# The Passenger Train, 1954



## Amtrak839 (Jul 26, 2009)

Nice look at how train travel used to be. Kid appears to be riding the Super Chief from Chicago to Lamy.


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## Guest (Jul 26, 2009)

Great Find! Really enjoyed it


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## Bill Haithcoat (Jul 26, 2009)

Amtrak839 said:


>




This is neat. That could have been me. I would have been about his age in 1954.

Actually the train was the Chief, not the Super Chief. I happened to catch the track sign at the station in Chicago. (which, incidentally was Dearborn Station, not Union, if they filmed it correctly)

There were several "Chief" trains on the Atchison Topeka and Santa Fe. Like the Super Chief, San Francisco Chief, Texas Chief, Kansas City Chief, just plain Chief, etc.The Chief was almost as nice of a train as the Super Chief, but it did not get as much publicity.

The movie just said the train was going to California, but it was specifically going to LA.

Did you notice the lunch counter lounge where the kid chose to have some of his meals rather than going each time to the more formal and more expensive diner.

Notice the old fashioned chalkboard type bulletin board at the station. Way before the electronic bulletin board we are used to now.

This is a lightweight stainless steel (unpainted) streamliner on a relatively fast schedule and would have been considered a leader of the pack in its day. But for that matter, many Santa Fe trains were like that.

This is the generation of equipment which immediately preceded the amfleets, viewliners and superliners Amtrak eventually built. A small percent of such equipment eventually was to be designated "heritage" by Amtrak. This is not your old wild west open window shoot 'em up steam engine equipment.

Our present day Southwest Chief is more in the lineage of the Super Chief, than the Chief, the train shown in this video.


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## Bob Dylan (Jul 27, 2009)

Amtrak839 said:


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Enjoyed the video,If Im not mistaken its the Chief, AT &SF also ran the Super Chief and The Capitan,

I never rode any but remeber seeing them pass by when visiting my grandfathers friends that worked for

Santa Fe in the 40s and 50s!What Chicagp Station was he leaving from and is the Lamy station still the same,

ive yet to ride the SWC?


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## Amtrak839 (Jul 27, 2009)

Bill Haithcoat said:


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Thanks for the info. I didn't realize there were so many "Chief" trains. I saw the sign too, but when I went to post I thought "Super Chief" just because I've heard the most about that one.


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## zephyr17 (Jul 27, 2009)

Amtrak839 said:


>


It is a mix, to be expected of a film of this nature.

At the station, the kid boards AT&SF 19 which is the westbound Chief, based on the platform signboard. During the train walk through, we see a Pleasure Dome, which ran only on the Super Chief. You can tell by the flat paned dome and singe parlor type seats on each side. Also, the Chief did not get any dome cars until the El Capitan was re-equipped the Hi-Level consist in 1956, when the Chief got the El Cap's "Big Dome" full length domes. The Budd Big Domes were VERY different from the P-S flat pane short domes pictured here. The diner shown when "dinner is being served" is the Super Chief. You can tell by the Mimbreneo china, which was ONLY used on the Super Chief. The Super Chief NEVER carried a lunch counter as the Super, although in the late 60s, if 17&18 were separated into separate sections, the first section (Super) would sometimes carry single level coaches and a lunch counter to keep the coach pax out of the Super Chief. However, according to my 1/61 official guide, the Chief did not carry a lunch counter car, so I doubt that is accurate for either train.

The chair cars were the delux chair cars used on both the Chief and El Capitan (before 1956), but in 1954, the Super was exclusively Pullman. The combination of the El Capitan (extra fare coach) with the Super Chief did not happen until 1958 and this is dated 1954. By 1958, the El Cap would have had Hi-Levels, which the coaches shown are emphatically not.

The last shot was the Super Chief eastbound out of Lamy, where the kid obviously boarded westbound in Chicago.

It was really fun to see, but don't take it as gospel about one train. Consider it as a commentary on Santa Fe's fine long-distance passenger service in general.

BTW - anybody else remember the EB Encyclopedia Britannica 16mm films from elementary school? I know I saw a lot of them.


