Ok thanks Overmod...been working on a question for an hour now doing the right research and was just about to post it when NP Eddie jumped in. So I will save it for another time. Which is fine, always good to have one ready to go.
But..hold the phone!,,I have a question for Overmod!...how come none of us who are admiring and not at all critical of you, joke and jest, enjoy the camaraderie and all that, never get invited for a tête-à-tête at a great BBQ joint?
Whilst the rest of us freeze to death in our sad and lonely existence ..yada yada yada...I doth protest!
ALL:
I will keep this thread going with a new question:
Page 69 of "Some Classic Trains" shows a photograph of the "Elkhart Valley". Something happened to this car in 1940. What was it? Also list the railroad, actual date, and location.
Happy hunting.
Ed Burns
Overmod, I'm with you on the crossword puzzles. I enjoy working them (they are reputed to help keep the brain alive and well)--six days a week, there is a little one of about 50 words in the morning paper, and there are two big ones in the Sunday paper.
Johnny
I am flat on my back with complications of this damn flu that no one seems to be able to type, irascible as hell and limited to posting on a phone. So plenty of time for various forum nonsense.
Did not realize I was actually up, and have come to the conclusion that most of the questions I can figure out how to ask are either excessively technically involved or just plain MEGO-inducing uninteresting. I know it's not in the 'spirit' of these quiz threads not to pose a question as 'reward' for a right answer ... but I'm also one of those people who love crosswords but couldn't possibly construct one ... let alone a good one.
I tried for a while being a bit 'cutesie' and leaving detailed "hints" - but that's just not what the spirit here is supposed to be, either.
So I say let Miningman try another, and may it give as much or more delightful nostalgia as I got from that Turbotrain peacock reminder!
.
Do not want to speak for Overmod but he is seemingly all tied up over in the Trains Forum on multiple threads regarding the Amtrak/CSX accident. He has kicked his turn at the question over to others before so perhaps if we do not hear from him soon we may assume to just proceed. I'm sure he will not mind.
I would suggest if anyone has a question ready to go ahead and we can always squeeze in Overmod at a later date.
If not we will have to wait.
Deggesty and rcdrye---Perhaps you missed it but the question has been asked already and answered by Overmod, re: the Turbotrain incident on its inaugural run.
Overmod is up.
Thanks for the insights on Pullman. Follow up explanations are always the best and tell the rest of the story.
rcdrye There are two reasons for the dramatic drop. In some ways comparing 1946 and 1956 is comparing apples and oranges. At least 1000 of the cars taken out of service after WWII were "Tourist" cars of various kinds, mostly unrebuilt open section cars, most without air conditioning of any kind. Between the big postwar buys and the rapid decline in short haul business after 1946, many older unrebuilt cars were sidelined, and many "betterment" upgraded heavyweight cars were moved to the pool. High steel scrap prices made scrapping the unrebuilt cars attractive, and really kept Pullman's bottom line up as business dropped off. Muddling the picture considerably is the question of who owned the cars. All of the postwar lightweights were railroad owned, while Pullman itself owned some prewar lightweights and about half of the heavyweights, the other half having been distributed to the new owner roads after the 1947 Pullman breakup. Many railroad-owned cars were identifiable only by letteroard initials, since they were often assigned to the Pullman poo. Since the railroad-owned cars that weren't normally in the pool were leased by Pullman, they could appear virtually anywhere, explaining the sometimes colorful makeup of seasonal and special trains, and even ordinary daily trains. Johnny: Time to declare a winner!
There are two reasons for the dramatic drop. In some ways comparing 1946 and 1956 is comparing apples and oranges.
At least 1000 of the cars taken out of service after WWII were "Tourist" cars of various kinds, mostly unrebuilt open section cars, most without air conditioning of any kind. Between the big postwar buys and the rapid decline in short haul business after 1946, many older unrebuilt cars were sidelined, and many "betterment" upgraded heavyweight cars were moved to the pool. High steel scrap prices made scrapping the unrebuilt cars attractive, and really kept Pullman's bottom line up as business dropped off.
Muddling the picture considerably is the question of who owned the cars. All of the postwar lightweights were railroad owned, while Pullman itself owned some prewar lightweights and about half of the heavyweights, the other half having been distributed to the new owner roads after the 1947 Pullman breakup. Many railroad-owned cars were identifiable only by letteroard initials, since they were often assigned to the Pullman poo. Since the railroad-owned cars that weren't normally in the pool were leased by Pullman, they could appear virtually anywhere, explaining the sometimes colorful makeup of seasonal and special trains, and even ordinary daily trains.
