After the Blue Bird, the next domeliner to hit the timetables didn’t even have a name. This was the Union Pacific’s Portland-Seattle pool trains, numbers 457 and 458 (the other trains in the pool being owned by Great Northern and Northern Pacific). The UP made these trains into domeliners by buying the General Motors Train of Tomorrow when that train finished its national tour at the end of 1949.
The cars were first added to the Portland-Seattle trains on June 18, 1950. In keeping with the Union Pacific’s “city of” train names, some people have called this train the “City of Seattle,” and some even claim that UP employees informally used that term in the 1950s. However, the name was not used in any timetable.
Dream Cloud, the dome-sleeper, was used as an extra-fare parlor car. The other cars were used as designed, and they were only part of a longer train consisting mainly of ordinary coaches. As hard as it is to believe today, the train was often so long that, when it arrived in Seattle, it had to be broken in two to fit onto the platforms at Union Station, which UP shared with the Milwaukee Road.
Given the historic significance of this train, it is disappointing that there are so few photos of it available. Some small ones can be found on this near-defunct web page. Nor have I ever seen any Union Pacific brochures or other memorabilia related to these cars.
The UP removed the cars from active duty in the early 1960s and (after using at least one car as a training car) unceremoniously sold the cars to scrappers. One of them, Moon Glow, survived in a Pocotello scrapyard to 1990 and was rescued by preservationists in Ogden, Utah. Unfortunately, they lack the funds needed to fully restore it.