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

by Walter R. Borneman

  One Santa Fe advertisement from the period said it all. It showed a glamorous movie star walking toward a gaggle of reporters next to the rounded end of a stainless-steel observation car complete with Super Chief drumhead. “She came in on the Super Chief,” read the caption. Indeed, for anyone traveling between the West Coast and America’s heartland, the phrase “just got in on the Super” quickly became the boast that set one above the crowd.5

  With this Depression-era emphasis on speed, there was to be one more battle for California. This time, the Santa Fe and the Southern Pacific would go head to head for the San Francisco–Los Angeles corridor. The Southern Pacific had long monopolized this market because its Pacific Coast line was the shortest rail distance between the two cities. It was here that the dashing Coast Daylight whisked passengers in comfort approaching that of the Super Chief. And while Santa Fe partisans were quick to take exception, many rail travelers stared at the Daylight’s red, orange, and black paint scheme and pronounced it simply the most beautiful train in the world.

  For the Santa Fe to compete in this market, it had to shorten its roundabout route over Cajon Pass to Barstow, back over Tehachapi Pass to Bakersfield, and then down the San Joaquin Valley to Oakland. Even then, a ferry was required to reach downtown San Francisco. The Santa Fe studied the problem and found an unwitting ally. The California Highway Department was improving the road system between Los Angeles and Bakersfield via Tejon Pass, which later became the route of Interstate 5. The Santa Fe took advantage of this and inaugurated a combination rail-bus service.

  A traveler left Los Angeles by bus, arrived in Bakersfield, boarded the streamlined Golden Gate, and then settled in for a 313-mile sprint to Oakland. From there, another fleet of air-conditioned buses completed the journey to downtown San Francisco via the recently completed Bay Bridge. Not only was this service cheaper than the rail-only or bus-only options—$6 compared to $9.47 on the Southern Pacific and $6.75 on the buses of Pacific Greyhound—but it beat the Southern Pacific’s all-rail time by ten minutes. Suddenly the Santa Fe was the fastest way between California’s twin hubs.6

  The prewar glory days of streamliners were destined to be short lived. After December 7, 1941, the demands of a two-ocean global war tested America’s railroads to the limit. The Santa Fe continued to operate the Chiefs and El Capitan, but the schedule for the Chicago–Los Angeles speedway was increased by two hours because of the tremendous volume of troop trains on the line.

  All along the Santa Fe main line, Fred Harvey establishments worked overtime to feed the large numbers of men and women moving about the country for the war effort. For many young draftees away from home for the first time, Fred Harvey meals provided a brief respite and memories of a mother’s kitchen. (Sixty years later, the author’s father was still talking about the pheasant sandwich he had been served “somewhere in Montana” while en route from Cleveland to Fort Lewis, Washington, in 1944.)

  But it was freight that proved the worth of the Santa Fe’s California-to-Chicago main line. With much of the route double-tracked, freight ton-miles (a ton of freight moved one mile) almost doubled between 1941 and 1942. The critical 82-mile Cajon Pass leg shared with the Union Pacific between San Bernardino and Barstow routinely handled twenty to thirty freight trains a day. Tehachapi Pass saw similar traffic, but perhaps nowhere was the Santa Fe busier than on its “surf line” between Los Angeles and San Diego. Both cities, past rivalries momentarily put aside, boomed as major military centers and embarkation ports. On one day alone in 1942, the Santa Fe moved almost five thousand people between the two places.

  The biggest operational change for the Santa Fe during this time was that World War II proved the worth of the diesel locomotive and hastened the end of steam. The first diesel freight locomotive was delivered to the Santa Fe for road tests in February 1938. Comprising four units generating 5,400 horsepower, the locomotive pulled sixty-six loaded freight cars from Kansas City to Los Angeles. “Bypassing water stops, crossing passes without helpers, and moving at a high rate of speed,” its performance encouraged the Santa Fe to place the first order for freight diesels by any railroad in the United States.

