This website aims to provide anyone interested in Conrail a unique glimpse into their business and special equipment trains. I’ll also sprinkle in some other topics that have caught my attention throughout the years.

As a teenager, I developed a love — I’ll stop short of admitting it to be an obsession — for the railroad known as Conrail. One particular aspect of the operations fascinated me more the rest however: the exclusive and elusive Conrail office car special. Looking at the cars (and, to a lesser extent, the locomotives) I wondered what happened behind the carefully obscured windows. What decisions were made? Who rode it and why? And more importantly to me, why couldn’t I peek behind the curtain?

As an adult, I began meeting retired Conrail employees and started this website. In 2020, I reached out to Rudy Garbely, from the Garbely Publishing Company, and floated the idea of writing a book about the Conrail business train. The rest is history and in the fall of 2021, the book “Conrail Business & Research Trains: The Special Equipment Fleet” was released to the world.

Between the book and this website, with the help of the men and women who worked on and rode the Conrail train, you get to see behind the curtain. Is it as good as riding the train? Nope. But that chance is history now.

If you are interested in hearing Wes Reminder and co-author Brock Kerchner talk about the book and some of the things you will find inside, I invite you watch the video recorded from the October 2021 Tri-State Railway Historical Society meeting.

Watch >

Enjoy this chance to glance back to Conrail in the 1980s and 1990s. If you have anything to share, such as stories, documents, photographs, or artifacts, I encourage you to reach out so I can continue exploring the history of the Conrail business train.