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## jphjaxfl (Jul 27, 2009)

The Chief was a two day one night out train from Chicago to Los Angeles departing Chicago around 9AM and arriving LA around 11PM the second day. Compared to the Super Chief and EL Capitain which left Chicago around 7PM and arrive LA around 8:30AM the third day. I lived in Peoria, Il in the 1950s and we would often go to North Chillicothe which was about 15 miles north of Peoria to watch the parade of Santa Fe Streamliners. We also rode the Pekin Express which is shown on the Dearborn Station Train Board. It was a local motor car that ran on the SF mainline to fom Dearborn Station to Streator and then down the Pekin branch to the city of Pekin which is 15 miles south of Peoria. Dearborn was the neatest Chicago Station with a diversity of passenger trains. You had from the Santa Fe, Wabash and C&EI Streamliners to ancient C&WI Indiana commuter trains, the weary old Erie that had some older equipment, the Monon uniqued streamlined passenger cars converted from Army Hospital cars to the Grand Trunk's Canadian National cars that were pulled by steam locomotives for longer than most American Railroads. Its interesting that the young man in the film gets out of the cab at Chicago Union Station to board the Chief at Dearborn. That was quite a walk!


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## Bill Haithcoat (Jul 27, 2009)

zephyr17 said:


>




Thanks Zephyr 17 for the additional correction tweaking. I kind of wondered about the domes but did not investigate further, it being bedtime, etc.

Question: Was the station scene that of Dearborn? And yes, the films seem familiar, about all kinds of topics, werent they?


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## Bill Haithcoat (Jul 27, 2009)

jphjaxfl said:


> The Chief was a two day one night out train from Chicago to Los Angeles departing Chicago around 9AM and arriving LA around 11PM the second day. Compared to the Super Chief and EL Capitain which left Chicago around 7PM and arrive LA around 8:30AM the third day. I lived in Peoria, Il in the 1950s and we would often go to North Chillicothe which was about 15 miles north of Peoria to watch the parade of Santa Fe Streamliners. We also rode the Pekin Express which is shown on the Dearborn Station Train Board. It was a local motor car that ran on the SF mainline to fom Dearborn Station to Streator and then down the Pekin branch to the city of Pekin which is 15 miles south of Peoria. Dearborn was the neatest Chicago Station with a diversity of passenger trains. You had from the Santa Fe, Wabash and C&EI Streamliners to ancient C&WI Indiana commuter trains, the weary old Erie that had some older equipment, the Monon uniqued streamlined passenger cars converted from Army Hospital cars to the Grand Trunk's Canadian National cars that were pulled by steam locomotives for longer than most American Railroads. Its interesting that the young man in the film gets out of the cab at Chicago Union Station to board the Chief at Dearborn. That was quite a walk!



Looks like you and I were posting at the same time. You verified that the station shown was Union after all, even though it should have been Dearborn.I just watched the video for a second time this morning and I see the details I missed the first time, such as that clearly being Union.

Living in Chattanooga, Dearborn was my usual approach to Chicago via C&EI's Georgian and Dixie Flyer.

Though the Georgian's timekeeping became a problem in later years, I never had to worry about making an eastbound connection from Santa Fe to the Georgian.

Not sure if I scarcely ever actually saw the outside of Dearborn as I would either be shutteled to a Parmalee bus or else change to another train in the same station.


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## NativeSon5859 (Jul 27, 2009)

That was a great video. Thanks for posting, Bill.


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## Bill Haithcoat (Jul 27, 2009)

NativeSon5859 said:


> That was a great video. Thanks for posting, Bill.


Thanks but actually it was Amtrak 839 who posted.


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## bam (Aug 9, 2009)

Fascinating! My 1954 train trip was on the West Coast Champion from New York to Bradenton for a week's vacation with my father, mother, aunt and two brothers on Anna Maria Island. Western trips would come later in 1955.


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## MikefromCrete (Aug 9, 2009)

That was a great film. Reminds of those shorts they used to show in school. The exterior station scene in Chicago is that of Union Station. The boy and his father are entering through the portion of the station torn down by the 1960's and replaced by an office building on top and the "basement" train station. The interior shots are of Dearborn Station. Dearborn had a great second floor waiting room with a big picture window that overlooked the station tracks. Dearborn had a unique set of railroads _ the fabled Santa Fe and its legendary western trains, the C&EI and its southbound trains (which stopped in my home town of Chicago Heights), the Wabash and its domed "corridor" trains to St. Louis, the Grand Trunk Western with its old-style CN painted cars and steam locomotives which ran late into the diesel period, the Monon, with its down-home friendly Hoosier trains, the Erie, the third most favored way to get from Chicago to New York in the old days, and the C&WI with its commuter trains to Dolton. Since I would ride the C&EI from Chicago Heights to Dearborn (including that rare RDC), I always considered Dearborn to be my "home" station in Chicago.

The train shown in the film was basically The Chief. The dome car was the Pleasure Dome used only of the Santa Fe and the only "short" domes used by the Santa Fe, the others were full length, "big" domes.