Johnny: Time to declare a winner!
rcdryePullman had 5000 cars in service in 1946, about 2600 in 1956.
Does this reflect a kind of double whammy, with all the additional lightweight postwar cars coming in as the great die off in overnight service gathered way? I'd expect the Korean War might have been the excuse for cutting up heavy steel cars just as it was for so many steam locomotives ...
Now I have a follow up question...would Pullman Porters and Attendants be assigned all over the place on various trains...like one day you would be working the Commodore Vanderbilt and then later assigned to that Massena run for a bit. Did they get the work over the whole system. Could you be assigned to a Union Pacific train then a few weeks later over to the Sante Fe or the Pennsy.
Thinking it was a very demanding and meticulous job, but steeped in railroading. The senior guys would sure know a lot about the route and what's going on.
I don't know the last year that the NYC had overnoght Pullman service between points on the Adirondack and St. Lawrence DIvision to/from New York, but in July, 1943, therewere three to Lake Placid, one to Malone, and one each to Watertown, Massena, and Ogdensburg.
As you noted earlier, there was much shifting between trains en route, especially for Boston, Toronto, and Michigan points traffic. There also several pickups and set outs between New York and Buffalo.
Wow ...that is some great information that would be extremely difficult to come up with. Rutland had 4! ,any given night...who knew. Long live the New York Central ...And Pullman.
Pullman had 5000 cars in service in 1946, about 2600 in 1956. Of course, not every car ran every night. I did tally New York Central's sleeping car routes in 1948 and came up with about 235 cars in either direction on any weekday night (many lines did not run on Saturday night). 1948 was the last year that Pullman's receipts covered its operating costs. The eastermost point served by NYC sleeping car service was Boston, with the majority of cars serving New York City. From New York cars went to Montreal (two routes), Toronto, San Francisco (two routes), Los Angeles (three routes), various points in Oklahoma and Texas, and even Mexico City. Interline service was operated with NYNH&H, DL&W, D&H, Rutland/CN, TH&B, CP, Erie (joint with P&LE), SLSF/MKT, MP/T&P and NdeM, C&NW, UP, SP, CRI&P, AT&SF, SOU, C&O and N&W (and I might have missed one or more).
Even the little Rutland had four Pullmans in motion on any given 1948 night. Neighbor Central Vermont had ten or twelve.
We do not get Genesee 'Jenny' cream ale in Canada, so I'm going by memory from TV ads out of Buffalo back in the free TV antennae days.
Once cable came along the ads were mostly pirated on either side of the border, then I left the Toronto-Hamilton-Buffalo Golden Horseshoe area to pursue my career in Geology/Mining.
Now it's all mega multi nationals and local boutique breweries with goofy names. Not sure what is what anymore.
I'm sure it is still around.
Does anyone know a fair approximation of the number of Pullman cars ( and railroad owned sleepers) there were in service at the height? How many were scrapped? Imagine that is a mind boggling number as well.
MiningmanI remember the ads for Genesee Beer, a cream ale maybe?
Jenny? Maybe a cream ale?
I must be getting too old, or perhaps they aren't advertising Jenny Cream as they once did. "Jenny Cream Ale" was three little words as important as "Cummins Turbo Diesel" in the right context.
\As a business model it seems absolutely flawless, leaving for another destination around the cocktail hour, having dinner in the diner with fellow associates, a pampered good nights sleep and shined shoes, a newspaper and breakfast awaiting, all of it downtown to downtown. Safe , dependable, virtually impervious to weather. It seems it would work to perfection even today and easily preferred over the alternatives. No business time is lost, it makes perfect use of empty hours.
It still is, but the overall cost to provide all that service, and all the necessary work on the ground to make it all-weather (something Amtrak notoriously can't do well much of the time) is appallingly expensive even when it works 100%. Backed-up toilets, random delays across the top of Indiana, and so forth don't really give one a civilized feel of effortless, riskless passage in 'zero working time' between the cities involved.
