Grassroots Railroad Sports?

CPR #2816 is the only surviving non-streamlined Royal Hudson and was sold to Nelson Blount's Steamtown USA after retirement. In the late '90s, when Steamtown became a National Park, they were trying to divest themselves of foreign engines and CPR bought her, shipped her back north and did a very extensive 2 year restoration before putting it in excursion service from '01-'08. They parked it in '08 due to the economic downturn, then fired it back up in '10, and ran it sparingly before it suffered some sort of mechanical issue in 2011. When Hunter Harrison took over CP in 2012, he was asked about the future of the company steam program and bluntly said that steam engines had no place on his rails. She's been parked with the rest of CP's heritage fleet ever since.

Today on virtual railfan:  Actually saw a military train.  The engines were BNSF, but the whole train was flat cars with various armored and soft-skinned military vehicles.  The core seemed to be Bradley AFV's, plus support, transport and mobile artillery .  About 50 cars in total, so battalion strength?   I've seen lots of them on train layouts, but never actually rolling around the country.  

The Milwaukee Road: the last US transcontinental railroad constructed and always the most sickly, hampered by poor routing, bad management decisions and more robust competitors.

For all it's ailments, you can't deny that the Milwaukee Road wasn't a spectacle. From streamlined Hiawathas hitting 100mph between the Twin Cities and Chicago, to big box cab and Russian electrics pounding across Big Sky Country to strings of diesels negotiating the mountains of the PNW, the Milwaukee Road always looked good. It just belied an underlying sickness that got worse as the years went on.

Milwaukee was always a big Fairbanks-Morse purchaser as well, with F-M's Benoit factory on the the Milwaukee's route.

In fact, Milwaukee Road #760, an H-10-44 switcher, was the very first F-M locomotive produced.

NickD said:

That's a stunningly beautiful locomotive. I realize profit margins are too slim for style like this to ever return to the railroads, but I sure wish it would. 
 

This stretch of former Milwaukee Road trackage runs within 3-miles of our old hometown, and fortunately is still in service as part of the Kankakee, Beaverville & Southern. 
 

In reply to Pete Gossett (Forum Supporter) :

That's a Fairbanks-Morse "Eire-Built". Fairbanks-Morse never actually gave them a model name, the Erie Built is a nickname given to them by railfans. F-M didn't have the manufacturing capacity to build them so they subcontracted the work to GE, who was providing the generators and tractions motors already, and GE assembled them at their Erie, PA plant. So they got the nickname Erie-built. The styling on all the early F-M stuff was done by Raymond Loewy, so that explains the attractiveness. And then the Erie-Builts that Milwaukee used on the Hiawathas had all the outrageous currogated stainless-steel trim added. Sadly there are no surviving Erie-Builts, A or B-units. There were 4 CP B-units that had been converted to a mobile welded-rail factory that were in existence until the late '90s but then were all cut up.

Saw this today at some sort of scrap yard. It had run off the end of the rails, rear truck was hanging in the air.