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Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern Railway: Map, History, Rosters

Last revised: October 27, 2026

By: Adam Burns

The Minneapolis, Northfield and Southern Railway, reporting mark MNS, began as Colonel Marion W. Savage’s electric interurban and spent most of its life as a Twin Cities belt line. Savage sold mail-order stock feed and owned the pacer Dan Patch. He wanted a high-speed line from Minneapolis to Dubuque, and a reach beyond that toward Chicago. What he built, the Dan Patch Line, stopped about 40 miles out, at Northfield. The wire was promised and never strung. Dan Patch died on July 11, 1916. Savage died the next day. The company went into receivership that same month. In June 1918 Harry E. Pence’s Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern took the property and turned it to freight. For the next sixty years the railroad was a short, busy connection among the big roads: Glenwood to Northfield and Randolph, and after 1927 a reach to Crystal, Shoreham, and Northtown. The Soo Line took control on June 2, 1982, looking for a Twin Cities gateway to the Rock Island’s Spine Line. The Chicago & North Western was awarded that line. The MN&S never became the Kansas City road the Soo had bought it to be.

Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern DT-6-6-2000 No. 23 in freight service in Minneapolis on May 20, 1971. Bob Johnson photograph.

On this page: The Dan Patch Line · At a glance · The belt line · Motor cars and mules · Steam · Diesels · Soo Line

The Dan Patch Line

In The Electric Interurban Railways in America, George W. Hilton and John F. Due describe three great bursts of interurban building. The first ran through the 1890s. Between 1901 and 1904 more than 5,000 miles were laid down. The Panic of 1903 checked it. Construction started again between 1905 and 1908, another 4,000 miles, and that is the season in which Savage decided he would have an electric railroad of his own. The automobile was still Henry Ford’s promise rather than the country’s habit. A traction line looked, to a great many promoters, like the future: frequent trains, clean cars, and a timetable a small city could trust.

The traction men were already late. The steam railroads had the through business, and too many of the new lines joined towns that could not fill a car. Few of them bothered with carload freight. A lot of that mileage came up in the 1920s. Savage’s road was aimed at the same mistake, and then it was pulled out of it.

The corporate beginning is a year before Savage’s name is on it. Promoter W. P. Mason incorporated the Minnesota, Rochester & Dubuque Traction Company on November 27, 1906. The idea was local transportation south of the Twin Cities, through a rural country, with no real plan for freight. The surveyed line ran southeast toward the Mississippi and missed Rochester, the largest city on the way, after the two sides failed to agree on a franchise through the streets. Mason wanted the wire, and a right-of-way built to a high standard. He could not finance it.

In mid-April 1907 Savage took hold and reincorporated the property as the Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester & Dubuque Electric Traction Company. He never failed to put a name on a product. The railroad became the Dan Patch Air Line, soon shortened to the Dan Patch Line, after the horse that had not lost a race and held a stack of world records. Savage had bought Dan Patch in 1902 for $60,000. The town of Hamilton, where he kept a 750-acre stock farm and a stable called the Taj Mahal, was renamed Savage in 1904. Lake Marion, below the farm, took his given name. The horse was the advertisement. The railroad was going to be another one.

The Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern Railway logo. Author’s work.

The territory was already spoken for. The Milwaukee Road, the Chicago Great Western, and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy served it directly. The Rock Island was not far off. The Chicago & North Western and the Soo Line were in the Twin Cities. Savage advertised past the facts, the way he sold feed: completion dates, a route to Dubuque, electrification that was always just ahead. Towns argued over a station, or refused the line. Faribault refused it.

Grading began in 1908. John C. Luecke and Paul R. Spyhalski, in The Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern, give the first day of regular service as July 5, 1910: 12.38 miles from 54th Street in Minneapolis to Savage, where the farm was. Regular service reached Northfield, 37 miles, on December 13, 1910. The road had been laid out for passengers, so it needed downtown Minneapolis. The Twin Cities Rapid Transit Company did not want the interurban on its rails, and Minneapolis at first refused a franchise. A small depot went up at 54th Street, an agreement was made, and through service to that point opened on March 1, 1911.

