Does anyone have photos of the Budd Zephyrs - the original stainless-steel streamliners? Burlington had a number of these trains as did other roads. The Flying Yankee of the Boston and Maine RR was famous on the East Coast.

I am interested as my father had a hand in building every one of them - first as an electrician and then as a foreman. He became the manager of final assembly of the Budd railcar division after WWII.

If anyone has any photos of a Budd Zephyr streamliner, I would be thrilled to see them.

Thank you.

Don

If you take a road trip to St. Louis they have one at the Museum of Transportation. General Pershing Zephyr - St. Louis Museum of Transportatation - Last of its Kind on Waymarking.com

kjfishman

Thanks for the heads up! I will be in the St Louis suburbs this summer to visit my daughter and her coming twins (my first grandchildren). I will definitely head out to the Museum of Transportation.

Just imagine that this beautiful thing was built in the 1930s. It is as elegant today as it was then. I had a Lionel Burlington Zephyr when I was a kid. I think my brother has it now.

Thanks again.

In 1970, I saw a string of old passenger cars as I was driving through Denver, CO. Only after my slides came back from the processor, did I realize this was an early Zephyr car; you can see that this car is "articulated" - it shares a truck with the car to its right - which was a hallmark of the first groups of Zephyr train-sets to have the locomotive distinctly separate from the cars. I eventually discovered that these cars were the original Denver Zephyr train-set of 1936, which were moved to the Texas Zephyr in 1957 when a new set of cars was built for the Denver Zephyr {yes, I know this is a mediocre image, but I didn't have much choice of where to stand when taking it - in fact I feel fortune to have gotten anything at all}






This second picture dates back to 1973, when I joined my parents and brother for what turned out to be my last family vacation with them {I was a grad student at the time}. We visited the Edaville Railroad, which provided a ride through cranberry bogs behind a small steam locomotive. Over time, Edaville went in and out of bankruptcy at least once, so I don't know if they still have the Flying Yankee. In the Flying Yankee, like all of the first batch of zephyr-like trains, the first unit was a combination locomotive and some kind of head-end passenger car {the little blonde kid is my second brother, who was born when I was a sophomore in college}




I've been looking for, and not finding yet, a picture I took in 1972 of a Zephyr train-set which was then at a fairgrounds in Iowa. That particular slide is really mediocre {badly over-exposed} because the weather was really awful. I would like to find it, though, because that particular train-set has become kind of a "Flying Dutchman" - apparently at some point it was sold to a junk dealer, and people believe that it had not been salvaged, but no one has been quite sure where it actually is.


BTW - the very first Zephyr, now called the Pioneer Zephyr, has been on display for many years at the Museum of Science and Industry in Chicago. The last time I was there, which was roughly 30 years ago, it was parked outside next to the U-505 submarine. My understanding is that they built a new parking garage, and the Pioneer Zephyr is now inside it at the first basement level.

Google "Chicago Museum of Science and Industry Zephyr" and you will see a lot of images of the one that is on their property. Thirty years ago it was outside and easy to photograph however the weather elements in Chicago were taking their toll on this as well as the U-505 submarine. Now the Zephyr is inside and more difficult to photograph but it is open for visitors. They probably have the most comprehensive amount of information on these trains. I forgot what serial number that one is as I have slept a few times since then. Further research and you will see a few poor videos shot at the museum showing the restored inside of the train. I have a local friend who also has an interest in the Zephyrs and that is what is on his car license plate.

@Aggiedad: a Budd but not a Zephyr down here in South Australia. Scroll down about half way through this post on my photo blog:

National-railway-museum-part-3/

The country these Budds ran into was remote and very sparsely populated. Marree was originally established as a rail head to receive cattle driven (as in mustered by horse) hundreds of miles from the arid country in the centre of Australia. The railway to Marree is now long gone and I doubt Marree is much more than a pub, garage and a few houses now.

Did your father have a hand in any of these Budds?