  There was soon little doubt that steam locomotives—majestic and thunderous though they were—had seen their glory years. Only the enormous demands of World War II gave them a temporary reprieve. Steam locomotives belched black smoke and worked alongside their diesel upstarts, but by the end of the war, it was clear that diesels had prevailed over steam by every measure of efficiency, moving 100-car trains 500 miles without a stop and often running 10,000 miles per month. During this intense period of national mobilization, revenue train-miles on the Santa Fe jumped from 40.9 million in 1938 to 70.7 million in 1945. Steam couldn’t have done it alone.7

  After World War II had been fought and won, “the greatest generation” raced homeward to embrace a new level of prosperity and mobility. Everyone wanted a new automobile, but America’s railroads also responded with family travel advertisements and a renewed commitment to streamliners.

  The Super Chief once again became a mainstay of the traveling elite. It even had a role in numerous movies and books, including Frederic Wakeman’s early postwar novel The Hucksters. Racy for its time, The Hucksters entwined the glitz and glamour of high-powered advertising agencies with a torrid bicoastal love affair. Few things were certain, but in one paragraph Wakeman captured what the Santa Fe’s prize train had come to mean to a war-weary world.

  “One thing about the Chief,” Wakeman wrote, “east or westbound, it never changes. That’s what a man likes about this extra-fare, extra exclusive, super-deluxe commuter special that makes Toots Shor’s handy to Romanoff’s, that connects Sunset Boulevard with Wall Street. The Chief never changes. A man can depend on the Chief. It’s one of the few enduring values left in this unstable old world.”8

  Robert R. Young took the hucksterism of Wakeman’s novel to the extreme in 1946 when he launched a public crusade for coast-to-coast Pullman car service. Young was the freewheeling president of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad, and some joked that his initials really stood for “RailRoad” Young.

  Young firmly believed that the railroad industry was not doing enough to plan for the postwar years, particularly new competition from airlines. Young waged a contest to control the Pullman Company, which effectively ruled the nation’s passenger service because it dictated where and when its cars were assigned. This frequently meant that passengers changing railroads for transcontinental travel through the mid-continent hubs of Chicago, St. Louis, and New Orleans were forced to change Pullman cars even if it was the middle of the night. Young decreed there was a better way.

  The most famous salvo of his campaign was an advertisement placed in national newspapers that proclaimed, “A Hog Can Cross the Country Without Changing Trains—But YOU Can’t!” It showed a totally satisfied pig standing at the door of a boxcar smoking a cigar while a distraught family labeled “John Q. Traveler” looked on in disbelief.9

  Young’s “hog ad” got repeated national attention, and while he ultimately failed to control Pullman, the company made it easier to ticket coast-to-coast service. Accordingly, the Santa Fe teamed up with both the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central to hook through cars from the Broadway Limited and the 20th Century Limited onto the Chief for delivery to Los Angeles and back.

  Coast-to-coast cars made publicity, but at the core of the postwar rail travel boom in the West was an innovation sparked by a ride taken during the last days of the war. Cyrus R. Osborn, the head of the General Motors Electromotive Division, happened to be in the cab of a Denver and Rio Grande diesel as it was passing through the depths of Colorado’s spectacular Glenwood Canyon.

  “A lot of people would pay $500 for this fireman’s seat from Chicago to San Francisco if they knew what they could see from it,” Osborn remarked to the engineer. “Why wouldn’t it be possible,” he mused, “to build some sort of glass covered room in the roof of a car so passengers
could get this kind of a view?” Later that week, Osborn sketched out a rough design for a series of vista dome observation cars.10

  Streamliners pulling sleek, stainless-steel vista domes set the stage for one last round of railroad rivalry in the American Southwest. Once again, the competition between California and Chicago focused on the Denver and Rio Grande, the Union Pacific, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe.

