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Domeliners Yesterdays Trains of Tomorrow By Karl Zimmermann w dust jacket 1998
Domeliners Yesterdays Trains of Tomorrow By Karl Zimmermann
Hard Cover with dust jacket
Copyright 1998
128 pages
TABLE OF CONTENTS
Foreword: The Domeliner Mystique 5
The Pioneers: Silver Dome and the Train of Tomorrow 8
Proliferation Along the Way of the Zephyrs26
Budd's Short Domes: The Classic 40
Pullman-Standard: Not a Curve in Sight 58
The Full-Length Domes: Was Bigger Better? 71
American Car & Foundry's "Daily Domeliners" 84
for Union Pacific
Hand-Me-Down Domes: New Lives for Old Cars 92
On Amtrak: More Days of Glory 108
Private Domes: Yesterday's Trains for Tomorrow 116
Roster: The Dome Cars of North America 125
Bibliography 128
Half a century ago, a bright, intriguing, even radical idea lit up the traditionally conservative landscape of railroading. The idea was the dome car, and it caught on - to the point that dome cars came to loom large in the perception of North American passenger railroading in its last great years, those immediately following World War II. The charismatic cars would assume an importance far out of proportion to their rather slight numbers. Just 236 were ever built, and the time line for their construction was little more than a decade long. Only 16 railroads bought dome cars from three builders: the Budd Company, Pullman-Standard, and American Car & Foundry. These railroads were the Santa Fe, Baltimore & Ohio, Canadian Pacific, Chesapeake & Ohio, Burlington Route, Milwaukee Road, Rio Grande, Great Northern, Missouri Pacific, Northern Pacific, Southern Pacific, Spokane, Portland & Seattle, Texas & Pacific, Union Pacific, Wabash, and Western Pacific. Southern Pacific and Burlington built their own, in the latter case merely as prototypes. Another handful - principally Illinois Central, Canadian National, Amtrak, Auto-Train, and VIA Rail Canada - operated them as hand-me-downs.
These cars, designed to provide high visibility for passengers, also had high visibility. They were exciting, glamorous, and innovative. Seen by many as the possible savior of the passenger train - in the West, at least, where more ample clearances allowed their use - domes did what could be done against long odds. The public, whose freshest image of passenger railroading was dominated by war-swollen consists shorn by law of all nonutilitarian equipment, responded to the lure of domes. Many came back to trains for another look and found the dome cars to be as much fun as the railroad publicists had promised.
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