Rival Rails: The Race to Build America's Greatest Transcontinental Railroad

by Walter R. Borneman

  In 1902 Johnson and his father’s former business partner, Edward A. Shedd, bought the National Life Insurance Company of Chicago at foreclosure. Johnson eventually increased his holdings to 90 percent of the ownership. Sometime in 1904, Johnson met either a man fronting for Scott or Scott himself and heard the now well-worn tale of Scott’s Death Valley riches.

  Having made a considerable profit from a lead-zinc mine in Missouri, Johnson was willing to take a chance on Scotty. But given their future relationship, it must also be speculated that something clicked between the two men. The following year, probably with funds provided by Johnson, and quite likely in an attempt to impress Johnson with the success of his Death Valley venture, Walter Scott swaggered into the Los Angeles office of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe and made his simple but profound request: “Chicago, fast as you can do it.”6

  Supposedly, Scott suggested that his goal was a time of forty-six hours. If so, that was a full day faster than the schedule of the California Limited and twelve hours faster than the existing Los Angeles-to-Chicago record. That eastbound record over the Santa Fe was held by a special train called the Peacock Special that made the run in fifty-seven hours and fifty-six minutes in March 1900, carrying the vice president of the Carnegie Steel and Iron Company, Alexander R. Peacock, on his way to Pittsburgh for an urgent board meeting.

  Later there would be ample speculation whether Scott was just plain crazy, whether he had indeed peeled off $5,500 in big bills to pay for the excursion, or whether the Santa Fe was somehow involved as a coconspirator in a publicity stunt. Certainly the railroad gave its all for the run.

  What is fact is that on the afternoon of Sunday, July 9, 1905, Walter and Ella Scott arrived at La Grande Station in Los Angeles and stepped aboard a train that would quickly come to be called “the Scott Special,” or with the hyperbole of hindsight, “the Coyote Special.” Engine no. 442 was to start the journey and pull a consist of one baggage car, one dining car, and one standard Pullman, the Muskegon.

  Eastbound to San Bernardino the special roared, pausing only long enough to pick up a helper for the climb over Cajon Pass. At the summit, “the helper engine was uncoupled on the fly and, while the speed of the train never slackened for an instant,” the helper engine raced ahead and darted onto a siding. The switch to the main line was then closed, and the oncoming special sped past without so much as a hint of slowing.

  East of Cajon, Scott’s special flashed downgrade to Barstow at more than a mile a minute. The problem here, Frank Holman, a reporter on the train recalled, “was not how fast we could run, but how fast we dared to run.” Reportedly, the distance between mileposts 44 and 43 went by in 39 seconds—96 miles per hour.

  At Barstow came the first change of crews and locomotives. Then it was on to the Colorado River at Needles and a Sunday evening arrival just six hours and seventeen minutes after leaving Los Angeles. After another crew and locomotive change—there would be nineteen engines and engineers used in all—the special roared across the river on the steel cantilever bridge south of Needles that had replaced the early wooden structure opposite town.

  Dinner was served in the dining car—to Fred Harvey standards, of course—despite the rocketing motion of the train. By the time the newspapers got ahold of the story, the menu was reported to have featured a “Caviare Sandwich à la Death Valley” and a juicy, two-inch-thick “Porterhouse Steak à la Coyote.”

  Meanwhile, northern Arizona flew by outside the windows as the train climbed up and down the heavy grades below the San Francisco Peaks and rushed on eastward in the darkness across Cañon Diablo, past Gallup, and on into Albuquerque. North of Albuquerque at Lamy another helper was put on for the climb over Glorieta Pass. Even across Glorieta and Raton, the Scott special averaged just over forty-six miles per hour—quite a record, considering the tough mountain railroading involved.

  By the time the train raced into La Junta, Colorado, the mountains were behind it, and up ahead the Santa Fe’s raceway across the plains of Kansas and into the heartland urged even greater speeds. From Dodge City, Scotty sent President Theodore Roosevelt a telegram: “An American cowboy is coming East on a special train faster than any cowpuncher ever rode before; how much shall I break transcontinental record?”

