@amazinblue82
I'm sorry, I'm big into railroads & forget that not everyone is. Didn't realize you couldn't read the sign on the bridge.
The sign, the bridge & presumably the train are all New York Central.
You weren't quite right with the CN thought, but very close. Notice there are 2 parallel bridges there, each with a pair of tracks. In 1950 the south bridge would have been NYC & the north bridge was Grand Trunk Western. If you follow those tracks back to the SW, the north side of the bridge over I-96 still has a "GT" sign on it. GTW was one of the US subsidiaries of Canadian National which was mostly owned by the Canadian Govt. About 25 years ago, they spun it off as a private company, and since then they have absorbed the various US operations into just being CN. So the tracks in the background are CN.
Meanwhile, the NYC became half of the ill-fated Penn Central merger in 1968, which became a large part of the much more successful Conrail in 1976. In 1999, The other 2 large eastern RR, CSX & Norfolk Southern bought Conrail and each took half. Detroit is one of a couple of areas where their two sets of operations & the Conrail tracks were so intertwined that they couldn't come up with an equitable way to divide it up. So most of the former NYC trackage in and around Detroit is owned and operated by Conrail Shared Assets, which is jointly owned by the other two.
While the train is headed generally East here, the railroad would consider it a Northbound, as this line started in Toledo OH and ended up in Mackinaw City. These days it ends in the north Detroit suburb of Utica, although some other sections farther north are still in use by other small railroads.
As I said before, my gut says that is a passenger car behind the locomotive which is fine as at that point there were still 2 passenger trains a day from Detroit to Mackinaw. My only concern is the time of day seems off a little. I don't have a 1950 timetable handy, but looking at several others from the '40s-'60s the daytime northbound seems to have always been scheduled for a Detroit departure between 8-9 am. If this photo is that early on a December morning, I would expect the shadows to be more pronounced to the left of the cars on the highway. That said, given how clean the road surface looks, the photographer may have done quite a bit of touchup work on the picture.
As to the specific type of locomotive, we can narrow it down considerably, but I'm not sure an exact type can be determined.
The three clues I see are the high rounded dome behind the smokestack, the tapered section in the middle of the boiler, and the overall size of the engine.
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Comparing to a couple of reasonably known dimensions, I think the overall length of the loco & tender is around 70 feet. While there is lots & lots of information online about NYC steam power, actual lengths of different classes has proven to be surprisingly difficult to find. I suspect I can find what I need in some actual books I have, but they aren't handy tonight, so will have to come back to that.
Regardless, that length probably eliminates any switch engines (0-6-0 or 0-8-0 types) and also any of their larger newer engines. (4-8-4, 4-8-2 or 4-6-4 types).
The other clues also eliminate the larger engines. I'm not sure the engineering behind it, but early steam engines typically had that sort of boiler that narrowed in the front with the tapered section, but by the '30s-'40s boilers were usually nearly straight. Also, the NYC like most of the Eastern railroads had fairly tight clearances, so as the engines got bigger anything on top of the boiler tended to be pretty low profile to keep the overall height under control.
These are pics of NYC 4-8-4 & 4-6-4 engines. Note the much flatter top profile.
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What I think is most likely is the sort of medium sized engine that were built before 1930, but still in use in secondary roles until the end of steam.
If as I suspect this is a passenger train then the engine is most likely a 4-6-2. Those were K-something classes on the NYC with half a dozen sub classes. They were the main passenger engine for anything small enough or secondary enough to not be pulled by one of the 4-6-4 Hudsons.
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If it is a freight, then an H-something 2-8-2 would be likely. I think H-6 was the only type with the tapered boiler.
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One more side note, while there were lots of exceptions, typically freight engines would have 8 driving wheels while passenger engines would have 6 larger diameter drivers. This allowed faster speeds at the expense of some traction and pulling power. Basically the same physics at work that mean you start your car moving in 1st, but drive on the highway in a higher gear.
. neat story.
