technical insight
The Zephyr Pioneer - Take a train ride back to the future
Anyone watching a 1920 Model T automobile jerking and backfiring down the road would find it hard to believe that the object of so much derision would one day threaten the very existence of the railroad as a passenger carrier. But that is exactly what happened
I n 1924, the Burlington Railroad carried a whopping 18-million passengers. Only five years later, as the automobile’s popularity increased, that figure dropped to 13.8-million. And by 1933, amid the Great Depression, only 7-million travellers rode the rails. Passenger revenues followed a parallel descent. To the amazement of many, the railroad, with a tradition as grand as any in America, was slowly being replaced by an army of 30 mph automobiles. Luckily for the railroad industry and the travelling public, a figure appeared on the scene in the early 1930s, with the knowledge and determination to build a train to meet the demands of the 20th century traveller. His name was Ralph Budd, and he became president of the Burlington Railroad in 1932. By the time Budd arrived at Burlington Railroad, the automobile had edged out trains as the favoured means of transportation, even for long distance travel. Budd was among the first to admit that “the loss of railway passenger traffic during the last decade has been caused by a shift from the railways to the highway, and not from a decline in
total travel. The total passenger one-mile units of travel have increased.” Budd reasoned that since automobile engineers had derailed the passenger train, they could be the ones to put it back on the tracks. Such thinking implied the use of a kind of automotive internal combustion power instead of the steam locomotive, upon which the industry had relied for a century. Stainless steel enters the rail transport industry One of Budd’s first moves was to visit the Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company in Philadelphia. Ralph Budd was not related to the company which had been the first to produce all-steel automobile wheels and the all-steel automobile body. Now it was ready to tackle passenger train construction. At the Budd Co. plant, the Burlington president examined a test rail car body, incorporating several radical innovations, including a gas engine and rubber tyres. Budd
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Issue 2 – 2024
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