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.
David Jarvis has photos of the U.S. version of Canadian Pacific’s Holiday Train stopping in Wisconsin Dells, Wisconsin on Sunday. Dogcaught collects links to photos of the ORHF Holiday Express, which ran behind SP&S 4-8-4 #700 last weekend. CSX’s Santa Train was only led by a GP40-2, not a vintage steam engine, but Christopher Esposito [...]
Oh, you’ve got to be kidding me: from the March 1938 issue of Modern Mechanix, a steam engine running on bricks of dried milk instead of coal. “The substitute fuel is said to have burned readily, providing as much heat as coal.” Does anyone know more about this? Via Make: Blog.
The Oregon Rail Heritage Foundation also runs a holiday train, but its proceeds go to their efforts to provide a permanent home for its three steam engines, including SP&S 700 and SP 4449, both of which will be pulling the trains. (Not quite needy families, but still.) Via Dogcaught. Previously: Daily Flickr Photo: Caltrain Holiday [...]
I should really do a post on geared steam engines. In the meantime, have a look at this Climax logging engine. Photo by cjphotohound.
Southern Pacific 4449, a GS4-class 4-8-4 Northern built in 1941, is one of a handful of locomotives still in occasional excursion service. Retired in 1957, it was spared the torch and was one of the steam engines pulling the American Freedom Train in the 1970s. It currently resides at the Brooklyn Roundhouse in Portland, Oregon, [...]
The Hindu reports that a 230-ton Beyer-Garratt articulated steam locomotive has been restored to service after 36 years; it made an inaugural 58-km run between Shalimar and Mecheda on the South Eastern Railway in West Bengal, India on Friday. It’s expected to be put to use on a tourist line. Other coverage: Business Standard, Kolkata [...]
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 [...]
While searching Flickr for interesting railroad photos, I kept stumbling across photos taken by Raymond Fudge, particularly those from the Steamtown National Historic Site and the Strasburg Rail Road. The former is a museum set in the yards of the former Delaware, Lackawanna and Western Railroad in downtown Scranton, Pennsylvania (official site; Wikipedia); the latter [...]
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