Recently, on the Toronto Railway Heritage Group, Derek Boles responded to a discussion about this famed excursion as follows:
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“What made the May 1, 1960 triple-header excursion so memorable for many Toronto-area railfans was that Trains magazine devoted ten pages and a cover to it in their August 1960 issue. American magazines in general were not very good at covering Canadian content, which was rather myopic given the cross-ownership of several hundred miles of track on both sides of the border and the number of cross-border passenger trains at the time.
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That began to change in the mid-1950s as most of the important Class One railroads in the U.S. abandoned steam locomotives and American railfans had to come to Canada to find mainline steam. The National Railway Historical Society held their annual convention in Toronto in 1958 specifically for that reason. . Trains editor David Morgan and photographer Philip Hastings did a series of memorable articles “In Search of Steam,” several of which focused on Canada. By May 1960, steam had virtually disappeared from all but a handful of U.S. railways so an excursion with three locomotives operating out of what was then Canada’s second-largest city attracted a great deal of attention.
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Kalmbach even published a slick hard-cover photo book in 1961 called “Canadian Steam.” I remember how thrilled I was as a kid to get this book; it was literally the first picture book ever published about Canadian railways that was geared specifically to the railfan and it was published in the U.S. In the last 50 years there have been hundreds of books published about Canadian railways but in 1961 they were extremely rare. Some of the railfan organizations such as UCRS and CRHA had produced monographs on va rious topics but they were amateur publications, usually poorly printed given the limited resources and technology of the time. The magazines of both these organizations were still mimeographed into the 1960s. So ten pages and cover in Trains was a big deal! . As far as U.S. railfan publications like Trains providing coverage of Canada, I’m not sure that the situation is a whole lot better in 2010 than it was in 1955. This is especially ironic given that Canadian Pacific and Canadian National have bought up several U.S. railroads so that their tracks now extend deep into the American heartland and the Gulf of Mexico.
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Derek Boles, Toronto Railway Heritage Moderator”
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Ray Kennedy, who originally financed and organized this famed excursion has an extensive and fascinating article about the excursion at his “Old Time Trains” website. The image above is from the beginning of that article. Click here to read Ray Kennedy’s article on the triple header excursion.
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Posting by Russ Milland