The Orange Blossom Special in 1927

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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In January 1927, Seaboard completed its “all Florida” line to Miami and passengers no longer had to ride a “parlor car bus” between West Palm Beach and Miami. Among the passengers on the first train to Miami was Dorothy Walker Bush, mother and grandmother of the U.S. presidents. George H.W. Bush had been born in 1924 but apparently he didn’t get to go on this trip.

Click image to download a 6.1-MB PDF of this 12-page booklet from the Touchton Map Library.

Unlike yesterday’s booklet, this one has several interior illustrations of the train, making it clear that this was truly a first-class limited. Among the services illustrated were the barber shop, valet service, maid-manicure, men’s and women’s showers, dining car, club car, and observation car. The centerfold has a bright yellow-and-blue map of the Florida peninsula (colors now identified with Ukraine’s flag). Continue reading →

The Orange Blossom Special in 1926

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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In 1924, Seaboard extended its Florida line to West Palm Beach, then reached Miami in 1926. Both the ACL and Southern Railway had to share revenues from Miami-bound passengers with the Florida East Coast, but Seaboard now had its own route.

Click image to download a 4.7-MB PDF of this 8-page booklet from the Touchton Map Library.

To celebrate the opening of the route to West Palm Beach, on November 21, 1925, Seaboard introduced a new year-round all-Pullman train, the Orange Blossom Special. This booklet, which was issued on February 1, 1926, “seventy days after this train was put in operation,” includes schedules to St. Petersburg on the West Coast and to West Palm Beach on the East Coast. It also includes schedules of the winter-only, all-Pullman Seaboard Florida Limited. Continue reading →

Southern Withdraws from the Competition

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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Southern responded to the intense competition with the ACL and Seaboard by introducing the Palm Limited, between New York and Jacksonville/St. Augustine, on January 11, 1904. This was the first truly evocative name in the Florida corridor. Though competitively equipped, it took about an hour longer — 26-2/3 hours instead of 25-2/3 — to get from New York to Jacksonville than the ACL or Seaboard trains.

Click image to download a 16.9-MB PDF of this booklet from the Touchton Map Library.

An evocative name wasn’t enough as Southern dropped out of the New York-Florida market after 1915. This may have been due to wartime considerations, but it did not come back after the war. The Southern focused instead on service between Florida and Midwestern cities such as Chicago and Cincinnati. Continue reading →

The Robert Burns Supper

Posted on by January 31, 2023
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I’m interrupting this week’s series of posts on Florida trains to remind you that today is the 264th birthday of Robert Burns, Scotland’s national poet. On this day, Scots traditionally have a Burns supper, a meal that is centered on haggis, which is made from sheep’s heart, liver, and lungs wrapped with oats and spices in a sheep’s stomach. Though it sounds unappetizing, it is supposed to have a “nutty texture and delicious savoury flavour” (as cited by Wikipedia).

Click image to view and download a PDF of this menu from the University of British Columbia Chung collection.

Although Canadian Pacific was headquartered in French-speaking Montreal, its heritage was more Scottish than anything else. Nearly all of its founders, including George Stephen, Donald Smith, Duncan McIntyre, John Kennedy, Richard Angus, and James J. Hill were either born in Scotland or (in Hill’s case) born in Canada to Scottish parents. Continue reading →

The Winter Vacation Land

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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Henry Flagler, a billionaire partner of John D. Rockefeller, visited St. Augustine, Florida in 1883 and was at once captivated by its beauty and discouraged by the poor quality of its hotels and transportation facilities. So he decided to build a railway on the east coast of Florida, essentially completing it by 1912.

Click image to download a 29.3-MB PDF of this 48-page booklet from the Touchton Map Library, Tampa Bay History Center.

As the railway progressed south, he built a series of grand hotels, from the Ponce de Leon in St. Augustine to the Royal Palm in Miami. Together, the hotels and Florida East Coast Railway were known as the Flagler System. Continue reading →

The New York-Florida Corridor

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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In the turn-of-the-20th-century corridors we’ve examined to date — New York-Chicago, Chicago-Los Angeles, Chicago-Seattle, and Chicago-Twin Cities — a large share of the passengers were traveling for business. In the Florida corridor, however, most travel was for pleasure.

This 1906 booklet, which is from archive.org, describes the high-class resorts people could enjoy in Florida. Much of the booklet consists of fold-out pages which archive.org had incorrectly laid out in the PDF it has posted on line. I am pretty sure I fixed that problem. Click image to download a 13.9-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet.

