What’s in a name? C
ertainly there’s poetry and magic and romance in the names of passenger trains and their cars, but there’s practicality and purpose as well. Beginning a century and a half ago, in the early years of the Pullman Company, sleeping cars were nearly always given names, and
from the 1920’s onward these were typically assigned in series so railroaders would immediately know a car’s configuration just by its name. In the streamliner era, if you worked for the Union Pa- cific, for instance, you would have recognized Placid Bay and Placid Harbor as 11-double-bedroom cars, Alpine Lake and Alpine Meadows as 14-section cars, and Pacific Beach and Pacific Island as “10 and 6’s,” with 10 roomettes and 6 double bedrooms. And train names? They were among the railroads’ top marketing assets. When George H. Daniels, New York Central’s general passenger agent in 1902, came up with 20th Century Limited, he hit the jackpot. (In 1938, industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss gave the train the most stylish of logos.) Other favorites of mine include Seaboard Air Line’s Orange Blossom Special (and not just for the hard-driving fiddle tune), Great Northern’s Empire Builder (memorializing James J. Hill among history’s most powerful railroaders), and Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited (the Century’s competitor, its name originally spelled “Broad Way” for PRR’s multi-track mainline, not the Manhattan thoroughfare). Or how about Pennsy’s Congressional (serving Washington, D.C.), New Haven’s Merchants Lim-
ited (like the Congressional, a businessman’s train), or the Lackawanna’s Phoebe Snow (named for its white-gowned advertising icon from the steam era)? But, I can’t overlook Santa Fe’s glamorous Super Chief, Southern’s Crescent Limited, and Seaboard Air Line’s Silver Meteor for my list of per- sonal favorites. These and the names of countless other “Limiteds,” “Specials,” and “Flyers” each had a special magic.
When modelers buy passenger car kits, these generally include decal sheets with a variety of prototypically-appropriate names or numbers, or both. The modeler gets to choose, based on senti- ment or personal experience, or sometimes just euphony, the way a name sounds. If I were lettering a Southern Railway 10-and-6 sleeper, for instance, I’d probably opt for Shenandoah River, Tugalo River, or Rappahannock River just because I like to say the names. I do have a Great Northern full-length Great Dome. For it, I chose Mountain View from among six possibilities because I’d known the car in its later years as New Orleans with the American Ori- ent Express (and later GrandLuxe Express). For my 1948 20th Century Limited observation, I had just two choices: Hickory Creek and Sandy Creek. Though the latter ran on the AOE as the New York, I chose Hickory Creek since that car has been magnificently restored to its original appear- ance by the United Railroad Historical Society of New Jersey. I’m so in love with this nomenclature that since 1967 I‘ve listed every named car I’ve ridden, and the compilation is now 25 pages and growing, though sleeper-naming by Amtrak has been hit or miss. The cars Amtrak inherited four decades ago generally kept their original names for a time. Amtrak’s first sleepers, 70 bi-level Superliners, were nameless except for two: the George M. Pull- man and Edward L. Ullman. (Ullman was an Amtrak board member.) The 49 Superliner II sleep- ers offered a perfect option–the 48 continental states plus the District of Columbia–and Amtrak seized it.
When the 50 single-level Viewliners appeared, Amtrak chose the time-honored practice of series naming while playing on the fleet name. Majestic View, Cape View, Spring View, and Sunset View I find in my recent notes. VIA Rail Canada still operates many cars built in the mid-fifties, mainly for the Canadian, with sleepers of two types: Manor-series cars named for illustrious English- speaking Canadians and Chateau-series for French speakers. The wonderful Park cars, bedroom- lounge-dome-observations, still serve today’s Canadian. Last January I added Monck Manor and Yoho Park to my list. Not only cars but sometimes trains were named in series: Burlington’s Zephyrs, Rock Island’s
Rockets, Santa Fe’s Chiefs, Chicago & North Western’s 400s, Southern Pacific’s Daylights, Union Pacific’s City fleet. The Burlington was unusual in naming not just sleepers but all Zephyr cars (wearing the Budd Company’s unadorned fluted stainless steel), and from the 1936 Denver Zephyr onward all carried the prefix Silver. The previous year the four-car Mark Twain Zephyr used names of characters from the novel The Adventures of Tom Sawyer. The engine-baggage car-RPO was Injun Joe–perhaps the punniest passenger-car name of all time. KARL ZIMMERMANN
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photography/KARL ZIMMERMANN JULY 2012
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