As a youngster, I rode the Grand Canyon from Chicago to California. My dad was a railroad employee and was eligible to ride free any where. He had to pay for Pullman accommodations We were, however, restricted to certain trains and the pass travel was forbidden on the Chiefs. The Grand Canyon's diner had a lunch counter and four to six tables which seem adequate for the ridership, which included a lot of people traveling short distances since the Grand Canyon stopped everywhere.


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## Green Maned Lion (Aug 9, 2009)

Santa Fe ran many, many trains Chicago to LA. Numerous trains departing each day. There were three trains that were "Extra-fare" trains- they cost extra money to ride them because they were faster and more luxurious than the normal trains. At that time, the ICC regulated railfares very strictly, and the price of a ticket to L.A. was X, the allowed premium for a roomette was Y, and they could charge you X and Y, not a penny more or less. The only exception to this rule was if there was more than one train on the line serving the points.

If the I.C.C. determined you were adequately serving your line with regular trains, they would allow you to run trains at extra-fare- they charged a premium just to be on that particular train. All the other rates were as per regulation. It was the extra-fare trains, and almost all "all-Pullman" trains were extra-fare, that we now recognize as famous. The Super Chief, the Twentieth Century Limited, the City of Los Angeles, the Broadway Limited, and so on.

Santa Fe ran three extra-fare trains CHI-LAX, as I mentioned:

_El Capitan_: This train was unique and a pioneer of many things. Among them was that this train was all-chair. No sleepers. No parlours. Just coaches. It had nice lounges, and it had a nice, if reasonably priced, diner. It ran with the same carding as the Super Chief, and they usually ran fairly close together -In the last years of Santa Fe passenger operations, occasionally the El Capitan would run combined with the Super Chief, in fact. The passengers were strictly seperated- sort of like the Panama Limited and Magnolia Star. Its separate names and occasional combining continued well into Amtrak. The Super Chief still ran alone under Amtrak a good percent of the time, the El Capitan proceeding it by a moment or two on the tracks. Officially, they had the same schedule on Amtrak.

Another El Capitan innovation, later in the train's life, were the Hi-level coaches, the basis for the Superliners. 5 Hi-Levels still ply Amtrak's rails: the Pacific Parlour Cars.

_Chief_: This train was extra-fare, and all-pullman. It was discontinued sometime in the sixties. It was originally a heavyweight train, and prior to the Super Chief, it was the flagship of the proud Atchison Topeka, and Santa Fe. The Chief ran once again for a brief period under Amtrak, providing a regular fare, second frequency train during peak season on the CHI-LAX routing.

_Super Chief_: This was, perhaps, the most famous streamliner of them all. It was the last train to run extra-fare, and the last train to run all-sleeper. Not only did it run that way to A-day. It ran that way past A-day. It ran Extra-fare under Amtrak during the '72 peak season, running a slight extra-fare to the Chief. It was all-Pullman until Amtrak did some cost cutting and combined the service cars for the Super Chief and El Capitan in about '73. Not long after, Santa Fe informed them that they were not going to disgrace the name any further- and the train was renamed Southwest Limited. It was not until the Superliner upgrade that Santa Fe compromised and allowed Amtrak to rename it the Southwest Chief.


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## Shanghai (Aug 10, 2009)

My parents took the El Capitan from Phoenix in the early 70's. They were stuck near Williams Junction without air conditioning and electrical power for

several hours in the dead of summer. As I recall from my father, within a couple of hours, all of the drinks were exhausted and the coaches were hot

boxes. I don't think he ever rode a train again!!


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## Green Maned Lion (Aug 10, 2009)

Shanghai said:


> My parents took the El Capitan from Phoenix in the early 70's. They were stuck near Williams Junction without air conditioning and electrical power forseveral hours in the dead of summer. As I recall from my father, within a couple of hours, all of the drinks were exhausted and the coaches were hot
> 
> boxes. I don't think he ever rode a train again!!


I'm going to bet you that this was Amtrak's El Capitan and not the Santa Fe's.


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## PRR 60 (Aug 10, 2009)

For the old Santa Fe, the extra fare trains were the Super Chief (all Pullman), the El Capitan (all Coach), and the San Francisco Chief (only applied to Coach). The extra fares Chicago to California ranged from $2 to $7.50 each way, per passenger.

By 1963 there were just five Santa Fe trains Chicago to California, and even that is misleading since the Super Chief and El Capitan ran combined at least in the off season. I rode the El Cap in 1963, and it was a nice ride. One interesting idea was the ability of coach passengers to pre-pay for meals. In 1963, $10 got you free meals in the diner Chicago to Los Angeles (did not include the Super Chief). That sounds cheap, but inflated to 2009, that's $70 per person.


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