The 1945 Report on Streamline Trains focused exclusively on Seaboard Air Line’s Silver Meteor. The report observed that this operation grew from a single seven-car train that went from Richmond to Miami every three days in early 1939 to three 17-car Richmond-Miami trains plus three 12-car Richmond-St. Petersburg trains, allowing daily service to both Florida coasts starting mid-1943.
Click image to download a 31.3-MB PDF of this 88-page report. Click here to download an OCRed version of the report.
In its first year after entering daily service on July 1, 1939, the seven-car Silver Meteor carried 114 million passenger-miles of travel. By comparison, the first year of the 17-car and 12-car train operations carried 580 million passenger miles, a quintupling of business. Of course, the war may have had something to do with that.
With this report, I now have reports for 1938, 1939, 1941, 1945, and 1950 posted. Coverdale and Colpitts wrote at least two more reports, a January, 1935 report on “light-weight trains of the Zephyr type,” and a July, 1935 report on high-speed trains between Chicago and the Twin Cities. Since any data in these report would be updated in later reports, I’m not going to make a big effort to obtain copies. But if I do, I’ll post them here.