Some Stations are Terminals

This blog is mostly about painting and illustration. One exception has to do with design, architecture and by extension the urban setting. This post is a bit of a stretch from even those topics, but I think it's okay to have a change of pace occasionally, especially on a holiday.

In England, the place where one catches an inter-city railway train is called a station. Some London examples are Paddington Station, Euston Station and Victoria Station. The same is generally true here in the USA -- but not completely. Most people, me usually included, call one such place in New York City Grand Central Station. But its actual name is Grand Central Terminal.

Technically, the place is a terminal because it is the final stopping point or initial starting point for trains. A station, by contrast, is an intermediate point.

Regardless of what they officially or popularly are called, railroad depots that are functionally terminals are relatively rare because the power of railroad systems lies in the fact that they are basically networks where what is carried can flow from place to place. An exception is at a transportation break, typically where a railway spur ends at a ship docking facility for transferring goods from one transportation mode to another.

Another exceptional case is certain large, old, dominant cities that serve as transportation hubs for their countries. In these cases, when railroading started in the 1800s it was already considered too disruptive to carve rail lines across those cities' central areas. Instead, terminals were established at various points around the peripheries of central areas, the rail lines heading away to places in their same general direction from the cities' centers. This is the case for London and Paris.

An alternative is to have a large, central terminal that serves a large number of places, rail lines serving them diverging a ways away from the center. This is approximately how it works in Rome and Milan, though each city does have lesser terminals and stations for commuter lines.

Below are a photo and some maps illustrating some terminals.

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Seattle Depots - 1913
In the center of the photo is Union Station, actually a terminal used by the Union Pacific and Milwaukee Road lines.  To its right, with the tower, is King Street Station used by the Great Northern and Northern Pacific railroads.  It actually is a station because some tracks head in our direction and reach a tunnel under Seattle's downtown.  You can glimpse those below-street-level tracks if you drop your eyes down from Union Station.

London terminals
They all bear the Station name, but are terminals except for London Bridge Station.  Before the postwar nationalization of railways, each station was associated with a railroad serving its own (but sometimes overlapping) region of Britain.

Paris terminals - 1900
This image featured a peripheral line running just inside Paris' fortifications that approximate the route of the Périphérique, Paris' beltway freeway.  Not all these terminals remain: the D'Orsay is now an art museum, for example.  The functioning intercity terminals are the St. Lazare, Nord, Est, Lyon, Austerlitz, and Montparnasse.

New York - 1909
This map features a subway commuter line connecting parts of Manhattan with New Jersey.  At the upper right is Grand Central Terminal (called "Station" here), and nearby black lines indicate subway and elevated local transportation lines.  Grand Central served the now-defunct New York Central and New Haven lines for many years.  Pennsylvania Station, the other major New York depot, is a true station because some tracks under the station structure connect Pennsylvania Railroad tracks (to the west) to Long Island Railroad tracks (to the east).  The Pennsy also no longer exists but the tracks remain.

Chicago - 1908
I include this map mostly because of the long list of railroads serving Chicago more than a century ago.  Aside from the present government-run Amtrak passenger system (started in 1971) that uses private lines' rails, there never has been a transcontinental railroad company in the United States.  A number of major lines served the eastern part of the county and extended as far west as places such as St. Louis and Chicago.  And there were western railroads serving places as far east as those and a few other cities.  There also were railroads serving the central part of the country, but their tracks did not extend to the east and west coasts.  For someone traveling by train from coast to coast in the heyday of passenger railroading, it was necessary to change railroads in places such as Chicago.

Chicago - 1958
This map shows that downtown Chicago was served by seven terminals (most called Station) in the 1950s.  When I was young, I once arrived in Chicago on the Milwaukee Road at Union Station.  We departed on the New York Central a few days later at La Salle Street Station.  Note that Union Station served the westerly Milwaukee Road and the easterly Pennsylvania Railroad.  But being a terminal, there was no through trackage.  The lines branched a ways out of town.

More Philadelphia Suburban Rail Car Photos

Several years ago I posted regarding 1930s-vintage rolling stock used on suburban Philadelphia railcar lines. Since then, I scanned slides I took in April 1969 of some of those cars. They aren't very good portraits of the equipment, but perhaps they might nevertheless be of interest to some readers.

Most of the photos are of the Philadelphia & Western suburban line that ran from Norristown to Philadelphia's 69th Street Station where riders heading for the city center would have to change to a different transportation mode. I caught a car at Haverford and rode it to 69th on my photography expedition.

