About a year ago, I posted a 1928 Great Northern Railway brochure advertising air service between Minneapolis and Chicago. This potentially saved passengers aboard the eastbound Oriental Limited several hours of their journey. Since the Pennsylvania Railroad didn’t start joint air/rail service until 1929, I suggested that Great Northern was the true pioneer in such service.
Click image to download a 228-KB PDF of this letter.
This brochure, which I found at the Minnesota History Center, sounded to me like something that would come from the mind of Ralph Budd, the railway’s innovative president who effectively co-founded both Greyhound and Trailways lines. He seemed to be less worried about competition than about how the railroads could adapt new technologies that would save money and improve service for their customers. In that post, however, I noted that I didn’t find any files at the history center suggesting what Budd thought of this program.
Recently, I found this letter on the Smithsonian web site. It says that Charles Lindbergh stayed at Louis Hill’s home overnight in an effort, apparently on behalf of Northwest Airways, to persuade the railway to try out the joint air service. Lindbergh also apparently wanted to make the same offer to other railroads.
“I could not find that the other railways have shown any interest in aviation,” wrote Budd. Rather than try to have a joint program with, say, the Milwaukee Road, Budd and Hill decided “it would be best to go ahead and deal with it for the Great Northern rather than to try to do so jointly, as joint agreements are pretty hard to negotiate.” If other railroads want to make similar arrangements, he said, “we, of course, have no thought of interfering in any way with other lines doing exactly the same thing that we propose to do.”
In what may have been an effort to keep GN’s plans secret, Budd’s letter never actually says what “we propose to do.” But that was made clear in the brochure I presented last year, which specifically says that “Colonel Lindbergh is connected to” the joint air-rail program. In the 1930s, the Interstate Commerce Commission prohibited the railroads from owning airlines, which may have shut down experiments of the kind pioneered by the Great Northern in 1928.