Southern construction stopped the next year. The extension toward Faribault was given up, and the company leased the Chicago Great Western’s Mankato Branch instead. That branch had been built as the Wisconsin, Minnesota & Pacific, a Rock Island attempt to get farther across the Upper Midwest. The Minneapolis & St. Louis leased it for a time as the Cannon Valley Division. The Great Western bought it in 1899. It was never a heavy line. What mattered to the Dan Patch, once freight appeared, was the Great Western connection at Northfield and Randolph.

Electrification was the promise Savage kept making. He even looked over sites for a power plant. The wire was never hung. The passenger equipment was internal combustion from the start: Strang gas-electric cars, then General Electric cars, and then a General Electric freight locomotive. Bill Middleton, in Trains for June 1959, called the result "The Strange, Successful Story Of The Railroad That Was Once Named For A Race Horse," and he gave the Dan Patch the claim of being the first railroad or interurban to run on internal combustion alone.

To fill the seats, the company did what other interurbans did and built a place to go. Antlers Park, on Lake Marion near Savage, had a beach, a clubhouse, a dancing pavilion, an aerial swing, and a miniature railway. Summer crowds were the passenger business. The first freight, on August 25, 1911, was 400 gallons of milk from the Crescent Creamery at Northfield to Minneapolis. A downtown freight connection took longer. In 1914 the Dan Patch opened a terminal at 7th Street North, run with the three-mile Electric Short Line Terminal Company, reached by a connector from Auto Club Junction, near Savage, to the terminal company’s Luce Line Junction. That terminal company was merged into the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern in 1956. The Electric Short Line Railroad, the line that later ran west to Gluek, was a separate company.

At a glance

The belt line

Dan Patch died at the farm on July 11, 1916. Savage was in a Minneapolis hospital. He died on July 12. The Minneapolis, St. Paul, Rochester & Dubuque Electric Traction Company went into receivership in July 1916, within days of the two deaths. Creditors wanted the property sold off. That effort failed. In June 1918 Harry E. Pence organized the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern Railway, and that summer the new company took the railroad at foreclosure.

The new owners did not pretend it could live as an interurban. Freight revenue was $79,000 in 1919 and $116,000 in 1920, and it kept climbing while the passenger timetable was cut back. In 1927 a six-mile extension left Soonor, on the west side of Minneapolis, and reached the Soo Line at Crystal. Seven more miles of Soo trackage rights carried MN&S trains to Shoreham Yard and to an interchange with the Northern Pacific at Northtown. The project cost about half a million dollars. With it finished, the belt had seven interchanges with the big Twin Cities roads: Chicago & North Western, Rock Island, Chicago Great Western, Milwaukee Road, Great Northern, Soo, and Northern Pacific.

There was also the Minnesota Western. That railroad began as the Electric Short Line Railroad, incorporated in August 1908. By 1927 it had a little more than 115 miles, from Minneapolis out to Gluek, and a paper ambition to reach Brookings or Watertown, South Dakota. It never did. From 1927 the MN&S managed it. It stayed a separate railroad, and it contributed locomotives. The company absorbed in 1956 was the three-mile terminal at 7th Street North. The line to Gluek remained the Minnesota Western.

In 1929 the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern grossed more than $1 million for the first time. The depression cut the traffic. The company got through it. On January 18, 1931, it dropped the lease of the Great Western’s Mankato Branch. The stub had never had much business of its own, and it was later abandoned. The Northfield and Randolph connections stayed.

A 1929 public timetable of the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern.

An official, 1929 system map of the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern. American-Rails.com collection.

By 1957 net operating revenue was $4.77 million. More than 70 percent of the 82,000 carloads that year were overhead, cars the MN&S received from one railroad and handed to another. That was the belt-line business, and it was also the risk. When the North Western took the Chicago Great Western in 1968, the MN&S interchange with the Great Western fell by half. The mergers that followed kept taking the partners this little road had been built to connect.