  East of Dodge City, a continuing succession of men and equipment sped the Coyote Special through the darkness of a second night. Josiah Gossard, a Santa Fe veteran with twenty years’ experience as a road engineer, took the throttle for the run between Emporia and Argentine, just short of Kansas City. Notwithstanding four slow orders, Gossard covered 124 miles in 130 minutes, the fastest time yet recorded between those two points.

  Shortly before eight in the morning on Tuesday, the train thundered across the big steel bridge across the Mississippi, just south of Fort Madison, Iowa, and charged down A. A. Robinson’s straightaway toward Chicago. The 105 miles between the river and Chillicothe flew by in 101 minutes. One report claimed that the special bore down on Dearborn Station doing 60 miles an hour.

  At six minutes before noon on Tuesday, July 11, 1905, Death Valley Scotty’s special came to a halt outside the station. The train had covered 2,265 miles in just 44 hours and 54 minutes—an average, including all delays, of 50.4 miles per hour.

  It’s hard to say who was more elated—Scotty or the Santa Fe’s public relations department. Scott no doubt called on Albert Johnson, but the Santa Fe had a story that it would tell up and down the line and across the country. The special had been given the right-of-way across the country—even the vaunted California Limited was sidetracked for it—but otherwise, no extraordinary provisions had been made. The run was completed with regular equipment and standard crews.

  “I’m buying speed” was the pithy quote attributed to Scott, but the Santa Fe copywriters put a good deal more spin on it. “The value of a whirlwind run,” the Santa Fe rationalized, “lies in the fact that such spurts thoroughly put to test the track, the engines, and the operating force. They demonstrate to the world of travel that the regular hurry-up schedule can be easily maintained the year round; that the track is solid and dependable; that the engines are powerful and swift; also that the men on and behind the engines and along the track are keen of eye, clear-brained, and quick to act.”7

  A few years after this publicity stunt, Albert Johnson finally decided that he should visit Death Valley and see firsthand how Walter Scott had been spending his money. What he discovered surprised him. There was no sign of a gold mine, of course, but Johnson found himself invigorated by the dry heat and stark beauty of Death Valley. He returned again and again and spent weeks on end poking around its canyons with Scott. He “loves a good time and is a high roller,” Johnson admitted of Scotty, but, said Johnson, Scott was “absolutely reliable, and I don’t know of any man in the world that I would rather go on a camping trip with than Scott.”

  By the 1920s, Death Valley Scotty was a national legend, and Scotty’s Castle, a huge estate of Moorish architecture, was taking shape in Grapevine Canyon, fueled by Scotty’s lost mine stories and in truth financed by Johnson’s millions. Did Johnson care? “Scott repays me in laughs,” Johnson is reported to have said.8

  Johnson’s wife, Bessie, was killed in an automobile crash in Death Valley in 1943. Johnson passed away in 1948. Death Valley Scotty told tales of his secret mine until his end on January 5, 1954. Scott is buried on a hill above the castle that Albert Johnson graciously let him call his. It later became part of Death Valley National Park.

  The 1905 ride of the Scott special was a flash in the pan of railroad hype and hoopla, but it called undeniable attention to the railroad system that Colonel Holliday’s little line had become. Santa Fe mileage had grown from 6,444 miles in 1897 to 9,527 in 1906—an increase of nearly 48 percent. Gross earnings during this same period had climbed from $30 million to $81 million, resulting in a net income of $18 million in 1906 as opposed to zero nine years earlier.

  But Edward Payson Ripley was far from finished. In h
is annual report for 1906—echoing the refrain of William Barstow Strong that a company could not afford not to build—Ripley announced that despite recent expansions and acquisitions, it would be necessary to continue such an expansionist policy for an indefinite period of time. “The country served by the System is growing so rapidly that a large amount of additional equipment and of other facilities for the transaction of business must be provided.”9

  Ripley might have added that the country served by the Santa Fe was in fact growing so fast because of the railroad and that the Santa Fe continued to fuel that growth with ever-increasing capacity, branch lines, and land grant sales. Thanks in no small measure to the railroad’s advance, the territory that President James K. Polk had wrested from Mexico sixty-some years before had become an integral part of the burgeoning United States. In 1846 the wagon master’s cry had been “On to Santa Fe!” Cyrus K. Holliday and his associates pushed their railroad to Santa Fe and then beyond. In doing so, they inexorably changed the landscape the rails traversed.

