Trains; The Magazine of Railroading, Volume 48, Number 12, October 1988

82, [2] pages, including covers. Illustrations (some color). Map. Cover has some wear and soiling. Founded in 1940, Trains Magazine celebrated its 79th anniversary in 2019. This issue includes an article on "Missiles on Rails" by Michael R. Boldrick, about the Peacekeeper Rail Garrison (pages 36-40). The author was a retired Air Force colonel and had been a test director during development of the silo-based MX missile. He also served as a Minuteman combat crew commander. He later worked for the Stanford Research Institute. Other articles in this issue include Reflections from the Judd Road Bridge that in part described when the renowned French actress Sarah Bernhardt digressed from the established schedule of her first triumphal American tour to present a private performance in Ann Arbor on Christmas Eve, 1880, The retirement of the Cadiz, Beech Grove (Amtrak's largest shop), and moving grain on the Rock Island. The Peacekeeper Rail Garrison is a mobile missile system that was developed by the United States Air Force during the 1980s as part of a plan to place fifty MGM-118A Peacekeeper intercontinental ballistic missiles on the rail network of the United States. The railcars were intended, in case of increased threat of nuclear war, to be deployed onto the nation's rail network to avoid being destroyed by a first strike counterforce attack by the Soviet Union. However the plan was canceled as part of defense cutbacks following the end of the Cold War, and the Peacekeeper missiles were installed in silo launchers as LGM-118s instead. Train-based ICBMs do offer some advantages over missiles in fixed silos, namely that the enemy can never be sure where they are, or more accurately, where all of them are at any given moment. Maintaining a missile on a train is more difficult than in a silo, while rail lines and roads can be blocked by snow, which tends to restrict railroad ICBMs to warmer climates.…