Passenger service ended in 1942. After that the pattern was freight, and it held into the late 1960s. Two or three turns a day ran Glenwood–Northfield–Randolph. Some of them laid over at Randolph, where the company kept a contract with the Randolph Hotel for the crews. Transfer jobs ran from Glenwood to Crystal and to the Soo at Shoreham. The Soo gave the MN&S four stalls in the Shoreham roundhouse. Other transfers worked the Great Northern at Cedar Lake, and the Milwaukee Road and the Minneapolis & St. Louis at St. Louis Park. Omaha Road cars at Savage usually moved on the mainline trains. At Northfield the Milwaukee and the Rock Island were close connections, and there was almost always a car to hand over. The railroad cleared its own snow. One hard winter it rented a Juhl rotary. The Hi Line, the original piece between Auto Club Junction and the 54th Street terminal, and the industries along it, were switch jobs out of Glenwood Yard.

Motor cars and mules

The Dan Patch accumulated fifteen motor cars between 1910 and 1915, and it was never an electric railroad. The first three were Strang cars, two of them from the Missouri & Kansas Interurban and one a Strang demonstrator. On this road they were Ogerita, Irene, and Rosamond. Ogerita, the smallest, spent her time on a shuttle and was retired in 1914. Rosamond burned in 1911. Irene, the demonstrator of 1908, was rebuilt by General Electric in 1913, renamed Marion, and became Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern 15. She was scrapped in 1932.

A dozen General Electric–Wason cars, numbered from the second 3 through 14, carried the passenger business in the good years. Most of them were sold after the 1916 bankruptcy. No. 7, a GE demonstrator, was wrecked in 1914 and rebuilt as baggage trailer 200. What the reorganized railroad kept from that fleet were 13, later renumbered 16, and 14, together with Marion. In April 1921 it added Minnesota, Northfield & Southern 12, a General Electric–Wason built in January 1916 as Florida East Coast 200. The Dan Patch’s own No. 12 had already left. Passenger service ended in 1942. Nos. 12 and 14 were authorized for conversion to freight work the next year. No. 16 was scrapped in 1939.

Railbus A-1 was a 31-passenger White, built at the company shop in 1918. Like Ogerita, it was too small. It spent most of its time as a shuttle between 54th Street and the Auto Club, and in 1922 it was sold to North Dakota’s Midland Continental.

Behind the motor cars were 25 trailers, and until 1916 they more than doubled the seats. Nos. 50–53 were secondhand New York City elevated cars, 48 feet long. Nos. 54–62, nine cars, came from Wason in 1912 and 1913. Nos. 63–74, twelve cars, came from Brill in 1915, 57 feet long, with open platforms. Their later history is thin. Trailer 59, a Wason of April 1913, was sold to the Minnesota Western on April 1, 1945. Trailer 55, a Wason of June 1912, was stricken on February 1, 1946. Those 25 trailers stand outside the locomotive counts.

The later cars, outside that fifteen, are the ones the freight railroad actually kept in the timetable and then in work service.

The freight locomotive the Dan Patch became known for was a mule, a boxcab apart from the motor cars. General Electric built four of them. No. 100, of 1913, was a 350-horsepower, B-B machine, billed as a power plant that could take either a passenger train or a freight. It went to the Minneapolis, Anoka & Cuyuna Range and survives at the Minnesota Transportation Museum, in the Jackson Street Roundhouse at St. Paul. Nos. 101–103, the same rating, arrived in 1915 and were sold in 1916. They were on the property only a short time. The four mules stand outside the fifteen motor cars and outside the steam list.

