Indiana Historical Society

On the Wings of the Zephyr
The Rise and Fall of America’s High-Speed Streamliners
1934–1960
Mark Reutter

Let’s go back to a Saturday evening seventy years ago. On 26 May 1934, at precisely 8:26 p.m., a remarkably designed train rolled onto the stage of the Century of Progress Fair in Chicago. An exuberant crowd bolted to the stage to pay homage to the train, which had just made the longest and swiftest railroad run in history, sprinting nonstop 1,015 miles between Denver and Chicago at an average speed of 77 miles per hour, with bursts of up to 112 mph. Named the Zephyr, the train was the result of a unique collaboration of railroad executives and automotive engineers. The men had taken the orthodoxies of standard railroading and tossed them into a cocked hat. The train’s glistening silver skin, for example, was made of lightweight stainless steel, a breakthrough in metalworking design. Its cars were not coupled together but configured in a sleek “articulated” tube. Most unusual of all, the train was propelled by a revolutionary compact diesel engine.

Smooth, light, quick on the pickup, faster than an automobile, and almost as economical as a bus, the Zephyr caused quite a sensation. During its 26 May race, the “silver streak” was bathed in adulation and generated excitement as it sped to its destination. In town after town, fire sirens shrieked and church bells pealed at its approach. Roads became parking lots as spectators gathered at highway crossings, along embankments, in farm fields, on the top of grain silos, and wherever else the view was good to watch it speed past. Women threw kisses at the train, and men tossed their hats in the air. The race was front-page news around the country.(1)

In 1934 columnists, politicians, and street-corner philosophers alike had been demanding that American industry “do something” to get the economy rolling again, to create jobs, and to pull the country out of the gloom of the Great Depression. The Zephyr seemed to be the answer in the field of transportation. In the wake of its journey, the railroad industry was revolutionized. From the equipment and designs incorporated in the Zephyr, a new kind of passenger train took to the rails. Over the next seven years (until car building was suspended because of World War II), 143 trains were put in service on twenty-nine railroads. The trains featured major innovations in fixed-wheel technology and enabled America to claim title to the fastest scheduled passenger trains in the world.(2)

The word “streamliner” became indelibly etched in the public’s mind with these fleets of high-speed, high-tech trains. The word originated from the jargon of aircraft engineers. A shape that cut down on wind resistance was said to be “a streamline.” In truth, very little was known then about wind resistance. But it was generally believed that smooth, round, continuous objects moved through air and water with a minimum of effort. The porpoise and the teardrop were cited as examples of “gliding forms of nature” that approached aerodynamic perfection.(3)

A change in passenger-train construction was long overdue. Ever since wooden passenger cars were replaced with all-steel cars around 1910, engineers continuously found new ways of using alloy metals to lower the weight of a moving structure. Automobiles had shed many pounds, while commercial flight had risen on the wings of aluminum. Railroaders, however, had been trained to believe in weight, which was equated with safe and smooth riding. Ralph Budd, president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, was among the first railroaders to think seriously about reengineering the passenger train. In June 1933 Budd, convinced that lightweight trains would reduce operating costs, ordered a streamline passenger train from Edward G. Budd, owner of the E. G. Budd Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia.

Edward Budd (the two men, it turned out, were distantly related) was a builder of steel automobile bodies who was intrigued by a new type of alloy steel called 18-8 (18 percent chromium and 8 percent nickel). Cold-rolled, the alloy was three times stronger than regular carbon steel, yet was so ductile that it could be pressed into deep-drawn, graceful shapes. “The term ‘stainless’ reflected another of its virtues: It did not rust. The alloy kept its silver sheen even when exposed to organic acids, and wind and rain only brightened its natural glasslike finish.”(4 )

In fabricating the Zephyr, the Budd company incorporated a lightweight body design and low-slung suspension. The roof, for example, acted as a major load-bearing member rather than just “a lid for the box” and allowed the heavy center sills and concrete subfloors of orthodox railway equipment to be eliminated without sacrificing safety or stability. Better distribution of stresses permitted use of light, hollow beams of metal reinforced by welded crosspieces. Wrapped in its stainless steel wrapper, the 196-foot-long train weighed only 97 tons, or slightly more than a standard Pullman car.(5)

A key element of the new train was the engine. For years the chief bar to the adoption of diesel power on railroads was the tremendous weight of diesels with enough horsepower to move a train. Based on thousands of tests, Harold Lee (Hal) Hamilton and Charles Kettering of General Motors Corporation came to believe that the four-cycle diesel could be “sweated down” to a two-cycle version. The two-cycle engine they designed was one-fifth the weight of a conventional diesel of similar horsepower. Coupled to direct-current generators to furnish electricity for the traction motors, the GM diesel proved to be a rugged prime mover. As Ralph Budd later recalled, “Immediately I was set afire because I knew that [the diesel] was something completely revolutionary and better—so much better—than anything we had ever had.”(6)

A few months after its dramatic debut, the Zephyr went into passenger service between Kansas City and Lincoln, Nebraska. Despite double-digit unemployment in the farm belt, the train attracted so many riders that customers had to be turned away. By the end of 1935 revenues were twice what they had been when steam trains ran on the line, while operating costs had been slashed from sixty-four cents to thirty-four cents per train mile. In other words, by spending money, railroads were making money. Although the initial $200,000 price tag of the Zephyr was high, the reduction in operating costs more than compensated, and the train earned $97,000 in its first year of service and recouped its cost in twenty months. The larger Twin Cities Zephyrs, which started running between Chicago and St. Paul-Minneapolis in 1935, were cash machines, ringing up $823,422 in operating profits in their first nineteen months of service.(7)

