Here’s a 1957 timetable from the railroad that started the Dixie Flyer, the train described in yesterday’s post. By 1957, that train was still operating, but it consisted solely of coaches — no food service cars — which must not have been too comfortable for a train that took more than 40 hours to get from one end to the other (Chicago to Miami).
Click image to download a 4.6-MB PDF of this 8-page timetable.
The main train on the route in the 1950s was the streamlined Dixieland, which had sleeping cars, coaches, a diner, and an observation-lounge car. This train took only about 24 hours to get to Jacksonville and another 7-1/2 hours to get to Miami.
In 1957, the route seemed less convoluted than in 1910, involving the Chicago & Eastern Illinois, Louisville & Nashville, Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis, Atlantic Coast Line, and Florida East Coast for the Jacksonville-Miami part. The only real change from the 1910 route was that the train followed Atlantic Coast Line rails from Atlanta to Jacksonville, rather than Central of Georgia/Southern Railroad. Except at the extremities, that kept the train entirely in the ACL family since ACL owned L&N and L&N owned NC&StL.
In Jacksonville, Dixieland passengers could change to an Atlantic Coast Line train to the west coast of Florida (including Orlando, Tampa, and Sarasota), but there were no through cars to those cities. The schedule allowed 20 minutes for this change southbound but 2-1/2 hours northbound, which is odd as the train was more likely to be late coming from the north than from the south.
The Dixie Flyer wasn’t even the secondary train on the route. This was the Georgian, a coach-and-Pullman train that went between Chicago and Atlanta. Another train in the timetable was the City of Memphis between Nashville and Memphis.
For some reason, the equipment listing includes a train called the Tennessean between Nashville, Knoxville, and Bristol, Tennessee. Yet there is no schedule for this train and neither Knoxville nor Bristol are on the NC&StL. In fact, the Tennessean was a Southern Railway train that went from Washington to Memphis via Bristol and Chattanooga; what today’s timetable is saying is that the NC&StL had a car from Nashville to Chattanooga that continued to Bristol on the Tennessean.