I remember riding from Marietta, Ga to Chicago in the 50s. In Marietta, it was on the NC&St.L railroad, then the L&N, then arriving in Chicago on the C&EI. In the late 50s I remember frequently seeing a train at Englewood Station on the Pennsy with ACL locomotives, when, unlike today, foreign power was very rare.
Discribing the present CSX route from Atlanta to Chicago via Chattanooga, of course the UP opeates the former C&EI on it’s North End. Passenger routings in the Chicago area did not necessarily stick to only the operating roads tracks as did most freight service. A train a Englewood on the PRR with ACL engines woud be the South Wind, one of the trio of trains that serviced Chicago-Florida on a every 3rd day basis - thus giving daily service between the end points.
The train you saw with ACL passenger power at Englewood was most likely the Pennsy’s South Wind which was an every third day Chicago-Miami streamliner. The other two streamliners on that run were the Illinois Central’s City of of Miami and the C&EI’s Dixie Flagler. Each train ran on a different route between Chicago and Jacksonville, but they all ran on the Florida East Coast between Jacksonville and Miami.
The Louisville & Nashville (L&N) was a major player in the Chicago-Miami streamliner service. The L&N took the South Wind from Louisville to Montgomery, AL, and the ACL forwarded it to Jacksonville. The L&N took the Dixie Flagler from Evansville to Nashville where the NC&STL took it to Atlanta; The Atlanta Birmingham & Coast ( for all intents the ACL) took the Dixie Flagler from Atlanta to Jacksonville.
And, the IC carried the City of Miami between Chicago and Birmingham, the CG carried it between Birmingham and Albany, Ga., and the ACL (later, SCL) carried it between Albany and Jacksonville. The ACL between Waycross, Ga., and Jacksonville was common track to all three except that the South Wind did not use the same station in Waycross that the other two used.
Some of the CG’s engines used on the Chicago-Florida trains were painted with the IC’s colors so you had look closely to see which road owned them.
Only two CofG locomotives, E8A’s 811 and 812, were painted in chocolate and orange and assigned to the “City of Miami” pool.