Classic Trains Winter 2019

Classic Trains magazine celebrates the golden era of American railroading when giant locomotives and colorful streamliners shared the rails. Your subscription includes 4 issues (1 year) of compelling stories and photography, including: • First-hand accounts from railfans and railroaders.• In-depth profiles of great locomotives, passenger trains, and railroad companies.• Spectacular photographs of steam locomotives, vintage diesels, and streamliners.• Railroad history from the 1920s through the 1970s.• Unlimited access to premium online content.• And much more!…

Hard to believe, but as the year 2019 draws to a close, the 1960s are now fully five decades gone. Not so long ago, it seems, the half-century club was reserved for sock hops, ration books, bread lines, and speakeasies. Now the Apollo moon landings are on the list. But of course, 50 years is a long time. Nowhere is this more evident than in railroading. In this issue we have several stories that provide ample proof of the changes the industry has seen in the last 50-plus years. In “End of the Trail” [page 16], Bill Diven recalls the summers he spent in northern Illinois and southern Wisconsin in the late 1960s and early ’70s. A teen-aged resident of southern New Mexico at the time, Bill rode Santa Fe trains to…

LIGHTS, CAMERA, 4-8-4! Southern Pacific’s old Oakland Pier station took a turn in the spotlight — literally — just before it closed. The 1957 film Pal Joey opens with Frank Sinatra, having been thrown onto a train in some town, arriving at the terminal on his way to San Francisco. In brilliant Technicolor, the camera captures GS-4 4443 steaming grandly into the shed, then stealing the scene as Sinatra walks past her. Filming, pictured here, was in April 1957, 15 months before SP moved out. Heritage fever heats up Canadian Pacific has maintained F units and a GP38-2 in its 1940s–’60s livery for special trains since the early 2000s; in September, it received the first of 10 SD70ACu rebuilds dressed in two versions of the classic scheme for general freight service. Then on…

Boss of the Grips: The Life of James H. Williams and the Red Caps of Grand Central Terminal By Eric K. Washington. Liveright Publishing, New York, N.Y. 368 pages, $27.95. The already deep body of literature on New York’s Grand Central Terminal has been made incalculably richer with this biography of the man who for nearly a half-century led the elite corps of red caps who attended to the passengers of the New York Central. To follow the life of James H. Williams, “the Chief,” is to take an absorbing journey into the heart of New York social life in the first half of the 20th century, especially as it related to African-Americans. Principled and graceful, Williams was a pioneer, breaking the Terminal’s color barrier, fighting for recognition and respect for his…

I enjoyed reading J. David Ingles’ “Alcos In Dairyland” [page 54] and “Sailing to the U.P.” [page 56, Summer]. My friend Wayne Allen and I made a similar trip in fall 1978, traveling from New Hampshire to Michigan, across the lake on Ann Arbor’s carferry, then north from Green Bay to Escanaba and St. Ignace, Mich., then south across the big bridge over the Straits of Mackinac to Lower Michigan. We were rewarded with GB&W and C&NW Alcos, MILW F units and FM switchers, C&NW BLW-EMD conversions, and the carferries. One surprise was at St, Ignace, where we found Algoma Central GP7 168, on loan to the Soo Line, switching the cross-strait carferry Chief Wawatam [above]. Gregory L. Strout, South Paris, Maine My old college friend Dave Ingles knows better than to…

Six Electro-Motive GPs and a lone Alco RS11 power a northbound Seaboard Coast Line freight through Baldwin, Fla., on September 2, 1968, 14 months after the merger of Seaboard Air Line and Atlantic Coast Line. The three GP40s up front wear SAL’s final “Jolly Green Giant” scheme, while the trailing first-generation units are in the livery introduced by the road’s FTs in the early ’40s. Baldwin, about 20 miles west of Jacksonville, was the junction of north-south and east-west SAL routes and one Atlantic Coast Line route. Today, both SAL routes are in service for CSX, but the ACL line comprises the Jacksonville-Baldwin Rail Trail.…