  In 1870 the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe was not yet one-third of the way across Kansas. But between then and 1910, the population of the states and territories its main lines served—Kansas, Colorado, New Mexico, Arizona, California, Oklahoma, and Texas—increased 5.7 times, more than twice the national average.

  Those seven states and territories, encompassing one-third of the continental area of the United States, grew from populations of 1.9 million in 1870 to 10.9 million in 1910. This surge was perhaps most visible in the U.S. House of Representatives, where new apportionments and statehoods increased the region’s representation from nine congressmen in 1870 to fifty-one in 1910—a westward trend of population and political power that has continued into the twenty-first century.

  Colorado became a state in 1876. Oklahoma, spurred by a land rush and oil discoveries, followed in 1907. By 1912, the territories of Arizona and New Mexico would round out the lower forty-eight states. And along the way, the towns served by the Santa Fe became the commercial hubs and political centers of a region where before there had largely been wild prairies, sweeping deserts, and quiet countryside.

  With Santa Fe connections, Los Angeles and San Diego in California, Phoenix in Arizona, and Albuquerque and Las Cruces in New Mexico grew to prominence. The Santa Fe paced the Denver and Rio Grande along Colorado’s Front Range and boosted Denver, Colorado Springs, and Pueblo.

  Along with the venerable Katy, the Santa Fe stocked the Oklahoma boom and brought competition to Dallas, Fort Worth, and Houston. More than anything else, it was the passenger prestige and freight tonnage of the Santa Fe that solidified Kansas City as the western gateway to the Southwest. Perhaps most important, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe tied together East and West along the most direct transcontinental route between the Midwest and the Pacific Coast.

  Some would later say that Ripley had worked a “virtual miracle”—not just on the Main Streets of so many towns in the Southwest but on Wall Street as well. Ripley’s fiscal conservatism and calculated expansion had made the Santa Fe a “blue chip” investment. Meanwhile, his investment in the physical plant continued, including the double-tracking of the main line from Chicago to Newton, Kansas, by 1911.10

  The road was “winning its right,” one contemporary financial writer noted, to be called “the Pennsylvania of the West.” In case there was any doubt exactly what that meant, the writer spelled it out: “The Pennsylvania policy is not one of parsimonious dividends, nor of shrinking from heavy capital expenses. It is one of liberal maintenance, aggressive expansion, and the free issue of stocks and bonds.” No doubt, J. Edgar Thomson smiled in his grave at that.11

  When Edward Payson Ripley relinquished the presidency of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe on January 1, 1920, “the road had become universally recognized as one of the best physically and soundest financially, in the world, besides having established an enviable reputation for the character of service rendered.” It had indeed reached the top of the heap.12

  23

  Dueling Streamliners

  There is, of course, one more story that must be told. Any account of the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe would not be complete without it. By 1909, the transcontinental routes had been built, empires won and lost, but the American West was still a contested battleground. Increasingly, the objective would become transcontinental speed, and the high visibility weapons would be sleek, new streamliners racing between California and Chicago.

  Edward Payson Ripley first responded to calls for increased passenger speed and service by inaugurating the Santa Fe’s de-Luxe between Chicago and Los Angeles in December 1911. Powered by a steam locomotive pulling heavy steel cars, the de-Luxe made the trip once a week in just over sixty hours. Its nine o’clock morning arrival in Los Angeles bettered the schedule of the California Limited by five and one-half hours and, according to one advertisement, “saves a business day.”

  The only stops the de-Luxe made for passenger boarding were at Kansas City and Williams, Arizona, the latter for Grand Canyon traffic. A limit of sixty passengers per trip could take advantage of service that the railroad boasted was “extra fine, extra fast, extra fare.” At last, the West had a train that could rival the New York Central’s famed 20th Century Limited or the Pennsylvania Railroad’s stalwart Broadway Limited.1

  World War I came along all too quickly and was not a very pleasant time for American railroads. In 1918 President Woodrow Wilson assumed federal control of the railroads in order to consolidate routes and make rolling stock available to the war effort. The de-Luxe was one of the casualties. The one bright spot was the growing reliability with which the nation’s rail network moved men and materiel around the country. In many respects, it was a test for a far greater effort less than a generation later.

