The Southern Railway refused to join Amtrak in 1971, as Southern President Graham Claytor decided that, “We could afford to keep our primary train and make it the finest in the country.” The Crescent ran daily overnight from Washington to … Continue reading
In 1970, Southern discontinued the Crescent through Montgomery while keeping the Southerner through Birmingham. Probably because the Crescent name had more prestige, it renamed the Southerner the Southern Crescent. This appeared to combine the names of the two trains but … Continue reading
The Southern had three different trains between Washington and New Orleans in 1966, each following different routes. The Crescent and the Southerner each went through Atlanta, but the former went through Montgomery and the latter Birmingham. The Pelican went through … Continue reading
Fast forward nearly 40 years from yesterday’s 1925 timetable and the Southern still has lots of trains on its trunk routes. This one shows eight trains a day from Washington to Charlottesville, five of which continue to Atlanta, four to … Continue reading
Here’s a timetable from the end of the Golden Age of passenger trains. Though only half the size of most timetables, this one has 72 pages, the equivalent of 36 pages in a regularly sized table. The larger size would … Continue reading
In 1952, the Southern had five trains between Washington and New Orleans, most of which continued to New York over the Pennsylvania. The premiere train was the streamlined Crescent, which was all Pullman north of Atlanta and added coaches only … Continue reading
These blotters from the Dale Hastin collection were all issued by the Southern Railway. PDFs of the blotters are all 400 to 500 KB in size. This blotter must date to around 1934 or 1935, when railroads were hastily adding … Continue reading
After Amtrak had taken over most American passenger trains, leaving the Southern Railway to operate the only private overnight train in America, the Southern’s menus, some of which I posted here a few months ago, offered passengers the opportunity to … Continue reading
In the early 1880s, 120 construction workers (many of them prisoners provided by the state of North Carolina as a subsidy to rail construction) lost their lives build a railroad from Old Fort to Asheville, North Carolina. As a memorial … Continue reading
Although this lunch menu is five years newer than yesterday’s dinner menu, it has an identical cover (except for the word “Luncheon” rather than “Dinner”). Despite five years of inflation, the menu still offered a print of the 1401 pulling … Continue reading
