August 1 was the tenth anniversary of the birth of Streamliner Memories. But I took a two-month vacation last year, so today is really the start of this blog’s eleventh year. Up through today, I’ve written just over 3,650 posts and uploaded nearly 5,000 PDFs of railroad documents. During that time, I’ve often noted the inaugural dates of major, pre-Amtrak intercity passenger trains. My list now includes more than 200 trains, though I am missing quite a few.

Inaugural Dates of Named Passenger Trains

The first passenger trains began operating in the United States in the 1830s. As near as I can tell, however, few railroads applied names to their trains before the 1880s, or if they did they were destination-oriented names such as “Pacific Express” (for a westbound train) or “Federal Express” (for a train to Washington, DC).

For example, one source says that in 1873 the Central Pacific ran a train from Oakland to Ogden that it called the Atlantic and Pacific Express. I suspect it was called the Atlantic Express eastbound and Pacific Express westbound. One of the earliest named trains that didn’t have a destination in the name was the New York & New England’s Federal Express, which went between Boston and Washington beginning in 1876.

Instead of distinctive names, railroad timetables identified the class of each train, usually using terms such as “accommodation” (meaning local), “mail” (originally meaning a fast train), and “express” (meaning it didn’t stop as often as an accommodation train). The first named trains were often “limiteds,” meaning they stopped even fewer times than an express. The first trains on Southern Pacific’s sunset route between New Orleans and San Francisco made more than 300 stops; the first express trains on that route still made around 200 stops; the Sunset Limited originally made fewer than 30 stops.

The earliest name on my list is Pennsylvania Railroad’s New York and Chicago Limited. As an all-Pullman train that began operating in 1881, it is considered the first modern limited train. Sometime shortly after that, probably in 1882, the New York Central responded with its own New York-Chicago limited train, which it unoriginally called The Limited.

The Pennsylvania Limited, which replaced the New York and Chicago Limited in 1887, was the first train with vestibules between all of the cars. Some other “firsts” are noted in my spreadsheet.

The list certainly doesn’t have all named passenger trains and the dates for some that it does have are incomplete. For example, the list has the month and year of the first run of the St. Paul road’s Pioneer Limited and Great Northern’s Oriental Limited, but not the exact day. For some other trains, I don’t have the month or the day.

Some trains are included more than once; for example, the original Sunset Limited in 1894, a revived Sunset Limited in 1911, and the streamlined Sunset Limited in 1950. But I am inconsistent about that: the Empire Builder appears three times (1929 inaugural run, 1947 streamlined, and 1951 Mid-Century version) but the North Coast Limited only once.

This list provides historic information about technological advances in passenger trains over about a 70-year period. The next step would be to add a column listing the number of hours each iteration of each train took to get between terminuses. If you can fill any blanks, either missing dates, missing trains, missing updates of trains, or travel times of trains on the list, please feel free to send them to me and I’ll add them to the list, which I’ll periodically update and repost.