago I stood inside what, for me, is a very exciting place: beneath the 30-ton overhead crane in the spacious, gleaming locomotive shop at the Age of Steam Roundhouse (AoSRH) in Sugarcreek, Ohio. Surrounding me were examples of the Age of Steam crew’s handiwork, including former Lake Superior & Ishpeming 2-8-0 No. 33 and Yreka Western 2-8-2 No. 19, the former nearing completion, the other not far behind. And over in the corner, minding its own business, was Morehead ...
10

In a Mountain State town, ghosts of the Virginian

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Summer brings road trips and, inevitably, a visit to a railroad town, defunct or otherwise. There’s something irresistible to me about seeing a small place that once depended on a railroad, or still does.   Princeton, W.Va., belongs in the former category, now that its claim to fame, the old Virginian Railway, is mostly gone. Decades of retrenchments brought about by the VGN’s successors, first Norfolk & Western and then Norfolk Southern, have left the town pretty quiet.&nb...
9

The survivor: Nickel Plate 587

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
If you follow the world of railroad preservation closely, you know that most of the reports this week coming out of that charnel house known as the Indiana Transportation Museum (ITM) are bad. The scene in Forest Park at Noblesville, Ind., has been almost impossible to believe: traction equipment and locomotives cut up on the spot; workers, trucks, and acetylene torches everywhere; hurried deals thrown together to save as much equipment as possible; outside groups tagging rolling stock, getting...
8

The perils of 1968

Posted 5 years ago by Kevin Keefe
Of all the crazy years in American history, 1968 is near the top. Entire books have been written about it. Television documentaries have sanctified it. “The most turbulent twelve months of the postwar period and one of the most disturbing intervals we have lived through since the Civil War,” wrote Charles Kaiser in his 1988 book 1968 in America. It was a year defined by the war in Vietnam and the assassinations of Martin Luther King Jr. and Robert Kennedy. Riots in cities and on...
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