Power Rock Island Armourdale yard Kansas City

Hurtling through Iowa City, Iowa, early on a June morning in 1966, Train 8, the Rocky Mountain Rocket, is running about five hours late behind E6A 631 and an unidentified second unit. Normally its... (more)

A pair of dirty R.I. U33B's, led by 7-year old #291, pull a Council Bluffs bound freight across 63rd street in West Des Moines at a slow 10-20 mph as they smoke up the sky. The train is nearing t... (more)

Freshly shopped GP El Reno

RI transfer job making pickup Pullman Junction south side of Chicago

A cold, wet, gloomy November day greets the Rock Island and its commuters at La Salle Street Station, Chicago as E8 649 and another E wait for their next assignment. In addition to running commute... (more)

Portrait of two Chicago landmarks: The Chicago Board of Trade dominates the background as E6A 630 eases out of LaSalle Street Station at 4:08 pm on March 20,1975, to begin its regular afternoon co... (more)

Half an hour out of Silvis yard, FP7A 406 heads through the riverbottom swamps east of Colona, Illinois, on its way to Chicago. The unit, along with nine sisters, is four feet longer than a standa... (more)

Those accustomed to Rock Island in maroon or red were startled in 1975 when the road’s new president John Ingram started painting cars and locomotives in white and blue. But Ingram had come out ... (more)

Just three weeks out of the Capital Rebuild Program at Silvis shops, new image GP7 4517 ambles through the old riverfront town of Peru, Illinois, in the historic heart of the Rock Island. Rails we... (more)

Once upon a time, the HIgh Line connecting the Golden State Route at McFarland and the Omaha-Denver line at Belleville, Kansas, saw four passenger trains (including a Rocket) and a half dozen frei... (more)

Late afternoon in the piñon and mesa landscape of southern New Mexico. The temperature on July 29, 1967, has just slipped below 100 degrees as GSX, the Golden State Express, otherwise known as #9... (more)

Rock Island U25B 202 left its own rails behind 45 miles ago, in Santa Rosa, New Mexico. Now it’s rolling through the piñons on the Southern Pacific just south of Vaughn, hell bent on an early e... (more)

Massive floods along Colorado’s Front Range ten days ago closed almost all rail access into Denver. And so June 17,1965, finds this Rock Island piggyback grinding up the just-reopened Rio Grande... (more)

The Rocky Mountain Rocket, almost exactly halfway on its 91-mile journey across the old Kansas Pacific from Denver to Limon, Colorado, passes beneath a cluster of cottonwoods, those ancient sentin... (more)