MILW

Have you ever wondered how the freight handlers loaded and unloaded box cars at multitrack freight houses when there wasn't a platform beside every track? They lined up the boxcar doors on adjacent tracks and put plates between the cars to bridge the gaps. Essentially, the cars on the outer tracks would become very short platforms to reach the cars on the inner tracks. This view is of the Milwaukee Road's Galewood Yard in Chicago, April 1943.

If there is one locomotive series that paved the way for dieselization in North America more than any other, it would have to be the F-series locomotives of General Motors Electro-Motive Division. The first true F unit was the FT, first produced in 1939. F units were originally designed and sold as two-unit pairs of, usually, one cab-equipped A unit and cabless B unit drawbarred together like the Denver & Rio Grande set of F9s at the Colorado Railroad Museum (shown here). EMD built almost 1,000 FT units in the A and B configurations together, while later models were produced in even higher numbers. With their high production numbers and widespread use on both passenger and freight trains up through the 1970s in regular service, the EMD F series has appeared on numerous stamp issues. Let's take a closer look at one set from Sierra Leone...