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The Tennessee Valley Railroad’s 
Hiwassee Loop

In East Tennessee there’s a very nice excursion railroad, called the Tennessee Valley Railroad. It offers a short run option from Chattanooga up to Missionary Ridge, through a hand cut, Civil War era tunnel, behind one of a variety of nicely restored steam locomotives.  At the top, there’s a turntable and you can watch them turn the steamer around—very cool!

Or, you can board a three and one-half hour run called the Hiwassee Loop, departing from Etowah Tennessee, south of Knoxville, and re-live the glory days of the Louisville & Nashville’s passenger service over the L&N’s mountain lines that wind east and south toward Georgia alongside the scenic Hiwassee River.

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The Steptoe Valley Flyer

16:00 hours February 9th, 1941.

The crew of the outbound Steptoe Valley Flyer prepares their train for a fifteen mile round trip to wye the train at Keystone, Nevada, before boarding passengers on Train No. 3 heading to Cobre, Nevada where the line meets the Western Pacific mainline to Reno. At the helm, 4-6-0 number 40, built by Baldwin’s Philadelphia plant in 1909, pumps air in anticipation for her run up Robinson Canyon.

16:00 hours February 9th, 2019.

Fireman Con Trumbull, fresh in from Casper, Wyoming, and trainmaster Angie Stevens, a local in the town of East Ely (and engineer for today’s run), chat about slow orders, bulletins, and happenings reported on the 145 mile stretch of Nevada Northern mainline that await their nighttime run to Cobre, as the aroma of coal begins to fill the air inside the cab.

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Two Trains, 
Two Photographers

West Leesport, Pennsylvania

In December 1990, the Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern Railroad (RBMN) bought 150 miles of tracks in east-central Pennsylvania from Conrail in the process of expanding from a 13-mile shortline (the Blue Mountain & Reading, on the remaining portion of the former Pennsylvania Railroad’s Schuylkill Valley branch) to a 300-mile regional. The “Anthracite Cluster” included mostly ex-Reading Company routes—both main lines and branches—as well as bits and pieces of ex-Lehigh Valley and ex-Central of New Jersey trackage.

To celebrate the expansion, and the railroad’s heritage, the Reading, Blue Mountain & Northern operated a weekend of freight and passenger trains in early June of 1991, using Reading Technical & Historical Society diesels and their own ex-Reading T-1 #2102—herself built in 1945 in the Reading Company’s shops in downtown Reading, Pennsylvania. For a few unseasonably hot days, the tracks between Reading and Cressona once again felt the weight of a giant 4-8-4 pulling coal cars, almost like the old days. (Unlike the old days, the engine wore Blue Mountain & Reading lettering on her tender, and all of the coal cars had Conrail markings, but I don’t think too many of the assembled fans minded much.)

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Riding the Joliet Rocket

No, this isn’t from WWII in the forties, but present day history buffs volunteering their time in their magnificent period uniforms aboard the “Frank Thomson” PRR closed-end observation car, seated in its comfortable art deco lounge area and photographed on September 16, 2018. The train is the “Joliet Rocket” clipping along at over sixty miles per hour on its way to Chicago’s LaSalle Street Station powered by the famous Iron War Horse #765 of the Nickel Plate Road. Built in 1944, NKP 765 is now owned and operated by the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society. The four fan trips held over the weekend of September 15th and 16th, 2018 are named in remembrance of the fallen-flag Rock Island Rocket trains of the past that ran on these rails.

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Anatomy of a Photograph
 The Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad

The Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad

Saturday, October 20, 2018 was the final day of the week-long Lerro Productions photo charter on the Oregon Coast Scenic Railroad. The anatomy of an image: here are the accounts of Polson #2 steam locomotive fireman Martin E. Hansen, and photographer Matthew Malkiewicz.

Reflecting on a steam run as experienced inside the cab and from behind the lens

Martin E. Hansen

The night before the last day of the charter I was told that one of the firemen for the charter had to leave and go home early. Our trainmaster asked if I could fill in for him on the log train the next morning with Polson Lumber Company #2, a standard gauge 2-8-2 Mikado built by the Baldwin Locomotive Works in 1912. Since I had just completed a week of hard work days in the shop with our restoration crew finishing the jacket, piping and other final installations on the Skookum locomotive, I was ready for a change and gladly accepted the assignment.

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Traces on the Waterfront

Kingston’s Hanley Spur

San Luis Central car carrying potatoes to Quattrocchi’s from Bath, New Brunswick.

Are the tracks really gone?

 I can hear the chuff of a Canadian Pacific mixed train coming up behind me. There! A Canadian National roadswitcher burbles as it ambles along in the warm afternoon sun.

I am day-dreaming. I’m walking exactly where those steel-wheeled sights and sounds were once felt. I’m on the City of Kingston’s Urban K&P Trail, the umbrella name for the multi-use trail that traces the paths of Canada’s two major railways from mainline to lakefront.

When the railways first mapped out their steel arteries, the ‘line of best fit’ could not possibly reach every community. Canadian Pacific’s Montreal-Toronto mainline was many miles north of Kingston. The Grand Trunk Railway (later Canadian National) barely entered city limits.

The Kingston & Pembroke (the trail’s namesake) connected Kingston to the CPR mainline in 1885, with GTR’s Kingston trackage having reached the waterfront in 1860. Industry grew along the water; grain elevators trans-shipping to lake freighters, coal and oil dealers supplying the city’s heating needs, even one of Canada’s major locomotive manufacturers. Trackage was extended as far south as it could be—mere feet from Lake Ontario, the St. Lawrence River and the Great Cataraqui River.

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