By 1939 just about every major U.S. railroad had bought streamliners, some powered by diesel locomotives and others by revamped steam locomotives.8 Streamliners now blasted through the Mohawk Valley on the 20th Century Limited and Pacemaker, wound up Raton Pass on the Santa Fe’s Super Chief and El Capitan, and skimmed across the high Nevada desert on the City of San Francisco. They also ducked between the smokestacks of New Jersey on the Reading’s Crusader, sprinted through corn-and-hog country on the Rock Island’s Des Moines Rocket, cut through the piney woods of Mississippi on the Gulf, Mobile & Northern’s Rebel, and matched horsepower against the headwinds of coastal Maine on the Boston & Maine/Maine Central’s Flying Yankee.(9)

What quickened the public pulse about the streamliner was its speed. The Zephyr’s race to Chicago was a preamble to the “greatest speed-up of rail service the world had yet seen,” in the words of industry journalist Donald Steffee.(10) In 1928 there were only two passenger trains, running a total of 135 miles a day, scheduled at 60 mph or more between stops. Both ran over the Reading’s South Jersey lines between Philadelphia and Atlantic Ocean resorts. By 1936 there were 644 station-to-station runs scheduled at 60 mph. The trains covered a distance of 40,000 miles. By 1939 the over-60 mileage had jumped to 56,300 miles, and the 10 fastest passenger trains in the world were U.S. streamliners.(11)

Individual running times showed remarkable improvements. The traditional sixty-hour schedule between Chicago and California was reduced by a full day when the Union Pacific’s City of Portland raced between Chicago and Portland in thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes. Kansas City and Oklahoma City were pulled five hours closer with the expedited Firefly. Two hours were shaved between Houston and Dallas by the Southern Pacific’s Sunbeam. In the East, where schedules were already tight, New York-to-Washington running times were cut forty minutes on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Congressional.(12)

The acceleration was accomplished by reducing dead time at stations—crew changes became marvels of fast work—and by maintaining the highest cruising speed possible between stops. With every minute counting, diesel power became an indispensable tool. Frequent stops for coal and water en route were eliminated. Diesel engines could decelerate faster than steam locomotives because of their higher braking ratios, and they could quickly accelerate to top running speeds after a station stop. The net result was that the Denver Zephyr ran at up to 90 to 95 mph and averaged 66 mph between Denver and Chicago eastbound, including eleven stops. But the Super Chief and El Capitan claimed the world’s fastest scheduled runs of more than a hundred miles. The diesel streamliners covered the 202 miles from La Junta, Colorado, to Dodge City, Kansas, in 155 minutes flat. On one 10-mile stretch, the trains were actually scheduled at 108 mph.(13)

Streamliners made the public “train conscious again,” summed up Ralph Budd. Measured in passenger miles, it was determined that rail patronage increased by over 40 percent between 1933 and 1940. This improvement, Budd liked to point out, had not been achieved at the expense of safety. Data gathered by the railroad indicated that the Zephyrs had about the same number of grade-crossing accidents per million train miles as steam passenger trains, but recorded fewer injuries and property damage. In fact, none of the grade-crossing accidents had resulted in passenger injuries, and the streamlined trains had continued under their own power to the terminal after the collisions.(14)

The implications of the American speed-up were not lost on overseas railroads. Faster trains were soon in operation in countries as far apart as Argentina and Japan. In continental Europe, where rigid speed limits had been the norm, changes were made to mimic the American streamliner. The previous maximum of 75 mph was lifted in France to 81 mph for conventional trains and 93 mph for diesel-powered rail cars. The 75-mph limit was increased to 87 mph in Holland and Belgium, and 100-mph running was permitted over certain sections in Germany and Italy. Most of these changes came as a result of the study of U.S. rail operations.(15)

Racing into World War II, streamliners were a crucial factor in handling the 300 percent surge in wartime traffic. Spliced with heavyweight cars, streamliners rolled up billions of passenger miles and kept traffic moving in the same years that intercity buses and commercial aircraft struggled to stay afloat.(16)

A spirit of optimism prevailed at the end of World War II. The Santa Fe Railway made plans for roadbed and track strengthening to permit passenger-train speeds of up to 125 mph, and railcar builders were preparing for the biggest boom in history. The Budd company and other builders, such as Pullman-Standard and American Car Foundry, expected to build more than three thousand cars a year. “A new era has come to the railroads,” Edward Budd said in 1944. “The automobile has its advantages and will always carry many people. But the railroad has the [common-carrier] field.”(17)

While it was widely believed that airlines eventually would dominate long-distance trips of five hundred miles or more and cars and buses would eat into the short-haul business, railroads dominated passenger service, handling two-thirds of the nation’s common-carrier traffic. In fact, the New York Central Railroad alone carried more people than the entire U.S. airline industry. Nobody gazing into a crystal ball in 1945 would have imagined that railroad passenger volume would plunge from 790 million riders in 1946 to 298 million by 1965; that such legendary streamliners such as the Royal Blue, Liberty Limited, 400’s, and Orange Blossom Special would be discontinued or turned into locals; and that the Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC), in a 1958 report, would declare that the passenger train was headed for oblivion and would soon “take its place in the transportation museum along with the stagecoach, the sidewheeler, and the steam locomotive”?(18)