Steam

By the fall of 1915 the freight was outgrowing the mules. The company ordered three Porter Moguls, and they were delivered in 1915 as Dan Patch 200–202, with 51-inch drivers. Only 200 stayed. No. 201 went to the Minnesota Western in 1918 and came back in 1927, when that railroad passed under MN&S management. It was retired in 1937. No. 202 was sold before the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern drew its roster. The steam list below is 25 locomotives, each frame once. The first 506, a parts engine, is one of them. The Baldwin of 1944 is the second 506.

No. 1 was a Baldwin Mogul of 1889, 60-inch drivers, acquired in 1918 and retired in 1920. The new power after that was a pair of Porter Moguls, 100 and 101, built in 1920 with 53-inch drivers. No. 101 was still switching at Glenwood in July 1932 and was retired in 1946. No. 100 was the last steam locomotive on the railroad. It was dropped in November 1950, six months after the second 506.

With the Minnesota Western in 1927 came two American compound Moguls, 143 and 146, built for the Soo Line in 1907, 55-inch drivers, retired in 1932. In 1925 the road bought three Northern Pacific Prairies, class T, Alco of 1906, 63-inch drivers. They became 300, 301, and 302, the old NP 2354, 2359, and 2301, in that order. All three were retired in 1932. The shops put superheaters on 100, 101, and the three Prairies, and Franklin air doors on 300–302.

Six Consolidations came from the Duluth, Missabe & Northern and were numbered 400–405. Nos. 400 and 401 are Alco engines of 1907, 56-inch drivers, the former DM&N 344 and 345, acquired in 1927. No. 400 was retired in 1932 and No. 401 in 1936. Nos. 402 and 403 are Pittsburgh engines of 1905, the former DM&N 321 and 326, also acquired in 1927. No. 403 was retired in 1935. No. 402 lasted until about 1949. Nos. 404 and 405 are Pittsburgh Consolidations, 404 built in 1905 and 405 in 1907, both acquired in 1927. No. 404 was still in service at Glenwood on July 24, 1934, and lasted until about 1949. No. 405 was retired in 1931.

The road engines of the freight years were nine Decapod frames. The first three, 500–502, are Brooks USRA Decapods of 1917, acquired from the Detroit, Toledo & Ironton in 1932. They had been DT&I 300, 301, and 302. Two more, 503 and 504, followed in 1933, the former DT&I 308 and 314. In 1935 the Erie supplied 2464 and 2494, which became 505 and the first 506. The first 506 was bought for parts and was taken apart. It was hardly a locomotive. The second 506 is a different engine: a Baldwin Decapod of 1944, built for the Soviet Union as Es2379, damaged by a crane at Seattle while it was being loaded, repaired by Baldwin, and delivered here the same year. It was dropped in May 1950. No. 507, Brooks of 1918, had been Erie 2450 and then Alabama, Tennessee & Northern 427. It arrived in 1945.

The Decapods were doubleheaded between Glenwood, Northfield, and Randolph, and the pairs were split at Savage so a single engine could take the train across the Minnesota River bridge. On the short lap between Northfield and Randolph they ran either end forward. Jim Mahacek of Northfield remembered them, now and then, helping a heavy Milwaukee Road or Rock Island freight south out of Northfield toward Dundas, past the end of the MN&S itself. The Glenwood shop fitted Baldwin power reverse and brakemen’s cabs, and in 1944 and 1945 the Decapods received stokers and larger tender cisterns. The last of them came off in 1950. Porter 100 outlasted them by a few months.

Diesels

The first diesel was Baldwin VO-660 600, built in June 1940 and later renumbered 60. The MN&S scrapped it in April 1968. A second VO-660, Minnesota Western 1, built in 1942, became MN&S 61. Cargo Carriers bought it before 1966. The railroad dieselized the way it had bought steam: one or two locomotives at a time, and the steam stayed until the new engines had earned the right to replace it. Porter 100 and the Decapods were still working beside the diesels into 1950.

