Travel blog Gadling has been running a series of posts on touring Alaska “without a cruise ship.” In today’s post, we arrive at Skagway, where, naturally, the writer thoroughly enjoys himself on the White Pass and Yukon Route: “I love train travel and this was one of the very best train journeys I’ve ever taken.” […]
Both Disneyland and Walt Disney World have a railroad: each has a small fleet of refurbished narrow-gauge steam locomotives running on a couple of miles of track around the park. Even though they’re steam engines, they’re also kind of diesels: the fireboxes are heated by diesel fuel rather than coal or Bunker C. Starting this […]
Even in Romania, logging railroads are a dying institution. Twenty years ago, when Bob Turner first toured Romania’s logging lines, “the country still had 21 forestry lines, all 760 mm, all steam operated. My last visit was in 1999. Three systems survived at that time. I closed a chapter of my steam photography, and thought […]
The Galloping Goose is an icon of Colorado narrow-gauge railroading, but it was born out of necessity: the Rio Grande Southern, facing bankruptcy in the 1930s, adopted these odd-looking, diesel-powered rail buses as a way of providing minimal service (and maintaining a mail contract) at minimal cost. The front half looked like a bus, the […]
A Cumbres & Toltec narrow-gauge Mikado, presumably awaiting a retrofit, in Chama, New Mexico, in September 2003. Photo by Bodie Bailey.
I received a few railroad-related books for Christmas. From my father, Tony Koester’s Model Railroader’s Guide to Coal Railroading. From my significant other, Jennifer, two books on the history of British Columbia railroads: Logging by Rail: The British Columbia Story by Robert D. Turner, a history of logging railroads in B.C. (mostly on Vancouver Island); […]
John West has spent nearly five decades taking pictures of trains, and he’s posted a collection of them online. It’s a bit hard to navigate (the photos are actually spread over several discrete user pages), but there’s a lot of first-rate stuff here: recent photos of Chinese steam; Rio Grande narrow gauge in the 1960s; […]
One of the steam engines of the Puffing Billy Railway, a narrow gauge tourist line in Australia. Photo by Captain Chaos.
I’m a sucker for narrow gauge, and I know I’m not alone. For some reason, railroads built to a gauge narrower than the standard four feet, 8½ inches have captured railfans’ and model railroaders’ imaginations, no doubt due in no small part to the rugged terrain and astounding scenery in which such railroads were invariably […]
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