A bit of Americana.
The Streamliner, introduced in 1934, ushered in a whole new era in American train travel. The innovation was uniquely American.
The Streamliner’s forerunner was, for all intents and purposes, known as the Exposition Flyer. This was a train that was created with the express purpose in mind of getting citizens residing in the nation’s breadbasket basically to and from the 1939 Golden Gate International Exposition that was held in San Francisco on Treasure Island. The Flyer was a vehicle if you will that was intended to not only attract new patrons to the passenger-train-travel market but also to retain existing passenger-train users.
Where passenger train travel was concerned, this was also when the automobile and private personal automobile travel started to make inroads. This prompted electric street and interurban railway networks to lift embedded railway rails from roadways where these were installed in addition to removing overhead catenary (trolley) wire and support infrastructure holding these wires up. A significant number of these systems shut down. And, their replacements? Rubber-tired, gasoline- and diesel-powered cars and buses, respectively. The country had entered the automotive age.
The government regulating body, the Interstate Commerce Commission, meanwhile, would not allow the industry to outright abandon passenger-train service, even though those concerned railroads tasked with providing the electric street railway and interurban services, in that regard were losing the farm in a manner of speaking; they were operating at a deficit, in other words. So, what it basically came down to is the railroads going with Plan B.
And, that they did.
It is helpful to keep in mind that at this particular point in time the transition from
steam to first gasoline-electric, this followed simultaneously shortly thereafter by diesel-electric and straight electric propulsion, was being made. Innovations like General Motors’ Electro-Motive Corporation’s M-10000 and the Budd Company’s Pioneer Zephyr products (the former built for and used by the Union Pacific Railroad, the latter built for and used by the Burlington Route, at least initially) entered frame. At this juncture, these trains were all the rage as they were for quite some time very popular among the land-traveling set, as opposed to jet-setters which had not arrived on the scene then. It was a bold move that paid off quite well, in fact, at least for a while.
However, by the late 1940s and early 1950s, the handwriting was on the wall and not only were railroads’ passenger-train operations taking a serious beating but so to was the industry as a whole.
As for the great and proud institution that American railroading is now, was then, and always has been, if not for the wiser heads intervening when and as they did (this manifested in the form of signed railroad regulatory reform legislation), the railroads most assuredly would have been done in and done for — they would have gone kaput!
One could say with confidence that the Streamliner was partly responsible for helping save the day!