The first postwar diesel was Fairbanks-Morse H10-44 11, built in September 1946 as Minnesota Western 51. It was the only H10-44 the MN&S owned. In the early 1970s it was repainted with an oversized version of the diamond logo. It was sold in May 1976 to the Hallett Dock Company of Superior, as that company’s No. 6. Fairbanks-Morse H12-44 10, built in January 1951 as Minnesota Western 10, was stored at Glenwood from June 1979, came back briefly while SW1200 30 was in the shop, and was then stored and scrapped.

Fairbanks-Morse H10-44 No. 11 leads a freight into Northfield, Minnesota, on October 29, 1964. The railroad owned only this one H10-44. Rick Burn photograph.

H10-44 No. 11, boarded up and waiting, at the engine house in Glenwood Junction on July 5, 1975. It was sold to the Hallett Dock Company of Superior in May 1976. Karl Miller photograph.

Baldwin VO-1000 12 had been Elgin, Joliet & Eastern 482, built in September 1944. It came to the MN&S in December 1954 and was scrapped in November 1968. The five center-cab DT-6-6-2000s, 20–24, arrived between December 1948 and January 1949. On this railroad they were the dragons. Nos. 20 and 22 were scrapped in 1968, No. 24 about 1966, and No. 23, still the engine in the photograph at the top of this page, finished its last regular day on August 22, 1974, and was scrapped in 1975. No. 21 is the only DT-6-6-2000 preserved. It arrived at the Illinois Railway Museum in 1983, complete and unrestored, with two Baldwin 606SC engines and a rating of 2,000 horsepower.

DT-6-6-2000 No. 23 in freight service near Northfield, Minnesota, on August 31, 1962. Rick Burn photograph.

Baldwin road-switcher 15, a DRS-6-6-1500 of March 1950, suffered a fire, sat at Glenwood, and was cut up on the Crystal team track in May 1981. The transfer locomotive 25 is an RT-624 of July 1953. It was scrapped about 1965, when the last of the SW1200s arrived. Those EMD switchers took the railroad. SW1200s 30 and 31 came in September 1962, 32 and 33 in February 1964, and 34 and 35 in May 1965. SW1500s 36 and 37 followed in November and December 1966. The last new locomotives were SD39s 40 and 41, October 1968. They worked the road freights and the local jobs. Early derailments in the tight track at Air Lake Industrial Park were cured with flange lubricators.

The railroad owned 22 diesels. It finished with ten of them in regular work, all EMD: the six SW1200s, the two SW1500s, and the two SD39s. On the Soo the six SW1200s became 1200–1205, and the two SW1500s became 1400–1401. The SD39s went into the Soo roster in 1982.

Soo Line

The men who ran the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern kept the locomotives clean, the track in order, and the shops at Glenwood Junction in a condition a much larger railroad would have been proud of. The Soo Line bought the company as a Twin Cities door to the Rock Island Spine Line, St. Paul to Kansas City. Control passed on June 2, 1982. The last day the MN&S operated on its own was the day before. The North Western was awarded the Spine Line, and the little belt never became that gateway. The Soo turned instead to the Milwaukee Road. It merged the Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern on January 1, 1986. Glenwood Shops came down, and the connecting yard was taken out, in the mid-1980s.

Freight kept moving on the Dan Patch Line after the shops came down. Progressive Rail, established in 1996 to serve Airlake Industrial Park, operates the Jesse James Line between Lakeville and Northfield and the High Line through Bloomington, Richfield, and Minneapolis, out to the Auto Club. It still uses an MN&S-inspired paint scheme and logo, two former cabooses, and one of the two SD39s. Canadian Pacific, now CPKC, still owns Savage to Lakeville and the line up the Minnesota River to MNS Junction. The Twin Cities & Western owns the Dan Patch Line Bridge, holds trackage rights on the MN&S Spur, and put the bridge back in shape in 2016. By September 2022 it was asking the state for help with about three-quarters of a mile of track in Savage. There is also talk, nothing more than that yet, of commuter trains on the old Dan Patch Line, through the suburbs that grew up along a railroad built for a racehorse.

