Iron Horses, page 36
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 his 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.
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
