In the Third 2010 Issue of North Western Lines...

Editor's Notes:
Pardon the silly question, but have you paid any particular attention to periods in text? They’re just tiny little dots dwarfed by a bunch of big letters, yet they “carry a lot of weight.” They are significant characters in the written world.
A few months ago, I received an email from author Richard Steffen who was preparing to send me a feature on Jewell Junction, Iowa, for North Western Lines. His package came, but before I opened it, I consulted an Iowa map to see where Jewell was located and to see if it had any significance on the surface. Well, this certainly wasn’t like Des Moines — quite the opposite in fact.
I discovered that Jewell was one of those tiny little dots like a lot of other Iowa towns that I doubt I would tour.
I got around to opening the package, and upon eyeballing the contents, I uttered something like “you’ve got to be kidding me!”
To make a long story short, what Richard did was take a shovel, bulldozer, and whatever other “earth tool” exists and turned up a gold mine of C&NW history.
This little dot was an active railroad junction, and Richard did a monumental amount of homework in putting together this multi-part tribute to Jewell.
The article is loaded with information and accounts from newspapers and other historical sources, and the text weaves through a massive amount of images, documents, maps, and other pieces of artwork. I hope you’ll find Jewell Junction to be an interesting discovery.
Also in this issue, we have presented just a few of the pictorial highlights from the Annual Meet in Kenosha plus a nice photo section of C&NW Dash 9s in action before they became patched. Our news photo from David Wendorf taken right after the meet served as our inspiration for this feature.
We have an account of the M&StL purchase which took place 50 years ago, and read how C&NW shops prepared new steam locomotives for service 100 years ago in 1910.
This issue, as you may have already noticed, marks a return to a previous NWL format. We have increased the page count to 64 and have dropped the Newsliner insert. The columns have returned to the front part of the magazine. While we can better accommodate lengthy features (such as Jewell Junction) without sacrificing text or worthy images, we anticipate catering to a wider variety of articles. Please keep us in mind if you have a story idea.
—Steve Jessup
NWL Production Editor