Related reading

• Soo Line
• Progressive Rail
• Twin Cities & Western
• Minneapolis & St. Louis
• Chicago Great Western
• Milwaukee Road
• Rock Island
• Chicago & North Western
• Great Northern
• Northern Pacific
• Chicago, Burlington & Quincy
• Duluth, Missabe & Iron Range
• Detroit, Toledo & Ironton
• Erie Railroad
• EMD SD39
• Illinois Railway Museum
• Interurbans
• Railroads in Minnesota

Sources

• John C. Luecke and Paul R. Spyhalski, The Minneapolis, Northfield & Southern: From Dan Patch to Dragons (Grenadier Publications, 2013). Chapter 6, "From Motor Cars and Steam to Diesels." The motor-car, mule, steam, and diesel tables. Porter 100 dropped in November 1950 and the second 506 in May 1950. Decapods doubleheaded and split at Savage. Passenger service ended in 1942. Twenty-five trailers. Twenty-two diesels, and ten EMD locomotives at the end.
• George W. Hilton and John F. Due, The Electric Interurban Railways in America. The three building booms, including 1901–1904 and 1905–1908.
• William D. Middleton, "The Strange, Successful Story Of The Railroad That Was Once Named For A Race Horse," Trains, June 1959. The Dan Patch as the first railroad or interurban to operate with internal combustion alone.
• Pioneer Press, July 12, 1916. Dan Patch died the day before, at the Savage farm. Marion W. Savage was ill in a Minneapolis hospital.
• Illinois Railway Museum, Minneapolis Northfield & Southern 21. Baldwin DT-6-6-2000, built 1948, arrived 1983. Two 606SC engines, 2,000 horsepower. The only preserved locomotive of the type. Complete, unrestored, not operational.
• American-Rails.com production rosters. SW1200: 30–31, serials 27507–27508, order 4452, September 1962; 32–33, serials 28933–28934, order 4459, February 1964; 34–35, serials 29758–29759, order 4470, May 1965. SW1500: 36–37, serials 32504–32505, order 4506, November–December 1966. SD39: 40–41, serials 34127–34128, order 7119, October 1968. The Soo Line roster on this site lists the six SW1200s as 1200–1205 and the two SW1500s as 1400–1401.

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    Nov 04, 26 11:47 PM

    
    Chicago and North Western C628s 6701-6730, the ex-Norfolk and Western high-hoods, in Upper Peninsula iron-ore service from the mid-1970s until December 21, 1986, and what happened to each unit.

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33. Warrenton Railroad: Serving Warrenton, NC (1884-1985)

    Nov 04, 26 10:33 PM

    
    The three-mile Warrenton Railroad, from Warren Plains to the North Carolina county seat. Chartered January 28, 1871. First train November 8, 1884. Closed in 1985.

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34. Rio Grande Steam Locomotives (Since 1900)

    Nov 04, 26 11:40 AM

    
    Denver & Rio Grande Western steam locomotives built since 1900. Standard gauge quantity 435 and narrow gauge 48. Challengers, 2-8-8-2s, Mountains, Northerns, and the K-27, K-28, K-36, and K-37.

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35. Rio Grande Diesel Locomotives (All-Time)

    Nov 04, 26 11:39 AM

    
    Denver & Rio Grande Western diesel locomotives, each frame once. 554 units, from the 1941 NW2 through the 1990 GP60s. FT, F3, F7, and F9 sets are not counted again under their 1950 numbers.

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36. Rio Grande Railroad: Map, Logo, History, Rosters

    Nov 04, 26 11:34 AM

    
    Denver & Rio Grande Western history, from William Jackson Palmer and the October 27, 1870 charter through the Royal Gorge, the Moffat route, the California Zephyr, and Union Pacific common control…

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37. Lindblom Gift Expands the Fort Wayne Restoration Shop

    Nov 04, 26 11:14 AM

    
    Art Lindblom gave the Fort Wayne Railroad Historical Society more than $1.4 million, its largest single gift, to expand the New Haven shop. The addition is planned for late 2026 and early 2027. A sepa…