  As America raced into the Roaring Twenties, the Santa Fe reintroduced the de-Luxe under a new name destined for railroad stardom. The road relied on its ties with southwestern Native American culture to name the train the “Chief.” Still powered by steam, the Chief was made up of eight Pullman cars. Naturally, these included a Fred Harvey dining car, because, as the original brochure for the Chief asserted, “California, the Santa Fe Railway and the Fred Harvey cuisine have been inseparable in the minds of travelers for over forty years.”

  Perhaps the biggest change was that the Chief operated daily and began its inaugural run with twin consists that left Chicago and Los Angeles simultaneously on November 14, 1926. There were a few additional passenger stops—including Ash Fork, Arizona, for connections to Phoenix—but the Chief shaved minutes off the timetable of the de-Luxe and arrived in Los Angeles in just under sixty hours.2

  Yet another boom went bust in 1929, but America’s passenger trains responded with a new level of sophistication and innovation. The Santa Fe’s rival Chicago, Burlington and Quincy debuted a silver rocket of a train that it called the Zephyr. Streamlined to slice through the air and reduce drag, the train was also “streamlined” by the use of lighter stainless steel. The three-car Zephyr consisted of a diesel power car with railway post office; a center car with a baggage-express compartment, buffet area, and twenty coach seats; and a rear observation-lounge car with fifty-two seats.

  The Burlington sent the new streamliner on a five-week publicity tour of the Northeast and then let it kick up its heels on a run from Denver to Chicago. On May 26, 1934, the Zephyr left Denver’s Union Station and fairly flew across the plains to arrive in Chicago thirteen hours and five minutes later at an average speed of 77.6 miles per hour. An estimated half million Midwesterners lined the Burlington’s tracks to watch, and for a nation still staggered by the Great Depression, it was a very futuristic and optimistic sight.3

  Not to be outdone, the Union Pacific competed with the Burlington’s Zephyr by introducing a streamliner of its own. Marketed under the slogan “Tomorrow’s Train Today,” its canary yellow paint with golden brown trim became distinctive Union Pacific colors. Officially, the bright yellow was
chosen for safety reasons because it “can be seen for a greater distance than any other color,” but there was little doubt that the Union Pacific wanted everyone to know which train was coming. By the summer of 1936, the Union Pacific was running City of San Francisco and City of Los Angeles streamliners between Chicago and those cities in a record time of thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes.4

  Then it was the Santa Fe’s turn. On May 12, 1936, in direct response to the challenge of the Union Pacific’s “City” streamliners, the Santa Fe started its first Super Chief west from Dearborn Station in Chicago. The consist was standard Pullmans without a stainless-steel car in the line, but the motive power was twin 1,800-horsepower diesels that had routinely hit 150 miles per hour during their trials. These early diesels were shaped like boxcars with a straight front end, but the Super Chief matched the Union Pacific’s time to Los Angeles to the minute.

  By April 1937, the Super Chief was all streamlined with a silvery nine-car consist of mail car, mail-baggage car, four sleepers, lounge, diner, and sleeper-observation car that carried 104 passengers in style. The following year, the Santa Fe took delivery of its first E-type diesels with their hawkish nose and distinctive Indian warbonnet colors and paint scheme.

  By 1939, the Santa Fe was running a fleet of streamliners between Chicago and Los Angeles. The all-Pullman Super Chief set the standard and operated twice weekly. The original Chief continued to operate daily as an all-Pullman train but without quite the speed or fanfare of its younger sibling. And to cater to the cost-conscious traveler who still wanted speed, the all-chair coaches of El Capitan carried 188 passengers on a twice-weekly schedule that matched the speed of the Super Chief.

  Why did the Santa Fe’s Super Chief eclipse the Union Pacific’s City of Los Angeles in fact and lore even though the competing trains had identical time schedules? In three words: marketing, service, and mystique. The Santa Fe promoted the splendor of traversing the American Southwest in unparalleled style. The Fred Harvey Company catered to every need with five-star meals and gracious hospitality. And thanks to those two things, the train became the train to be seen on for a generation.