Our love affair with trains.

The Hamburg Port Railway was opened in August 1866 by the Berlin-Hamburg Railway Company.
Today, the Port of Hamburg railway has a track network of more than 300 kilometres, which efficiently handles around 200 goods trains with over 5,000 railcars daily. It's the largest port railway in Europe.

In 2016, due to the anniversary, quite a few historic engines had been there:

That Toledo and Ohio building is something else. I've never seen anything like it. I always thought the overhanging eaves was functional railroad architecture to keep people out of the rain. But now I see the tower with the exaggerated overhanging eaves, and it seems to be strictly railroad aesthetic. It's wonderful.

It is based on medieval French architecture--essentially that central tower above the entrance is like a keep from the 13th or 14th century. The exaggerated overhand was to protect defenders from archers lofting their arrows into the tower. However, the architects were influenced by the Japanese castles, too, so it's a sort of misbegotten blend.

At 14:34 of this video, there is an excellent view of les Tourelles, a double barbican fortress south of Orléans in 1429 (although a lot of that movie is purest bullshit). That was the architectural style that the architects in Columbus were using when that station was built.

damn cant get the clip, were blocked in Pa .

European RR' gave thwir trains kind of high pitched whistles while those in US and Canada are deep resonant whistles. The reason , I always thought, was that in Europe, trains were all over and high pitched whistles could be clearly located wrt distance and place. The American trains just wanted you , and wandering cattle, to be warned to "Just get off the only goddam track in 100 miles" .

I don't know about mainland Europe, but in Britain the different railway companies had their own whistle designs. For example, the London Midland and Scottish Railway had a design they called a 'hooter' with a very deep mournful note. The Great Western Railway used two whistles on their locos - one low- and one high-pitched. The high-pitched whistle was for warning of the train's approach and for giving shunting signals. The low-pitched whistle was for sending braking instructions to the crew on the train before the advent of continuous brakes and was retained for the same purpose for freight operations. Some whistle-signals required use of both whistles. It always bugs me in TV dramas or films where they dub in the wrong whistle sound for the loco being shown. My wife is used to this.

The differences in the the below videos

LMS whistle

GWR main whistle

Restored railroad Depot, now used as a railroad museum, in West, Texas. West is the small town near Waco where they had the huge fertilizer explosion a number of years ago.

Here is a video showing the disassembly of a locomotive diesel engine. You can see the size of a piston itself. On one locomotive engine described the cylinders had a displacement of 710 cubic inches, and there were eight cylinders in a V. The engine turns a generator that run electric motors to drive the wheels. The mileage was one and a half gallons of diesel fuel per mile. Of course if you're pulling 50 cars with piggyback trucks, that's still pretty good mileage.

The diesel locomotive has a second engine and Generator to supply electricity to all Passenger cars for heating and cooling etc.

https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=QQ2AgoI-3Zs

I guess it's time for the nation that invented railways, and has the largest mileage of preserved heritage track in operation, and the largest number of preserved locos (I think it's over 3,000) and that actually lets steam locos haul trains over the national network, to weigh in here. Watch this space.

the diesel horns seem to sound the same the world over. However, for the steam trains, Im used to and prefer those sonorous whistles that , by their frequencies can be heard for 10 miles. Like an old elephant matriarch

What do they burn, coal, North Sea oil?

My fvorite Railroad artist is Ted Rose (1940-2000). The Pennsy used to publish RR calendars topped by a single annual water color illustration of one of their rolling stock. I never liked the "Official" RR art because the artists almost universally engaged in "EXTREME PERSPECTIVE VIEWS" They would show long trains that had a steep vanishing point angle which always bothered me.

Rose engaged in a lot more unique viewpoints and rendered them all in water color. He was a real master of the genre.

Hmmm . I tried to upload a picture from his book "IN THE TRACES"
I do not know why it failed

Heres one I think will allow itself to be shown. Its from his "In the Traces" book

Oops . . . the nickel dropped, and I realized that they are using coal.

This song, usually associated with Arlo Guthrie, it was written by Steve Goodman. (I not only know where Kankakee is, I've been there.) It is more than 900 miles from Chicago to New Orleans.

Johnny Cash would love this thread.

A song about the iron horse.