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P&W car near Haverford Station (cropped)

P&W car entering Haverford Station (cropped)

P&W car at Haverford Station

P&W car near Haverford Station (cropped)

P&W car at 69th Street Station

P&W car at 69th Street Station (cropped)

Philadelphia Suburban Transportation Company cars at 69th Street Station (cropped)

Red Arrow Liberty Liner at 69th Street Station (cropped)

Brangwyn's Railroad Posters

Sir Frank Brangwyn (1867-1956) is perhaps best remembered for his murals. He also did easel paintings and posters, many of the latter in support of Britain's effort in the Great War.

But that was not all. For a while in the 1920s he created a few posters for what became the London and North Eastern Railway, a major line that ran trains from London into Scotland along a route near the eastern coast of the island. (The London, Midland and Scottish followed a more westerly path north, while the Great Western and Southern railroads served other locations.)

At the time Brangwyn created the designs shown below, a trend toward simplified images was getting underway. Perhaps because Brangwyn was probably incapable of delivering a simplified image, his career in railroad poster making was comparatively brief.

Gallery

Durham

Firth of Forth Bridge

Scotland

Over the Nidd near Harrogate

Varieties of Railroad Travel Posters

This book about North American railroad company travel posters mentioned that early posters tended to feature locomotives, but by some time around 1915 the emphasis shifted to destinations offered by lines. Between these extremes must be a middle ground where voilà ! trains and destinations appear on the same poster. And voilà ! once more, there can be posters showing trains on their way to destinations passing by intermediate points of interest that the lucky tourist will be able to see if he rides the line in question.

This high-level theorizing leaves me breathless and my head woozy, so let's move on to viewing some examples.

Galllery

By Leslie Ragan for New York Central - 1938
Ragan created many fine poster illustrations for the New York Central. I selected this one because it features a locomotive to the exclusion of its setting.

By Walter Greene for New York Central - 1928
The New York Central railroad correctly boasted that it was the line that had the lowest level between New York and Chicago; competing lines had to deal with mountainous terrain in places en route. A 20th Century Limited would depart from New York's Grand Central Terminal and head north along the east bank of the Hudson River, crossing to the west side shortly before reaching Albany. From Albany it would proceed along the Mohawk River and then surmount a small crest near Utica to enter the Great Lakes drainage basin. From Syracuse through Buffalo and Cleveland to Chicago was a matter of traveling over fairly flat land.

The scene in the poster shows a train heading south along the Hudson at a point just north of West Point, where Storm King mountain looms on the river's west bank, a sight for passengers to enjoy if they were sitting on the right side of the coach. Storm King is certainly a large hunk of rock, but I suspect that Greene slightly dramatized it.

By Leslie Ragan for New York Central - c.1940
Here we find locomotives at a destination, Chicago in this case, with the Board of Trade building as the backdrop. Ragan depicts four locomotives, three steam powered and one new diesel engine (second from the left). At the far left is an ordinary non-streamlined locomotive. The engines at the right are steam powered streamliners; I wrote about them here.

By Edward Eggleston for Pennsylvania Railroad - early 1930s
Not a train in sight, but who would care about that if there was a lovely swinsuit-clad lass beckoning you to join her on the beach near Atlantic City's fabulous boardwalk? The Pennsy's main routes ran from New York to Philadelphia and then on to Chicago or St. Louis; to reach Atlantic City, one had to catch a spur line from Philadelphia.

General Motors Aerotrain: A Rider's Report

The photos above are of General Motors' Aerotrain, a mid-1950s attempt to put pizazz into rail travel and sell many similar locomotive-and-coaches combinations to America's ailing passenger railroads.

The Wikipedia entry here and this fuller account summarize the disappointing (to GM) tale of railroads that tried the demonstrator trains but refused to buy any production versions.

Basically, the Aerotrain was a flashy, automobile-styled locomotive pulling a string of coaches using some of the body stampings from inter-city buses GM was building at the time. By the way, that automobile reference is more real than one might think: the guy behind the design was Chuck Jordan, who many years later went on to head GM's styling operations.

The Aerotrain interests me because I actually rode one. I was a school kid at the time, and my dad bought a new DeSoto and we were traveling from Seattle by train to pick up the car at the factory. After stopping in Chicago to visit relatives, we took the New York Central to Detroit (the Wikipedia entry doesn't mention this run, the second link does), and lo! we got to ride the Aerotrain.

