Star Trains

[Anonymous]

The Silver Meteor

[Anonymous]

robri:

I hope your dinner train isn't like the one we have up here in Stillwater, MN.
We have the "Minnesota Zephyr", and while the food was good and the
equipment was well-maintained, the train itself goes NO PLACE (max. 8
MPH over some obscure former MILW branch trackage), and while that
alone isn't so bad (at least you do see some nice country, ever so briefly),
they have a quartet of singers going car-to-car singing 1940s war tunes
acapella. For those of us who weren't alive during WWII it can get real
old, real quick. Combine that with the fact that you and your date HAVE to
be seated with two other people you don't know who are practically in your
lap for the 3 hr. ride. They don't do seating for two - nope. Sitting with two
of the most boring individuals ever to have lived their entire lives in Little
Falls, MN somehow made the trip not worth the $65/per dinner fair.

[Anonymous]

and don't forget the Newport Star Clipper Dinner Train, new owner but still is operating along Narragansett Bay here in Rhode Island. One of the Recently featured dinner trains on The Food Network. Support me !! Still here going on my tenth year as an engineer. No longer with "star" in the name. Just the Newport Dinner Train.

[Anonymous]

There used to be the "Iowa Star Clipper" dinner train that operated out of
Waverly, IA on old CGW trackage. It's gone now - the train was sold and
relocated to some place in Michigan.

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

Not really a separate train but an interesting marketing ploy: When IC added coaches to the Panama Limited, they were initially advertised as the Magnolia Star. The timetable showed two parallel columns of times (identical, of course) for the Panama Limited and the Magnolia Star.

[CShaveRR]

In the first few years I worked for the CNW, we had a hot freight train, #477, that departed Proviso for the Twin Cities at 3:30 p.m. or so. It was made up in Yard 1. There was a trainmaster there, whose pride and joy was #477. After hours of listening to him "riding" the yard jobs that made up the train, and the diesel shop, and anyone else who had anything to do with it, we'd hear over the radio, "North Avenue, Yard 9, here comes the North Star!", and of course we were expected to not have anything in its way. After 477 got out of town, the radio waves would fall strangely silent.

The funniest time (but you wouldn't dare laugh!) was when this guy was hollering about lining up the North Star, riding it on the front platform out of Yard 1, past North Avenue and Yard 9. I assume he got off at Grand Avenue (the north end of Yard 9), but don't know how he got back to Yard 1. On second thought, maybe he rode it clear to Butler...slowing down to dump him off would've been unpardonable!

[Anonymous]

Stephanie:

You hit the nail on the head right at the end of your message. If the airlines had to absorb their true costs (airport operations and security, etc), they'd never be profitable again. Yet, the mind set in Congress is that Amtrak is a loser and its budget has to be cut. A bllion dollar budget for Amtrak is big, but it pales in comparison to what we spend on highways, airways and waterways.

John B.

[Anonymous]

Amtrak had a train called "The Lone Star" 15 & 16 which was a renaming of "The Texas Chief" of the same number. My "Texas Chief" was one of the trains retained by Amtrak and ran between Chicago and Houston on Santa Fe trackage except for Houston to Rosenberg, TX. Amtrak kept robbing this train of it's good equipment, so the Santa Fe management excercised it's option to recind the train's name. "The Lone Star" survived until the Carter Administration did a hachet job and killed it along with "The North Coast Hiawatha", "The Floridian", "The National Limited" and others in a 1979 budget scapegoat purge. What we need is 4 or more trains a day each way on 30 long distance routes and 9 trains a day each way on 120-150 short to medium distance routes. I've priced it, and it can be built in about 8 years for less money than fighting another Mid-East oil war.

[Anonymous]

Another Train that Never Was.....the Nightstar in Europe, which would connect Scotland and England to France, Germany, Belgium, the Netherlands, and Swtizeralnd. British Rail breaking up, change in policies, and the emergence of cheap airlines killed the Nightstar. Its rolling stock is now in Canada, owned by VIA Rail.

~Ra'akone

[Anonymous]

Here's another star train: NYC's North Star (No. 21). It carried New York City sleeping cars via Utica to Lake Placid into the late 1950's. The through sleepers returned to New York City via No 44, the New York Special.

JB

[Anonymous]

How about Cotton Belt's Morning Star and Lone Star? Boy, that really dates me! Think they were discontinued in 1958.

John Baie

[michaelstevens]

Of course across the Atlantic, we've got the Eurostar family of trains running thru the Channel Tunnel from London to Brussels, Paris, Bordeaux, Nice etc.

[vsmith]

Jamtracks Coast Starlight from LA to Seattle

[Anonymous]

Then there's the train that never was, called the Crescent Star (would have split from the Crescent in Meridien and run to Ft. Worth)

~Ra'akone

[Anonymous]

Well, daylight, as we all know, is the light coming from a star called the Sun, and the SP Daylight to me is one of the greatest stars among trains...

No intention to be a wiseguy here, really.

Oliver

[CSSHEGEWISCH]

SP also had the "Starlight", which was an overnight coach train between Los Angeles and San Francisco.

[kenneo]

SP had the Starpacer (376) and the Advance Starpacer (378) which later became known as the LABRT and the OABRT, but they were freight trains, the west coast versions of the Blue Streak.

[espeefoamer]

How many "Star "trains can you name?I checked the December 1966 Official Guide,and only found two.1.Seaboard ,Silver Star.#21-22,New York-Miami.#2.Great Northern,Western Star.#27-28,Chicago-Seattle.Rock Island at one time had the Twin Star Rocket,between Mineapolis and Dallas.Amtrak had a train ,the North Star,from Chicago to Duluth.Can anyone add to the list?