Promotion as a 'cruise train' or as a hotel 'experience' rather than transportation-with-benefits may work ... for a while. Even short spells of nonprofitability will lead to discontinuance, of the company involved if not just the train service. There are no reliable 'legs' for the service, even if more expense-account departments could be convinced that the cost of local transportation, hotel and meals for an air traveler to stay overnight ought to be applied toward the 'sleeper' alternative for comparable trips.
A slightly different model is seen overseas, where I believe almost all of the overnight "Pullman" services are gone, most but not all being victims of 'better' HSR making the trip in shorter hours or in daylight. I'd have expected a company like Virgin to make sleeper service work if anyone could. That does not seem to be happening, and I submit that if it were possible the advantages are such that it would be actively tried and retried until a suitable formula were found.
I am still fulminating about the lack of more 'auto trains' in different regional corridors. Those are less critical in the coming 'millennial' future where few people actually choose to afford their own cars, but still very important in, for example, a competitive price model for families where the room, not the individual passengers occupying it, becomes the basis of the transportation charge as well as the accommodation charge, and the car rides along for all the loaded-luggage short final to wherever the destination(s) may be.
http://www.exporail.org/can_rail/Canadian%20Rail_no207_1969.pdf
Here is a link to a great article on the Turbo Train and a few pages down 'the incredible picture" of the flying frozen meat and debris and the launched truck on the right, looking like a dog that just ran into a porcupine and got skunked at the same time.
The driver was not harmed, but really shook up, found him dazed sitting in a coffee shop bewildered as to what happened.
It was a great opportunity to tout the safety features as really the train was fine, just dislodged and damaged nose doors. Instead it turned into a goat show.
rcdrye--- Thanks for the info. I remember the ads for Genesee Beer, a cream ale maybe? and of course the song Motor City Madness, but these have nothing to do with NYC Pullman trains. If one thinks about what became of the Michigan Central Station then Motor City Madness seems more appropriate.
How is it that the Genesee is all Pullman one way and coaches the other way? ...and the Motor City Special essentially a one way operation?
One last puzzling and lingering observation. You state that the number of Pullmans on any given night on the NYC was simply mind boggling. As a business model it seems absolutely flawless, leaving for another destination around the cocktail hour, having dinner in the diner with fellow associates, a pampered good nights sleep and shined shoes, a newspaper and breakfast awaiting, all of it downtown to downtown. Safe , dependable, virtually impervious to weather. It seems it would work to perfection even today and easily preferred over the alternatives. No business time is lost, it makes perfect use of empty hours.
Yet there stands the incredible devastation and ugliness of the Michigan Central Station. Must have been a lot of Pullman Porters and Attendants without employment.
This was a mistake to lose all of this.
In 1948 NYC also had the all-Pullman Genesee from Buffalo to New York, and the Motor City Special from Chicago to Detroit. The Westbound Genesee carried coaches. There was no westbound counterpart to the Motor City Special.
The number of Pullmans in motion on the New York Central on any given night is simply mind boggling. Several cars were switched from one train to another two or even three times during their trips, which were often only a few hundred miles.
I had a blown-up copy of that picture over my desk for years. Don't know if there is one available for 'linking' from the Web.
Frozen meat, wasn't it? Made a glorious fan-shaped pattern in the air along with the pieces of demolished trailer. Only real damage to Turbo was little more than displaced clamshell doors (which I thought then, and still think now, is an extraordinary gift from Providence). Why this wasn't played up as an enormous safety coup, I don't really know, especially since it would have deflected attention from the underlying issue with protection...
Interestingly enough, the problem there was one of the chief reasons NYC didn't take UA up on their very, very carefully calculated offer to provide very high speed service on what is now the Hudson Line and then west to around Buffalo. Namely that the high-speed trains grossly overran grade-crossing protection and, in those days of analog circuits and relay controls, making something that could reliably discriminate between normal and high-speed trains was too expensive and too hard to maintain safely. To say nothing of what happened when someone tried to run the crossing without gauging the deceptive speed of the Turbo, or got stuck with less time to get out of the way.
Now, we could proceed to the question of running in the woods that a Scandinavian railroad had to solve with 'moose noses' for its trains ... but that's another tale.
Dec. 10, 1968 was a big big day for the Canadian National Railway. The long anticipated and much hyped Turbo Train was to undertake its inaugural run.
