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Steam Steel & Limiteds By Kratville Saga Great Varnish Era Hard Cover 1962
Steam Steel and Limiteds By Wm Kratville A Saga of the Great Varnish Era
Hard Cover
Copyright 1962
414 Pages
Contents:
The Wonderful Steel Train Yankee Flyers
Alleghenies To The Seaboard In The Blue Ridge
Hello Sunshine!
Down To Dixie
Extra Fare, Extra Fast, Extra Fine Lake Michigan to Lake Erie
The Busy Triangle
Prairie Plush.
To The Lake Country
To The Wide Pacific Shore Pullmans In The Rockies .
From The Gulf To Gila Bend West Coast
Canadian Luxury
Car Name Index
For over a century the passenger train was the basic mode of transportation for America. As the vast network of rails grew across the country, the train supplanted virtually every other form of transportation. Despite the cliche that the "public be damned," the railroads actually offered to the traveler every comfort and convenience possible on rolling wheels.
Between 18S0 and 1907, the standard train was wooden, but many of these trains operated at speeds that would put modern streamliners to shame. It was also an era of thousands of lesser trains running between obscure terminals and stopping at every country crossing.
It was a day of iron men and wooden cars, but 1907 changed all that. The first all-steel sleeping car rolled fresh and bright from the giant Pullman Company works at Pullman, Illinois. But an industry isn't changed overnight and it wasn't until the end of World War I that it could be said that most trains featured all-steel cars.
So it was left to the twenties and thirties to formalize the new concept of the passenger train. The great war had changed many things in America, and most of these changes eventually appeared in the railway train and its equipment.
The public became immensely conscious of modern styles in clothing, architecture, pastimes and a hundred other things. So the railway car had to change too. It was already steel, but by the twenties, had hardly ridden itself of the shackles of gothic windows and clerestory roofs. The cars of the twenties featured straight lines, inside and out. Cone were oval windows and gold scribed roofs. In their place flowed decor along the lines of the Adam and Spanish motifs. But still, everyone went by train.
When the market crashed in 1929, the passenger train was already on a declining grade. Short run daytime trains fell beside the wayside by the hundreds as the automobile, despite primitive road conditions, gained local favor for short trips.
From 1929 until 1934 the railroad industry occupied itself with trying to keep up service and rebuild much equipment to air conditioned comforts.
But in 1934 the Union Pacific introduced the streamliner, and the Burlington successfully dieselized it. A rebirth of the passenger train had begun and it didn't stop until World War II necessarily curtailed carbuilding. When it stopped though, it stopped for good. With a few exceptions like the vista-dome cars, the train of the early forties is the train of today. The most glamorous era in railroading had ended. Today there are no steel Limiteds. But within the pages of Steam, Steel and Limiteds is re-created that glorious interval of time when traveling by train was the only way to go.
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