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Burlington Bulletin #42: The Exposition Flyer
Burlington Bulletin No. 42: The Exposition Flyer
From an old press relase:
Hol Wagner tells the tale of the Exposition Flyer in 264 pages with 42 pages just on the equipment alone!
The Exposition Flyer seems to be little remembered, though it was a pioneer in the concept of through train service over multiple railroads west of Chicago. It was inaugurated as a one-season-only way to serve the Golden Gate International Exposition - the West Coast's World's Fair - in San Francisco,
but ran for nearly 10 years. Its famous successor, the California Zephyr, became "America's most talked about train" - a sleek, glamorous vision in stainless steel, diesel-powered by locomotives of the three railroads over which it operated, and regularly carrying more dome cars than any other train, anywhere.
But from June 10, 1939, to March 20, 1949, the CZ's progenitor, the Exposition Flyer, ran in seeming anonymity of the rails of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy, the Denver & Rio Grande Western/Denver & Salt Lake, and the Western Pacific between Chicago Union Station and the Oakland Mole, Southern Pacific's ferry terminal on San Francisco Bay. Made up of existing, primarily
heavyweight passenger cars of its three sponsors and the Pullman Company and initially
powered by steam, the Expo was hodgepodge in appearance, with no two consists exactly the same. A total of nine distinctly different types of lounge-observation cars, for example, carried the Expo's markers over the decade the train ran. The Expo helped inaugurate coast-to-coast transcontinental sleeping car service in 1946. The nation's first Vista Dome car was built with the Expo in mind, and the California Zephyr dome chair cars operated on the Expo for nearly a year before the CZ entered service.
Without a doubt, the Exposition Flyer is one of the least heralded passenger trains ever operated by the Q, Grande or WP. While the CZ draws extensive coverage, the Expo rates no mention at all in Rebel of the Rockies, Robert Athearn's definitive history of the Rio Grande; only passing mention in Richard
Overton's similar CB&Q treatise, Burlington Route; and again, virtually no mention in the only published history of the WP, penned by Gilbert Kniess for the March 1953 50th anniversary issue of Mileposts, the railroad's house organ.
Yet the Expo is one of the most interesting trains operated by any of these three roads, and its story deserves telling. This issue of the BURLINGTON BULLETIN attempts to do just that, in 264 pages of text, photographs, drawings and momentoes of the landmark train.
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