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38. Design Contract Awarded for the Forest Park Branch

    Nov 04, 26 11:09 AM

    
    The Chicago Transit Board approved a design contract for about 13 miles of Blue Line track from the Illinois Medical District to the I-290 Bridge. The release summary calls it a $17 million contract…

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39. Kanawha River Railroad: The Norfolk Southern Lease Is Renewed

    Nov 04, 26 10:51 AM

    
    Kanawha River Railroad filed to keep leasing 309.45 miles from Norfolk Southern in West Virginia and Ohio. The second amendment is dated August 17, 2026. The Board has not set the date the exemption t…

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40. Short Line Center Awarded a $5.625 Million Grant

    Nov 04, 26 10:35 AM

    
    The American Short Line and Regional Railroad Association received a $5.625 million CRISI grant on October 20, 2026, for the Short Line Training Center. A 25 percent match brings the project to $7.5 m…

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41. Palestine and Rusk Track Rebuild Finishes Its First Phase

    Nov 04, 26 09:13 AM

    
    The Texas & Eastern Railroad has finished the first phase of a roughly $30 million track project between Palestine and Rusk. Phase I used a $13.4 million CRISI grant. Phase II, at $8.54 million, adds…

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42. Manhattan, Brooklyn, Queens, and the Bronx Get Subway Power Design

    Nov 04, 26 09:12 AM

    STV said on November 2, 2026, that MTA Construction and Development selected the firm to manage design of 10 subway substations and 12 circuit breaker houses in four New York boroughs. No contract pri…

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43. Chicago's Regional Transit Budget Goes Out for Comment

    Nov 04, 26 09:07 AM

    
    The Northern Illinois Transit Authority opened its first regional budget for comment through December 4, 2026. The proposal is $5.04 billion for 2027 operations and $9.73 billion in capital work throu…

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44. VIA Rail Finishes the Toronto Maintenance Centre

    Nov 04, 26 09:05 AM

    
    VIA Rail completed a four-year modernization of its Toronto Maintenance Centre on November 2, 2026. The Government of Canada invested $310 million. The shop supports 32 Corridor trainsets and will sus…

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45. Brightline Suspends Orlando Service for High Water

    Nov 04, 26 09:02 AM

    
    Brightline suspended trains between Orlando and West Palm Beach on November 2, 2026, because of high water in Brevard County. A later post the same day kept the suspension until 2:00 p.m. on November…

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46. Hiawatha West Draws Federal Funding Toward Madison

    Nov 04, 26 08:58 AM

    
    Amtrak welcomed a CRISI selection for Hiawatha West, extending Chicago-Milwaukee service toward Madison, Watertown, and Pewaukee. Wisconsin said on October 16 that the award is over $218 million.

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47. Seattle's Train Maintenance Facility Opens for Airo Trains

    Nov 04, 26 08:56 AM

    
    Amtrak cut the ribbon October 23, 2026, on a $250 million Seattle shop for Airo trains on the Cascades route. The building came in on time and $50 million under budget and opens in phases through the…

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48. Aberdeen Carolina and Western Wins a $19.9 Million Grant

    Nov 04, 26 08:46 AM

    
    The Aberdeen Carolina and Western Railway won a $19.9 million CRISI grant for about 30 miles of welded rail in Montgomery and Stanly counties. The railroad and NCDOT are putting up a 52 percent match…

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49. Alco "C628" Locomotives: Roster, Data Sheet, Specs

    Nov 03, 26 07:57 PM

    
    Alco Century C628: 2,750 hp C-C road switcher, 186 built from December 1963 to December 1968. Production roster, specs, and where the high-hood Norfolk and Western units went.

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50. Santa Fe Railroad (AT&SF): Diesel Roster (All-Time)

    Nov 03, 26 12:54 PM

    
    Santa Fe diesel locomotives, each new frame once, with construction numbers and order numbers. The counted total is 3,964, from the 1935 boxcabs through the SD75Ms.

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