Another difference between this and most of the other corridors I’ve examined is that the railroads serving Florida were mostly amalgamations of other smaller rail lines. While there were a few powerful railroad owners who influenced the region, there were no heroic construction sagas like the First Transcontinental Railroad or the First Transcontinental Railroad to be built without government subsidies (i.e., the Great Northern). Continue reading →

The Paradox of Superpowered Passenger Trains

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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The 19th-century timetables recently presented here revealed that passenger train speeds in the 1870s averaged about 18 miles per hour including stops. Two decades later, the New York Central was running a passenger train that averaged more than 50 miles per hour including stops.


In 1924, Great Northern put the New Oriental Limited on display in Chicago alongside of its oldest train, the William Crooks and two passenger cars from the 1860s. Click image for a much larger (7.3-MB) view. Click here for a beautiful colorized version of this photo by Mike Savad.

The Empire State Express was exceptional. The fastest trains on most routes around the turn of the century averaged about 30 to 35 mph, but that’s still close to double the speed of trains in the 1870s. This growth in speeds was partly due to faster, more powerful locomotives but also to the introduction of limited trains that made fewer stops. Continue reading →

The Fast and Furious Mail

Posted on by January 21, 2023
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The first railway post office car began operating in 1862 on the Hannibal and St. Joseph Railroad, a predecessor of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy. In 1884, the Post Office Department decided it needed a fast-mail service between the east and west coasts.

This article about the St. Paul road’s fast mail trains is from the April, 1905 issue of The World Today. Click image to download a 4.9-MB PDF of the complete article. Click here to download the complete volume of 1905 issues of that periodical (106-MB PDF).

Getting the contract to carry the mail could be prestigious, because it meant that the post office believed a railroad was both fast and reliable. But it could also be a pain. On one hand, the federal government demanded a discount to compensate it for all of the assistance it had provided the railroads — even from railroads that had received no federal assistance. On the other hand, the Post Office demanded that its mail trains be given priority over all other trains. Continue reading →

The First Name in the North-West

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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The Chicago-Twin Cities corridor was served by a remarkable number of railroads. In addition to the St. Paul, North Western, and Burlington, the Wisconsin Central (later Soo Line), Minneapolis & St. Louis, Chicago Great Western, and Rock Island all attempted to compete in this corridor. In the earliest years, however, it was just the St. Paul and Chicago & North Western.


This Detroit Publishing photo of a “North Western Line” train pulled by an Omaha road locomotive is probably the North-Western Limited as that was the only train with a buffet car on the Chicago-Minneapolis line. Built by Schenectady in 1898, the F-8 class locomotive has 73″ drivers and produced nearly 19,200 pounds of tractive effort. Click image for a larger view..

Although the St. Paul road was the first to connect St. Paul with Milwaukee and Chicago, it didn’t have a monopoly for long. While the Milwaukee & St. Paul was building to St. Paul, the Chicago & North Western was building across southern Wisconsin and Minnesota with an eye towards the gold fields of South Dakota. Meanwhile, another company called the West Wisconsin Railway built a line from St. Paul to Elroy, Wisconsin, where it connected with the C&NW. The West Wisconsin route arrived in St. Paul only a few months after the Milwaukee & St. Paul. Continue reading →

St. Paul and the Pioneer Limited

Posted on by December 23, 2022
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In 1862, the first steam locomotive in Minnesota arrived in St. Paul, then a bustling frontier town of about 12,000 people. But the locomotive didn’t arrive by rail. Thanks to St. Anthony Falls, which were 16 to 20 feet high, St. Paul was the head of navigation on the Mississippi River, so the first locomotive was delivered by steamboat. That locomotive, the William Crooks, helped build the St. Paul & Pacific Railroad, the forerunner of the Great Northern.


The Milwaukee & Mississippi was one of the predecessors of the Milwaukee & St. Paul. This locomotive was pictured in about 1860, the year before the M&M went bankrupt. It was absorbed by the Milwaukee & St. Paul in 1863. Click image for a larger view.

The first railroad to connect St. Paul with the rest of the nation’s rail network was the Milwaukee & St. Paul, which completed rails between its two namesake cities in 1872. Also in 1872, it purchased the St. Paul & Chicago Railroad, giving it a connection to the latter city. By June, 1874, it had added the word “Chicago” to its name. In that year, Chicago, Milwaukee & St. Paul passenger trains took about 22 hours to travel between Chicago and St. Paul, for average speeds of about 18 miles per hour. Continue reading →