With that, the great General Motors stylist Harley Earl pretty much summed up his design philosophy, one that manifested itself in two generations of Chevys, Pontiacs, Buicks, and Cadillacs adorned with chrome, fins, and bulging taillights. Writing of Earl for Motor Trend, K. Scott Teeters described him as a “visionary with corporate clout and the resources to get anything done that he could imagine; and he had an amazing imagination.”
Among Earl’s accomplishments was his role in creating Chevrolet’s enduring contribution to sports cars, the Corvette. That alone is quite a legacy.
But Earl’s imagination wasn’t limited to automobiles. It was 75 years ago this month that Earl’s team at GM, the famed Styling Section, introduced American railroads to the Astra Liner, a concept streamliner that emphasized domes. Though now largely forgotten, the unveiling of the Astra Liner was a fateful moment before the postwar streamliner boom.
Not everyone admired Earl, notably Raymond Loewy, famous for his GG1 design for the Pennsylvania Railroad. “Dad called Earl’s designs ‘chrome-plated barges,’” said Loewy’s daughter, Laurence Loewy, in a 2005 interview for CNN. “He said that, if left to his own devices, Harley Earl would put fins on a TV or refrigerator.”
Meanwhile, for operators of passenger trains, the place to be back in February 1945 was an automobile showroom in the Chicago suburb of Oak Park, where GM arranged to show off the Astra Liner concept to the officers of 55 different railroads. After a brief promotional presentation, visiting railroaders would be ushered into a studio where they could ooh and ahh over a large model featuring three 10-foot-long cars with removable roofs, so as to reveal a crowded, bustling train of tiny passengers and crew, all made of clay.
Viewed through the prism of the stylish streamliners that would begin arriving a couple of years hence, the Astra Liner is a bit of a clumsy, even goofy take on the art of streamlining, more Aerotrain than California Zephyr — maybe not Earl’s and his stylists’ finest hour. But for railroad officials with one foot still in the heavyweight era, the train must have seemed tantalizingly radical.
Possibly the Astra Liner’s biggest “wow” factor was its lounge car, which featured both another dome as well as a round-end observation room. The car featured five separate levels, if one included a slightly depressed passageway to provide adequate headroom beneath the dome. In the rear of the car, a raised rear floor and deep windows would provide a majestic view of tracks and scenery, something New York Central patrons would come to know later in the Creek-series cars of the 1948 Century.
The Astra Liner made a strong impression on at least one member of the news media, Al Kalmbach, still the editor of Trains as well as its publisher. “Sounds a bit fantastic, doesn’t it,” Al wrote in the September 1945 issue. “But it is all within the limitations of sound railroad engineering practice. It is simply the result of turning loose on railroad car design men who have been successfully catching the public attention with auto, refrigerator, and appliance designs.”
Budd was so taken with the Astra Liner’s domes that he went back to his company and ordered his shops in nearby Aurora come up with the prototype Silver Dome, customized from a 1940 Budd coach called Silver Alchemy. That early dome — with its flat glass, necessitated by wartime restrictions — was the first of its kind. The fleet it would bequeath on CB&Q would become legend.
Astra Liner led naturally to another seminal moment, the creation in 1947 of GM’s Train of Tomorrow, the famous full-size demonstration train led by a new model from its Electro-Motive Division, the E7, and trailing four dome cars built by Pullman-Standard.
The Train of Tomorrow was an audacious move by GM. The automaker had no intention of getting into the passenger-car business: it simply wanted to whet the industry’s appetite for a new generation of cruise trains, all of which would need diesels to match. It’s a story beautifully told in author Karl Zimmermann’s book Domeliners (Kalmbach Books, 1998).
The Train of Tomorrow is a story all its own, with national headlines to match. But the next time you’re in an Amtrak Sightseer lounge, or are lucky enough to be riding in a real dome car, remember that it all started in an old car dealership in Oak Park with GM’s Astra Liner, with which the father of the Corvette momentarily dabbled in the train business.
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