“The Pennsylvania Turnpike is a toll highway operated by the Pennsylvania Turnpike Commission (PTC) in the U.S. state of Pennsylvania. A controlled-access highway runs for 360 miles (580 km) across the state. The turnpike begins at the Ohio state line in Lawrence County, where the road continues west as the Ohio Turnpike. It ends at the New Jersey border at the Delaware River–Turnpike Toll Bridge over the Delaware River in Bucks County, where the road continues east as the Pearl Harbor Memorial Extension of the New Jersey Turnpike… During the 1930s the Pennsylvania Turnpike was designed to improve automobile transportation across the mountains of Pennsylvania, using seven tunnels built for the abandoned South Pennsylvania Railroad in the 1880s. The road opened on October 1, 1940,[2] between Irwin and Carlisle. It was one of the earlier long-distance limited-access highways in the United States, and served as a precedent for additional limited-access toll roads and the Interstate Highway System.” (Wiki)
Witnessed and even assisted the construction of the PA Turnpike, Pennsylvania Railroad didn’t sit and wait for the PA Turnpike stealing patrons and changing traveler’s habit:
Running an all-Pullman ovearnight and an all-coach was a dumb idea to begin with. Puting coaches on the Pittburgher like the IC’s Magnolia Star on the Panama would have made more sense. The Pittsburgher or was it the Steel City all-Pullman had me as rider around ten times. I think often in a Creek duplex room. Business travel of course.
Often boarded at East Liberty after a late-evening dinner at a terrific Italian restaurant, a favorite of Harold Geissenheimer, the dinner companion and local wheels, after business concluded at Carnegie Institute or a church or syagogue.
Anyone who has driven the Pennsylvania Turnpike will know that it’s no substitute for the train between Philadelphia and Pittsburgh. This is the prewar Autobahn style road, a couple of slabs with minimal attention to high-speed grading with nothing but a cheap Armco-style barrier between opposed fast lanes. There were places you could start making high speed if you had a capable automobile … until you came across people going slower, and there were a lot of them, not always easy to see until the last moment. And then there were people like my friend Stefan’s father’s in-laws, one of whom had a relatively new '38 Buick and delighted in running around coal trucks on blind curves, saying to distressed passengers “What are you worried about … I got good brakes…”
Those advocating flying Capitol Scareways have likely never flown into a Pittsburgh airport. You would take the additional four and a half hours in a bar, drinking to recover your composure after the landing. This in addition to flying at low level over the Appalachians, a chain with sufficient ridge lift that sailplane pilots can take off from Blairstown, New Jersey (which is considerably north of Philadelphia, near the Delaware Water Gap), fly down to the Charlottesville, Virginia area, and then return to Blairstown.
It would be the advent of better turnpike-cruising cars and development of so many ‘intermediate’ destinations far from effective train stations that spelled the full death of service to and from Pittsburgh on the PRR. But those certainly came. As did more and more reliable, if no less frightening, air service in many weathers.
The proposed ‘Steel King’ was an afternoon all-coach train instead of an overnight train mixed with Pullman sleepers and coaches. It was like a section of the Trail Blazer, but depart much earlier than Trail Blazer’s schedule. I am still looking for details about the train but the keyword ‘Steel King’ related to many irrelevant stuffs.
The Pittsburgher was the overnight all-Pullman extra fare train between NYC and Pittsburgher and one source said that “…unlike many other Pennsy trains, patronage remained strong through the declining postwar years”, “the Pittsburgher quickly became the top choice for business travelers wishing to arrive at their destination by the next morning…” If this is true, I see why Pennsy wanted to apply the same formula of Trail Blazer to the NYC to Pittsburgher market, even though there were other options like Duquesne, Iron City Express, Juniata, New Yorker, and Pittsburgh Night Express etc… A little bit too greedy but not really that dumb.
It sounds as if the Pennsylvania Turnpike was a good bait that intentionally set the bar quite low so that the car owners who had driven on it would keep pushing the government to build better roads connecting Pittsburg to other important cities in the country. Another win-win situation for the politician and contractor! Who needs a doctor if there is no illness? It is quite sad to see the majority of people would rather have driven on a bumpy turnpike, taken a plane of the infamous US scareways instead of relaxing on the good old “Fleet of Modernism” train of PRR.