If Burlington hadn’t thought of it first, some other railroad, probably the Santa Fe, would have combined Diesel power with stainless steel to make a streamliner that was so different from all previous passenger trains that it woke up America. Still, in 1933 such ideas were inconceivable, and it took a creative engineer like Ralph Budd to put together Diesels, stainless steel, air conditioning, and everything else that made the Zephyrs special, even including the name Zephyr, which Budd thought of when reading Canterbury Tales.
Click image to download a 22.5-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.
Budd retired from the Burlington in 1949 and it seems like all that creativity went with him. The Burlington was still gung ho for passenger trains and its Zephyrs, but you wouldn’t know it reading this timetable. Continue reading