How long would it take a passenger rail train to go from New York to California, in, say, 1928?
An Express Train?
I was surprised that back in 1876 a passenger train crossed the country in 83 hours (New York City to San Francisco).
If you Google passenger train speed 1920s
you get some ideas:
https://www.google.com/search?q=passenger+train+speed+1920s
For example
You lost me at “No Deathrays”
In case Ming the Merciless should board?
From a newspaper article discussing the vast improvements from 1928 to 1938:
I’m guessing it’s a dude robert nod.
New York to Chicago on the Broadway Limited or 20th Century Limited: 20 hours, arriving 9:45 am. Spend the day in Chicago, then depart at 8:10 pm on the Overland Limited from Chicago to San Francisco: 64 hours, arriving 9:10 am.
I don’t believe any scheduled service could have gotten you coast to coast faster, even if you found a connection (via Cincinnati and St. Louis, maybe) that avoided the Chicago layover. Other trains might get you to Chicago with less time before the West Coast departure, but they had a slower end-to-end running time.
No, it pre-dates him by quite some time.
You can get fast if you spend the cash. London to Paris is a little under 300 miles and the (non stop) train does it in 2½ hours. Average speed = 120 mph. There is also the English Channel to cross on the way.
Given the time it takes to get from city centres to airports, plus all the check in time, the train wins hands down. Trips to Paris are a popular day out for Londoners, and vice versa.
While that is impressive, I wonder if this train had to stop in Chicago. Most cross-country passenger trains today do so; there’s a reason Chicago is called the rail center of the nation. Or, more accurately, Amtrak doesn’t run a single service that crosses the entire country from one coast to the other. You have to take a train from NOLA or NYC or wherever that takes you to Chicago, and then a different named train to continue your journey to the West Coast. There’s bound to be some significant layover time in Chicago. I’d be surprised if the private sector railroads didn’t do the same for most of early 20th century, until Amtrak took over passenger service in 19171.
Ah - thank you.
Probably not.
In those days St. Louis was the main rail hub in the middle of the country. Chicago was a comparative cowtown waay off the main routes.
But by 1900 St. Louis had gotten fat and lazy & Chicago was young and on the make. 50 years later there was no comparison; St. Louis was a has-been.
So when US passenger rail froze out into its more or less final configuration shortly after WWII Chicago was the major hub. Since then nothing much has happened to add or to re-route traffic. All that’s happened since is existing routes atrophying into non-existence. Sorta like watching dead tree slowly lose limbs over decades until it’s just a tall stump.
It’s not just Chicago being a hub, but the whole deadline from there down to New Orleans, mainly following the Mississippi river, being unpassable without a car change. With one exception that I’m aware of, at no time in our rail history was it possible to take with scheduled service, the same car from one coast to the other. (A rich guy could arrange a private train, I suppose.) I remember an ad in a railroad magazine published in the thirties calling for reform. The headline was A hog can travel across the Mississippi in the same car but you can’t!
The exception was the California Zephyr. While CZ itself stopped in Chicago, a single sleeper would continue on to New York City via the Pennsylvania or New York Central on alternate days, and vice-versa. This site mentions it. (Scroll down to CZ-11)
Huh? Chicago was always the Railroad Capital. Because the Mississippi is much wider and harder to bridge at St. Louis than at Rock Island, St. Louis didn’t have connections to the East until 1874. That’s a full five years after the Transcontinental Railroad was completed—and 25 years after Eastern and Western railroads were making connections in Chicago.
The pattern never changed—and certainly didn’t get reshuffled “shortly after WWII.” Eastern roads ended in Chicago, and the Western roads began there. Though a couple of railroads tried through-sleeper service in the 1950s, the sleeping car spent most of an entire day behind a switch engine, being slowly shuffled around the South Side of Chicago. Any sentient passenger would have gotten off in the morning and spent the day shopping or watching a movie, before reboarding the sleeping car that evening at a different station.