"Easy to photograph" is a relative term. I took several of it over the years, but nothing I was satisfied with {having sliver train quite close to a relatively high silver fence was a problem for me}

Back in the late 1970's we had a photo session event at the Museum and we got onto the top of the tender of the steam locomotive that was there near the end of the Zephyr and that allowed us to get a long shot of the train. Then from the front if you backup up all the way against the U-505 and got down low you could get much of the consist in if you used a wide angle lens. Some of the guys using 15mm lenses did OK. The best I had at that time was my 35-70mm zoom and it was just OK. I do not know how much room there is now in it's present location as it has been about 35 years since I last saw that train or the U-505 for that matter. Sad that it will never again see the light of day.

Great photos all!

Great stuff grabbing the shot of the articulated cars. With those cars sharing a truck, it just made that train seem like a silver monolith.

Thanks for that heads-up. Will definitely make the time to get there and see it. Dad worked on every Zephyr made, so I am tickled to see any of them. I really believe they are the most beautiful trains ever built. To look at one and then reflect that it was designed and built 80 years ago, gives you a great appreciation of the elegance of it. Of course being diesel it was completely different looking from everything else. Many railroads started putting sheetmetal bodywork over their passenger steam engines to try and look as good.

Great stuff! Yes, Dad would have laid hands on these. Prior to WWII he was the electrical superintendent for the railcar department, so everything electrical would have been his responsibility. After the war when the company returned to manufacturing railcars, he was manager of final assembly. No car went out the door without his okay.

I worked there summers while in college (early 60s) and worked on some Union Pacific dome cars and cars for the Philadelphia Subway System. There was a time that Budd would not have built a commuter car, but the plane was starting to take over and railcar sales were continually diminishing. By the early 60s Budd was down from 6 (or 8) railcar production lines to 3. Where the other lines had been was turned into auto chassis production.

Dad retired in 1970. His final project was the first high-speed train for the Boston-New York-Philadelphia-Baltimore-Washington run (the Bo-Wash corridor). He tested the prototype, but never built the production version.

Thanks to all for the photos and information.

This might be the 'forerunner' to the Zephyrs???

1934 Brings the new streamlined Chrysler Airflow and Union Pacific’s M-10000 train
The Chrysler Airflow was the first vehicle to use streamlining to make the car as slippy as possible for things like fuel efficiency and speed. The M-10000 was the first streamlined passenger train that also used an internal combustion engine for power.

You're right!

The M-10000 beat the Zephyr to the track by 2 months (Feb. 25, 1934 vs. Apr. 9, 1934). However the Zephyr entered regular service almost three months before the M-10000 (Nov. 11, 1934 vs Jan. 31, 1935).

The M-10000 used a gasoline engine and cars from Pullman. There were at least two M-10000s - maybe more; I don't know. They remained in service for just about 10 years.

The Zephyr was all stainless steel with a GM diesel engine. It set a speed record for travel between Denver and Chicago when it made a 1,015-mile non-stop run in 13 hours 5 minutes at an average speed of 77 mph. There was one section of the run where it reached a speed of 112.5 mph.

BTW - Great photo of the M-10000 next to a Chrysler Airflow, a car that was a bit ahead of its time (like post-war Studebakers). It is interesting to see the resemblance.

I ran across these photos and thought you might like to see them...

Chip

Interesting photos of times gone by.

I did finally find this slide, and judicious use of gimp's various controls - contrast, brightness, curves mostly - got the image into a fairly good condition.




If you look at the pictures posted by ChipB, the train in the upper left picture consists of four units while the train in the lower left picture consists of just three units. The lower left picture shows the original configuration, which is what the Museum of Science and Industry has. Car #500, which was added to make the upper left configuration, was stored with this train in Iowa, but unfortunately I didn't think to take a picture of it also. Since the train was articulated, they added/removed only one truck when they added/removed the one car, so in Iowa #500 was propped up on a pile of ties {sort of like using cement blocks to support a car if you remove/steal one of the wheels}.