  Despite competition to the north and south, the Denver and Rio Grande teamed up with the Burlington east of Denver and the Western Pacific west of Ogden. The three roads ordered six identical train sets and launched the California Zephyr between Chicago and Oakland in March 1949. Billed “the most talked-about train in America,” its service was impeccable and Rocky Mountain trout the specialty of the dining car.11

  The Union Pacific made a strong postwar run at both the California Zephyr and the Santa Fe’s competition after it put the City of Los Angeles and the City of San Francisco into daily service in 1947. The City streamliners soon became “Domeliners,” with the introduction of the only domed dining cars ever put into operation.12

  Throughout these years, the Super Chief was still the train to be seen on and the train to beat. It reverted to its prewar schedule of thirty-nine hours and forty-five minutes on June 2, 1946, and never looked back. By 1948, the Santa Fe was operating both the Super Chief and El Capitan on a daily schedule on that timetable. Onboard the Super Chief, there was almost unparalleled postwar luxury, from the sweeping vistas viewed from the Pleasure Dome lounge to the private dining of the Turquoise Room. Advertisements hailed the dome as “the top of the Super, next to the stars.”

  Romance, both with one’s companion and with the landscape the train traversed, remained a huge selling point. Southwest-style advertisements continued to be a Santa Fe staple, including one of the most famous, a full-color, full-page painting by Hernando Villa of the Meeting of the Chiefs—one a Native American on horseback and the other a warbonnet-painted locomotive racing across the Southwest.13

  Just as it had before the war, Santa Fe management encouraged close ties to Hollywood’s booming motion picture industry. The Super Chief made a special stop in Pasadena to allow Hollywood names to board or disembark without the crush of the Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal. This didn’t keep the press from covering the event—usually with the star’s concurrence, as he or she now was the acknowledged celebrity of the smaller Pasadena station.

  Over the years, the Super Chief’s high-profile passengers included Humphrey Bogart and Lauren Bacall, Desi Arnaz and Lucille Ball, and Richard Burton and Elizabeth Taylor. The train also carried Ronald Reagan in his Hollywood days and, later, former presidents Harry Truman and Dwight Eisenhower.

  But people remained only a small portion of the Santa Fe’s overall load. When Santa Fe management now thought of speed, it was not only the Super Chief, but also its core Los Angeles-to-Chicago freight service. With continued upgrades to roadbed and equipment, freight times decreased to the point that the road introduced the Super C, a hotshot freight that bettered the Super Chief schedule and moved long trains of piggyback truck trailers and containers between Los Angeles and Chicago on a schedule of thirty-four and one-half hours.

  As the Sunbelt of Southern California, Arizona, and Texas boomed during the 1950s, the Santa Fe grew right along with it. In the summer of 1955, the longest stretch of new track to be laid in the United States in twenty years—some 49 miles—was built from the Santa Fe’s Chicago-to-Galveston line at Fort Worth directly east to Dallas, eliminating the original roundabout route. That same year, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe system grew to 13,073 miles and was ranked as the country’s longest railroad.14

  The polished sophistication of the Super Chief firmly embedded the Santa Fe in the psyche of the American traveling public. But it was the heavy freight traffic between California and the Midwest during World War II and afterward that confirmed the Santa Fe’s continuing dominance at the top of the heap of America’s transcontinental railroads. Not only had the railroad become a key transcontinental connection, but mushrooming trade with Japan, China, and the Pacific Rim made it a vital land bridge in the growing global economy as well.

  From a dream on the Kansas prairie, through the fights for strategic gateways, two world wars, and the booms and busts of economic cycles, the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe had proven its staying power and inexorably entwined itself with the American Southwest. Wherever one was bound, it was indeed possible to ride Santa Fe all the way.

  Afterword

  American Railroads in the Twenty-first Century

  On the morning of Saturday, January 12, 1957, the Santa Fe’s vaunted Super Chief and stalwart El Capitan left Dearborn Station in Chicago westbound as usual. But there was one major difference. They were no longer two separate trains but a combined consist. Due to declining passenger traffic, the Santa Fe had consolidated the schedules of its two crack streamliners into one train. Its published schedule was still thirty-nine and three-quarters hours, but as the nation looked ahead toward new frontiers, this suddenly seemed terribly slow.

