Remember that C&O had the first air-conditioned car, and spent quite a bit with brass and nickel plate and stars on those flying-pump locomotives. Their track was built to heavier standards than most other railroads, and not for nothing was the whole ‘sleep like a kitten’ mythos developed. And while I think the food overseen by Balt’s father was probably better, C&O was renowned for their mammy-type home cooking…
Nobody was going to try to run overnight sleeper trains to Chicago on that route with a 16-hour or even 20-hour timing. But there were agreed rates for 24- and 28-hour services, too… and which of those you patronized would be VERY dependent on amenities and scenery…
I believe John W Barringer was the head of the C&O at the time the car order was placed - prior to the end of WW II - but close enough that the business community knew the end was near.
The B&O implemented the streamlined Cincinnatian in January 1947 and operated it between Baltimore & Cincinnati until 1950 when it finally decided that there was not enough passenger load to make the train profitable - C&O could see the writing on the wall and started selling the cars they had on order. B&O in fact bought a number of cars from the C&O.
Right after the War the carbuilders were swamped. I’ve seen some cars that New York Central ordered take anywhere from 18 months to three years to deliver.
The New York central alone ordered 354 cars from Pullman, 239 from Budd and 128 from AC&F. The scramble was on to replace the War-weary passenger equipment. There were a few in railroad management then that could see the future of transportation but change was slow for the railroads and, of course, there was the ICC to deal with and many routes and discontinuances took years to realize with the red ink piling up the whole time.
All of that activity was nearly 80 years ago, but it sure seems like a failure of management to not read the writing on the wall in terms of ordering a whole lot of new equipment in the first place in a declining market.
This discussion reminds me of my years as a commuter from the south suburbs to downtown Chicago on the Illinois Central (pre-Metra). This was in the 1970s and the commuter cars were the old heavyweights, no air conditioning, wicker seats that could rip your suit pants and windows that opened to escape the summer heat and humidity somewhat.
We’re looking at the state of the industry at the end of WW2 with the benefit of hindsight. Coming out of the war, there was no interstate highway system. There was no nationwide airline service. They were in their infancy. Long distance land travel was still by rail, at least in the major traffic lanes.
The railroad industry as a whole, came off of the best years they ever had, and probably ever will have. This in part blinded them to the competition that would come from other modes in time. And that time, thanks to some factors that were a byproduct of the war, was a lot shorter than it otherwise might have been. They thought they could hold on to their share of the passenger market.
At least in the major markets. That a place like Cincinnati couldn’t anchor a passenger train of its own isn’t really remarkable. Especially when there was competition from other major carriers.
It’s like cabooses. A few railroads bought new cabooses in the late 70s into 1980. They were gone from most trains within a few years. Why did they buy them? Cabooseless trains and reduced crews were on the horizon. Why is any railroad hiring new conductors when they themselves are fighting to remove conductors from trains?
The answers to all these things is you still have to exist in the here and now. Hindsight is always 20/20.
C&O’s participation with NYC for interline Pullmans gave them a presence in Chicago without having to run a first-class train there.
As late as 1957, the Sportsman carried two interline Pullmans for Chicago - one from Newport News via Cincinnati, and one originating at Richmond via Toledo. The Newport News car ran in the George Washington in the other direction. The two cars arrived in Chicago at about the same time, but at two different stations.
The use of interline Pullman cars made sense, I guess, for the C&O since it didn’t have its own direct route to Chicago. For other railroads though like NYC and PRR, would they use interline coaches and sleepers from the east coast to Chicago as the destination or only for transfers to west coast carriers?
It sure as hell wasn’t a ‘declining market’ in the immediate postwar years when this stuff was being ordered - not only was the tired old heavyweight stuff clapped out and worn, but the railroads were flush with cash and access to credit after the wartime boom, access to automobiles would be effectively restricted for years, and the generally positive attitude toward ‘streamliners’ and faster service in the period leading up to the War was expected to continue after it… and did for a while. One big thing that shot it in the foot was the ICC order after the Naperville wreck, which held all those shiny new trains to 79mph without very expensive train control. The real rot didn’t really start until the very late Forties, but it went fast with airline, turnpike, and automotive-production increases…
I won’t give management a pass. That’s why they get paid big time. They are supposed to know how to use a crystal ball. I’ll bet the shareholders felt different at the time.
The whole point is that no one could have predicted the radical drop off of consumer interest in passenger trains in the years the big replacement-car orders were being placed. There was certainly the expectation that Depression conditions might return with the wartime ‘stimulus’ gone… it certainly had come back with a vengeance in 1938, and many clearly remembered the awful time after WWI (that led in part to the Prosperity Special). You weren’t going to expect massive new car ownership or free ‘good roads’ construction in that kind of market – or lots of people paying for 300mph airline trips either, even if the airplanes could be bought cheap as surplus. The great falling-off of reciprocating steam (which had been expected to persist into the 1980s or beyond) didn’t gather full momentum until 1947, and the trade press accurately described the trends that led to it; the Korean War being a lucrative scrap market only facilitated what had already become obvious in many railroad markets (particularly in the East for railroads with the capital access to dieselize). New York Central put an enormous push into ‘Dieseliners’ in the late '40s, and Robert R. Young of C&O fame certainly saw no drastic loss of passenger traffic there in the early Fifties (I am of two minds about the actual point of the ‘lightweight trans of the future’ on NYC, but the Xplorer service to Cincinnati was very heavily promoted in timetables well into 1956… of course, to disappear with dismal haste once the wonder train had been running a few weeks…)
Keep in mind that many railroads would happily have shucked their passenger obligations if the governments had let them; the persistence of the ‘war tax’ on tickets… with no direct gain for the railroads… dragged on long after any actual ‘war’ could justify it. Making the operation desirable by any means, along with reducing operating costs, were reasonable and common-sense actions going by immediate postwar information.
That Cincinnati traffic was something of a special case – there was some idea that Cincy as a destination was some miracle attractant for trains originating from many compass directions, and (as the B&O for example found out quick) just because you built it didn’t mean they’d come… let alone pay a premium for amenities and speed.
I don’t think the Management of any industry foresaw the changes that were brought about by WW II. Before the War there were ways to do things. The experiences of men that spent the war years in the military had changed expectations upon their discharge than they did when they were enlisted or drafted. By the same token the pre-war women that went to work and became accustomed to marching to their own drummer, not the subservience to her husband that existed prior to the war.
We will never know, of course, but I would bet that if the C&O had it all to do over again, it would have stayed out of the passenger business, at least between Cincinnati and Chicago.
They were gone early from Cincinnati to Chicago service. They didnt get hit hard on that lane like most rails did. In fact in 1954 their freight and passenger revenues were:
1954
Freight rev $280m Op ratio 68%
Passenger rev 7m Op ratio 175%
C&O’s issue in 1954 was the dramatic drop in coal. From 1947 to 1954 coal tonnage dropped by 37%. Still was 47% of carloadings and revenue, but had dropped dramatically in just 8 years.
C&O was built for efficient movement of coal from WVa to either tidewater for export or to Toledo (loading to boats), or Northwest Indiana (steel). There were very few branchlines and those primarily served coal mines.
