If you have a half hour to spare and it's a long day at the office, this is just the thing for you.
A heartbreaking tale of American passenger railroading, it's overwhelming success straight out of the Great Depression, it's heyday and agonizing, tragic and permanent fall from grace.
If you've only got a couple minutes while waiting for the bus, here are some noteworthy excerpts, also a nice summary.
Between 1896 and 1916, railway passenger traffic tripled, while journeys on added-fare Pullman sleepers increased fivefold. The high-water mark was reached in 1920, when 1.2 billion passengers boarded 9,000 daily intercity trains and rode a total of 47 billion passenger-miles.
By the end of 1935, revenues were twice what they had been when steam trains ran on the line, while operating costs had been reduced from 65 to 35 cents per mile. Although the initial $250,000 cost of the Zephyr was approximately double that of a steam train, the lower operating costs more than compensated. The bottom line showed $95,000 in profits in the Zephyr's first year of service.
On routes where trains had loped along at an average of 35-40 mph since World War I, the new streamliners quickened the overall pace to 55 mph or higher, shrinking the running times between most terminals by about one-third. The quantum leap in train speed is made vividly evident by industry reports. In 1928 there were only two trains scheduled at 60 mph or more; by 1936 there were 644. The new trains covered a distance of 40,205 miles, of which 29,301 were scheduled daily. By 1939, total mile-a-minute mileage jumped to more than 65,000--and the 10 fastest trains in the world were all U.S. streamliners.
Streamliners commonly ran 100 mph to meet their schedules; one Midwest train was scheduled at 108 mph between stops in Kansas.
While it was widely believed that airlines would eventually dominate long-distance trips of 600 miles or more and that cars and buses would eat into the short-haul business, nobody gazing into a crystal ball in 1946 could have predicted what happened next. Railroads then handled two-thirds of the nation's commercial passenger traffic, and the New York Central alone carried more people than the entire U.S. airline industry. Who could have imagined that railroad passenger volume would plunge from 790 million riders in 1946 to 298 million by 1965; that such legendary streamliners as the Liberty Limited, Royal Blue, 400's, and Orange Blossom Special would be discontinued or turned into locals, shorn of dining and sleeping cars; or that the U.S. government itself, in the form of a 1958 report by the ICC, would complacently assert that the passenger train was rolling down the track to oblivion and would in all probability "take its place in the transportation museum along with the stagecoach, the sidewheeler, and the steam locomotive"?
In retrospect, the passenger train did not succumb because the jet turbine was more efficient than the diesel engine, or because Americans owned 60 million cars, or because railroad managers implemented fewer and fewer new ideas after 1950. Behind these effects lay a more profound cause: a change in the very ground rules of transportation. After World War II, government became the railroads' biggest competitor, as first Congress and then the White House jumped into the transportation business. Released from the stringencies of the Depression and the discipline of war, federal expenditures for airports and highways rocketed to dizzying heights, driven by the politics of the Cold War and the pork barrel.
The unprecedented legislative and financial support marshaled on behalf of interstate highways completed the transformation of the railroads from a proven national resource to a rusty relic. Ralph Budd and other executives had seen the industry make more significant changes in a decade than in the whole half-century before, but in the public's eyes, railroads were run by whiners or plunderers. Eleven years after V-J Day, the train was no longer considered essential to the nation's transportation needs or even to its defense.
"When the president signed the bill, I told him he had just signed the death warrant of American passenger service," Howard E. Simpson, president of the B·&·O Railroad, recalled in an interview. An apparently indifferent Eisenhower replied, "We'll see."
Simpson was right. The impact of interstates would be little short of shattering. Between 1956 and 1969, a total of 28,800 miles of interstate highways were opened to traffic. In the same period, 59,400 miles of railroad were taken out of passenger service. General Motors, like many other manufacturers, bailed out of the passenger-train business in the 1950s, although it continued to make diesel freight locomotives at its plant in La Grange, Illinois. America's rail-passenger service dwindled from 2,500 intercity (noncommuter) trains operated in 1954 to fewer than 500 in 1969.
The success of high-speed trains abroad raises serious questions about the direction and wisdom of America's transportation choices. Despite the hundreds of billions of dollars poured into highways and airports, America has less mobility today than it did 40 years ago. The average speed of traffic in an urban area is 7 mph, "the same speed that a camel caravan traveled 2,000 years ago," according to James Costantino, director of the Intelligent Vehicle-Highway Society. With both urban and suburban highways clogged with traffic and many airports reaching the saturation point, much transportation is getting worse instead of better. The U.S. Department of Transportation estimates that $100 billion is needed to end airport congestion and flight delays that cost billions of dollars in extra fuel and wages. Up to $600 billion is the price tag for rebuilding America's interstate highways, with their cracked pavements and worn-out bridges.
It was a bittersweet moment, for the Zephyr renewed but ultimately failed to save America's private-sector passenger train. By the time of the streamliner's retirement, the industry had declined so precipitously that no technology, no matter how efficient, could rescue it. The business was beyond the therapy of traction power. After Murphy spoke, he handed the brass throttle to Lenox Lohr, president of the museum. The diesel engine was started one last time and the wail of its horn flooded the museum grounds as Lohr yanked on the whistle cord four times. Then the diesel was turned off and a small group of admirers climbed a platform that flanked the cars and filed slowly past the still-gleaming silver streak.
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