  Overhead, new Boeing 707 jets were beginning to whisk Hollywood stars as well as ordinary folks across what was once a contested empire in less than five hours. On that raw winter’s day, few paused to notice that the moment marked the beginning of the end for the nation’s premier transcontinental passenger trains.

  Within a few years, the entire American railroad system was in chaos and disrepair. The once-proud streamliners of the Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and other roads had been ingloriously swept into Amtrak, which in its early form often seemed more of a graveyard caretaker than a public conveyance. The bankruptcy of the vaunted Penn Central merger was taken as gospel that bigger was not always better and that bigger certainly did not ensure profitability.

  Out west, the successors to Harriman’s Union Pacific, Huntington’s Southern Pacific, and Colonel Holliday’s Santa Fe hung on to their freight business and pondered their fate. The Denver and Rio Grande Western proved that it still had a feisty streak by opting out of Amtrak and operating the Zephyr on its own between Denver and Salt Lake City.

  The eventual demise of the Zephyr in 1983 came with more bad news for the Denver and Rio Grande Western. The Union Pacific acquired the Rio Grande’s friendly competition at both ends of its system: the Missouri Pacific to the east and the Western Pacific to the west, and left General Palmer’s legacy rather isolated.

  Then an event that would have been unthinkable to Collis P. Huntington and William Barstow Strong occurred. In 1984 the Southern Pacific and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe attempted to merge. The Interstate Commerce Commission (ICC) denied the union as monopolistic two years later, but a trend had been set. Bigger might indeed be better. (The ICC itself would be phased out in 1995.)

  Meanwhile, in 1985, a Denver oil tycoon, Philip Anschutz, acquired the struggling Denver and Rio Grande Western. Three years later, the direction of Anschutz’s thinking was revealed when his Rio Grande holding company also acquired the Southern Pacific as it staggered out of its attempted merger with the Santa Fe.

  Faced with this combined competition in the Southwest and the Union Pacific’s growing network across the nation’s midsection, the Santa Fe went shopping for another partner. Colonel Holliday’s road found it in the Burlington Northern, and the merger of the two roads into the Burlington Northern Santa Fe was finalized in 1995. The western railroad merger mania was completed the following year when Philip Anschutz sold the combined Southern Pacific–Denver and Rio Grande Western system to the Union Pacific.

  The immediate casualty of this consolidation of the West’s railroads into two corporate giants was the Royal Gorge route through the Rockies. The Union Pacific chose to run most of its freight through Wyoming and relegate the Moffat Tunnel line to regional coal trains and the Amtrak route of the reborn California Zephyr. The line through the Royal Gorge and over Tennessee Pass that the Rio Grande and Santa Fe had fought over so hard s
aw its last train in 1997.

  These titanic railroad mergers—a situation that occurred in the East as well with the emergence of the Norfolk Southern and CSX behemoths—left rail fans and historians mourning a disappearing past. But nostalgia for logos, paint schemes, and train names aside, the first decade of the twenty-first century has been incredibly good for railroads.

  Energy demands for coal, cross-country container shipments, just-in-time deliveries, and the strains of higher fuel prices and growing air congestion have all given railroads greater market share. Even Amtrak has become an increasingly pleasant way to travel. And just when it seemed that the days of railroad empire builders like Huntington, Palmer, Strong, and Ripley were a thing of the past, financial guru Warren Buffett and Berkshire Hathaway made a bullish bet on America’s rails by acquiring the Burlington Northern Santa Fe in 2010.

  Railroads, it seems, still have a very important role to play in American commerce. Nowhere is that more obvious than in the American Southwest. Drive I-40 across Arizona and New Mexico, and you are rarely out of sight of a Burlington Northern Santa Fe freight hurrying west or east. The Los Angeles-to-Chicago corridor that was so fiercely contested for more than a quarter century remains one of the most heavily traveled rail routes in North America; and the railroad that first led the way west from Topeka toward Santa Fe continues to lead America into the future.

  Acknowledgments