Lots of big wigs at the microphone bloviating away, blah blah yada yada, the train packed with reporters from across the land. The 'car attendants', looking like something from 2001 Space Odyssey, had that futuristic Jetsons look to them ( popular in the 60's), served pre prepared food, heated up in special containerized little box like things so that it sort of resembled a TV dinner. 3 hours 59 minutes Montreal to Toronto.. never been done before but this time, well, the future is here!
Before the bar car could open something happened. As Bill would say "Ohhhh noooooo".
One of the reporters in the 'dome car club lounge' managed to capture what was splashed all over the front pages of every newspaper across the land. Really and truly an amazing picture.
The Turbo became the butt end of jokes and the 'incident' an astonishing embarrassment to the CNR. Not only that but the happening occurance was foreshadowed one day previously at the exact same spot with a Rapido, so that further made folks say "Whaaaat???"
Furthermore, it was only the start of a long and mechanically plagued sad road that would set the whole thing back years.
The 3h59m schedule was not attainable but not because the Turbo was incapable of high speed, it was something else that was overlooked or at least not taken into careful enough consideration.
So the question is:
What happened?
Super bonus gold star if you can provide the 'photo of the year'
C'mon you got to do the photo, it's priceless.
What did the 'incident' actually prove in that the timetable was unrealistic because this factor was amazingly not taken seriously enough?
Oh, just to state I'm not insensitive to current events, no one was hurt. One slight exception was the same fella from the incident the day before had minor cuts, 2 days in a row, almost like a Monty Python thing. Bet he had a good tale to relate at the pub.
Lot of bruised egos and tails between the legs though.
Miningman The Cleveland Limited. I have a 1949 consist and it included one coach and a smoking car but the rest was all Pullman. Perhaps in 1943 it did not have the coach. That and Wanswheels tip.
The Cleveland Limited. I have a 1949 consist and it included one coach and a smoking car but the rest was all Pullman. Perhaps in 1943 it did not have the coach. That and Wanswheels tip.
Except for the Century, which carried lightweight cars only, these trains carried a mixture of lightweight and heavyweight cars. I am wondering if each of the 14 section cars carried had 4 private sections (such had a washroom for the exclusive use of the passenger((s)) in each private section); they were rebuilt from 16 section cars.
The westbound Cleveland Express did carry two Pullmans from Boston; otherwise, all of the wb cars originated in New York City.
We have the Twentieth Century Limited and the Commodore Vanderbilt as the all-Pullman trains to Chicago and the Detroiter as the all-Pullman train to Detroit and the Advance Commodore Vanderbilt with the car for plebians such as I also running New York to Chicago.
What is the fourth deluze (even though it carried heavyweights as well as lightweights) train; its name tells us what the western terminal was.
Incidentally, #44, the New York Special, carried seven overnight sleepers from points on the Adirondack and St. Lawrence Divisions into New York City--plus two from Chicago, three from Michigan cities, two from Niagara Falls, and one from Rochester--and coaches.
Overmod Is the similar train the Advance Commodore Vanderbilt? I'm pretty sure 'The Detroiter' was all-Pullman at that time.
Is the similar train the Advance Commodore Vanderbilt?
I'm pretty sure 'The Detroiter' was all-Pullman at that time.
Then there was the Owl znd the Night Owl, the latter usually just called the Owl. One was coach and Pullman, GM&O, Chicago - St. Louis, and the other was NYNH&H, all-Pullman, NY - Boston. (The Naraganset was the NewHaven's companion all-coach train.)
Well, there was the KC - Jacksonville Kansa City - Florida Special, Frisco and Souhern mosly, coach and Pullman, and the just plain Florida Special, PRR, RF&P, ACL, FEC, winter-season all-Pullman, no coaches.
You got two of them right.
I should have stated that there was a coach and Pullman train with a name similar to that of one of the all-Pullman trains.
It has been a while since I participated in the quiz. If f I do not know the answers to fairly complex questions I simply do not have the time to do a long complicated search. I enjoy reading them though and learn a lot from them.
There does seem to be a slight shortage of participants though and even some that answer just don't have a question to ask. We simply need more people over here at Classic.
So Deggesty's question maybe one I can answer off the top of my head but I'm certainly not 100% on being successful.
The 20th Century Limited- New York to Chicago
Commodore Vanderbilt- New York to Chicago
SouthWest Limited- Chicago/New York to St. Louis
New England States-- Chicago/New York to Boston
The similiar named all coach train is perhaps the Commodore - New York to Chicago
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