We welcome articles on all aspects of railroading in North America, both contemporary and historic. We are always looking for articles on interesting short lines, tourist railroads, preservation projects and transit systems, as well as interesting operations on the Class I railroads. Manuscripts should be 2000-3000 words and submitted electronically (we prefer Microsoft Word, but almost any word processing software will work). Articles must include photographs (please submit no more than 40 photos with any feature article); photographs can be color slides, black & white prints or digital (see below).
We are currently not accepting articles on non-North American subjects. We are also not accepting photo essays (features that rely on little text and a lot of photos) at this time.
We are accepting photos only when they accompany feature articles (with three exceptions – see below). Photos can be color slides or black & white prints. We will not consider articles illustrated with color prints unless the material is extraordinary or rare.
Digital photos that accompany a feature article should be in TIF format and submitted on a CD/DVD. Images must be at least 3000 pixels across the long dimension. We cannot accept RAW images – please convert all photos to TIFs. Digital submissions should be accompanied by a hard-copy sheet of thumbnail images so we can see what’s on the disk without having to put it into a computer.
The only instances where we’ll accept photos not accompanying a feature article are:
1) News photos – these can be of new locomotives or paint schemes, special runs, restored equipment or anything newsworthy. Timing is important – a photo submitted for the news section in September should not be of a subject taken in February! We strongly encourage news photos to be submitted via e-mail as low-resolution JPEGs (no more than 720x720) for review by the editors and we’ll let you know if we want the high-resolution version for inclusion in R&R.
2) Final Frame – the last page of R&R is reserved for Final Frame. Final Frames can be anything – a humorous photo, a stunning scenic photo, or anything railroad related. The only requirement is that the photo must be vertical – no horizontal photos are used in Final Frame. Digital images must be at least 3000 pixels high.
3) Contests, Photo Lines and other special features – occasionally we’ll ask for photos to accompany special Photo Line features (such as our annual Along the Rails feature) or for contests (such as our center spread contest). Watch the magazine for announcements of these special events.
When your feature article meets all these requirements it is ready to be submitted:
1) Is the manuscript 3000 words or fewer?
2) Are there 40 or fewer photos?
3) Are all the slides in slide pages?
4) Are digital images on a CD with a hard copy thumbnail page that has each image and its file name?
5) Are digital photos TIF (highly recommended) or uncompressed JPEG files? We cannot use RAW files.
6) Is there a caption for each photo?
7) Is material to help with maps enclosed? This can be a photocopy of a map, a hand-drawn map, whatever – just make sure that all the locations mentioned in your article or in your captions are marked.
8) Are all the pieces sent together in one package? Articles sent as “kits” with pieces coming in at various times tend to wind up with missing pieces.
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