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Trains Magazine 1956 November Middleman of the Alphabet Route
Trains Magazine 1956 November Middleman of the Alphabet Route
62 Pages
Railroad news and editorial comment. By David P. Morgan.6
Old-fashionedness with a purpose - a trait that gets things done in railroading.
Railroad news photos.-8
Watch railroading open a new station and lay to rest a steamer and some electrics.
Middleman of the Alphabet Route. By Gus Welty.14
Executives who saw the "big picture" have earned for the P&WV a secure spot.
A Virginia & Truckee sampler. By Lucius Beebe.23
Mr. Beebe turns poet to eulogize an age of railroading that has all but passed.
Six cylinders still going strong.26
You can't get this little switcher down. B&O predicts another 30 years for her.
Photo section.29
Railroading: photographed from the air and the ground, from a hillside and a cab.
Starrucca Viaduct. By Richard Ward.32
Erie and Delaware & Hudson Camelbacks in the full glory of a Pennsylvania autumn.
This car may well be it.--42
Budd's new car has all the carriers have been asking for in a passenger coach.
Concerning Henry Ford, a 4-6-0 built in 1900, small boys, and bliss and ignorance. By David P. Morgan with photo-
graphs by Philip R. Hastings.48
Steam - all steel and a yard wide, including NYC's oldest steam locomotive.
OLD-FASHIONEDNESS HATH CHARM
WE expect to read and see and hear about railroad modernism in 1956. It is news, good news, when (to select items from this issue alone) Missouri Pacific sets forth to build a yard that will cut terminal time from 18 to 9 hours per car, and the passenger problem may be nearer a solution because of Budd's superlight-weight coach. It is likewise encouraging to hear of the sales success of small but vigorous Pittsburgh & West Virginia, to know that diesels can age gracefully in the manner of B&O No. 125, and to discover that, all of a sudden, the average American locomotive is exceptionally recent and therefore efficient.
Modernism pleases management, financial analysts, the public, you, us.
Perhaps there should also be a bit of publicity attendant upon old age-rather, purposeful old-fashionedness. Railroading dates back more than a century and a quarter, years during which the industry has acquired a proud and priceless heritage. Frequently it is easy to misconstrue that age as inefficiency and to whip out the junker's tools for the sake of exchanging something rare for a few cents' worth of scrap value.
Baltimore & Ohio is the example we have in mind. B&O is surely modern in the sense of dieselization and traffic solicitation and retarder yards and C.T.C. It is known in the trade as a sharp railroad operator. But B&O also established a museum to house a priceless collection of railroadiana it had quietly set aside over the years. . . . B&O carefully repainted the red brick, white woodwork, and black railings of an elderly depot at Cumberland.... B&O is happy to explain its heritage - to railfans by operating excursions, to Hollywood by lending period equipment without cost, to the public by an "open-house" attitude.
B&O is purposefully old-fashioned in other respects. It took a Missouri show-me approach to the RDC, for example,
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