Great Trains Heartland

People who jet from coast to coast have been known to dismiss the vast territory 36,000 feet below their airliners as “flyover country.” The term has entered the lexicon as derisive shorthand for the dozens of states inhabited by tens of millions of people that coastal folks don’t think much about, let alone visit. Of course, those high-flyers are missing more than they know. That’s true now, and it was true before the era of JFK–LAX nonstops, back in the heyday of 20th century rail travel when the nation’s midsection was crisscrossed by some of the most stylish passenger trains on the continent. The Zephyrs, Rockets, and other famous fleets, together with standouts like the Panama Limited and Southern Belle, established records of speed, innovation, and luxury that rank with…

Tomorrow at dawn we’ll be on our way!” With those words, spoken over a nationwide radio broadcast on the night of May 25, 1934, the president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad not only announced a coming event but foretold the future. For with the heralded dawn-to-dusk nonstop run of the first Zephyr from Denver to Chicago, the Burlington Route was indeed “on its way” to a new high in passenger service. It was not without misgivings that boss Ralph Budd spoke those words into the microphone. For even as he said them, the Zephyr lay, a cripple, in the railroad’s shops in Denver. A last-minute checkup had revealed a cracked bearing in a motor armature — and the little train was a foreigner in a land ruled by…

The sign at Gate 6 in the beautiful Cincinnati Union Terminal says simply The Pan-American, implying that to say more would be as superfluous as explaining the meaning of “U.S.A.” The 24 years’ continuous operation of this fine train by the Louisville & Nashville has, indeed, made its name a byword to everyone who travels. Just to say the train’s name is enough. Let’s go down to the platform and take a look at the fine, fast train that will carry us to fabulous and glamorous New Orleans. Up ahead, the 4,000 horses inside a two-unit set of Electro-Motive E6A diesel-electrics are murmuring idly, humming to themselves as they await the signal to go. Our train No. 99 is long and heavy, but the twin diesels are more than capable…

For streamliners that are Texan to a T, Southern Pacific’s Sunbeam and Hustler are strangely foreign in their ancestry. The two trains (which are basically abbreviated red-and-orange duplicates of SP’s original 1937 Daylights in California), were ordered in San Francisco, built in Chicago, and are usually hauled between Dallas and Houston by 4-6-2s transferred from SP’s western lines to its Texas & New Orleans subsidiary or by new diesels assembled by Alco-GE in Schenectady, N.Y. All of which bothers traveling Texans not in the least. Like the Lone Star State, the trains are colorful, roomy, fast, and modern; their design has not ruffled the fashion consciousness of Dallas, and their schedules have won the approval of bustling Houstonians. Even that most robust of all Sunbeam-Hustler patrons — the Texas A&M…

For utilities magnate Samuel Insull’s Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee Railroad, the Great Depression following the 1929 stock market crash brought uncommonly hard times. In the space of only three years, revenues plummeted to less than half of pre-crash levels, and before the end of 1932 the Insull super-interurban landed in bankruptcy court. The North Shore’s recovery was a painfully slow one. Then when conditions finally seemed to be brightening, labor troubles brought a strike in 1938 that shut down the line for 51 days. The road’s receivers pondered abandonment of the entire property. Instead the North Shore elected to undertake a massive program for passenger traffic recovery. Company shops hummed with unaccustomed activity as wholesale numbers of the line’s standard steel cars rolled in for improvement and refurbishing. St.…

In the course of his inquest on “Who Shot the Passenger Train?” conducted in April 1959 Trains, Editor David P. Morgan concluded: “The railroads should preserve such [passenger] volume as is left by all reasonable means. But today cost control comes first. Railroading has reached a point where the high cost of doing a passenger business has robbed it of a profit incentive. And without that incentive (i.e., recovery of full costs plus an opportunity to earn 6 percent or more on the capital involved) the business, regardless of volume, is doomed. As any business would be.” This summation contains neatly within itself an example of the type of schizophrenia that has infected even the most solemnly objective examiners of the passenger problem. “Preserve existing traffic,” they say, “which is,…