In retrospect, the best part of the trip was the green-uniformed, red-haired Southern stewardess who looked at totally blushing me with big blue eyes and asked if y'all needed anything.

The worst part, as both links mention, was the rough ride. An unusual suspension design is cited as the culprit. Maybe so. But I always thought the problem was that the bus-based coaches were simply too light. In any case, trying to walk while the train was at speed was difficult due to random lurching and bouncing.

Sometimes transportation concepts of the future have no future.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 2

The streamlined trains featured in Part 1 of this series were diesel powered. At the time -- the mid-1930s -- most American locomotives were steam-powered, so the easiest, cheapest means of hopping on the streamlining bandwagon was to give existing locomotives streamlined cladding. And that's what some major railroads did while waiting to convert to diesel power, a process that moved into high gear in the 1940s.

Two of America's richest and most famous railroads were the New York Central and the Pennsylvania Railroad. The key passenger run for each was New York - Chicago, linking the nation's largest and next-largest cities.

The Central ran up the Hudson Rive to Albany and then west to Buffalo along the route of the old Erie Canal -- a passage with few hill or mountain obstacles. From Buffalo, trains went near the south shore of Lake Erie through Cleveland and Toledo in Ohio before cutting across northern Indiana to Chicago.

The Pennsy's route from New York went through Philadelphia and Pittsburgh before angling northwest to the Windy City. Unlike the New York Central's route, Pennsy trains had to cut through the Alleghany mountains -- a series of sharp ridge-lines and intervening valleys -- making use of tunnels to minimize the amount of grade to surmount. Western Pennsylvania is also hilly with winding rivers, so those obstacles also had to be cleared.

Thus the Central had an easier route topographically, but the Pennsy had a shorter one -- no dog-leg up to Albany before striking west. This made the railroads competitive when hauling the rich and famous on their premier passenger trains, Central's 20th Century Limited and Pennsy's Broadway Limited.

Let's look at some photos:
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Standard New York Central J2 Hudson-type locomotive
More information regarding that line's locomotives can be found here.

New York Central "Commodore Vanderbilt" - 1935
NYC's first steam streamliner was designed by Carl Kantola (with wind tunnel testing at Cleveland's Case Institute) and fabricated as a converted Hudson in the railroad's shops near Albany. The Commodore Vanderbilt was the second-string New York - Chicago run to the premier 20th Century Limited.

New York Central "Mercury" - 1936
This Hudson was given a streamlined cover by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss. It served on NYC's Cleveland-Detroit run.

New York Central "20th Century Limited"
Ten J2s were given streamlined skins designed by Henry Dreyfuss and ran on the New York - Chicago run starting in 1938.

Pennsylvania Railroad S1
The Raymond Loewy-designed S1 was an experimental streamlined locomotive that appeared in the late 1930s. The center photo shows Loewy posing on his creation. The lower photo compares the S1 to one of the Pennsy's regular steam locomotives.

Pennsylvania Railroad T1
The T1 was another Loewy creation, but one that saw service starting in 1942. It was a cleaned-up version of a normal steam locomotive with an aggressive "face" that looks like it was not an optimal case of streamlining, though the rounded "splitter" form in front of the boiler must have had less air resistance than a regular flat boiler section did. The T1 was the last major steam-powered streamlined locomotive type built in America.

Early American Streamlined Locomotives, Part 1

Perhaps it was aviation in the form of Schneider Cup racing airplanes that became progressively more streamlined during the 1920s (along with other high-speed aircraft) that made designer-engineers in other fields sensitive to the benefits streamlining offered in terms of increasing potential top speed and decreasing the amount of energy required to cruise at a given velocity.

As this Wikipedia entry indicates, operational streamliner trains began appearing both in Europe and in the United States by the mid-1930s. Though attempts were made to "clean up" the shapes of steam locomotives in the late 1920s, the early round of streamliners did not have steam locomotives; diesel was the engine of choice.

America's first streamlined trains that reached commercial use were the Union Pacific M-10000 and the Burlington Zephyr, both appearing in 1934 to great publicity.

The Zephyr had the engineer's cab at the very front of the locomotive unit, which placed the operators in grave danger in the event of a collision; the M-10000 had them placed higher and slightly more to the rear, a configuration found in most streamlined diesel locomotives of 1938-1960.

Another feature, shared by both designs, that didn't pan out was that the coaches were articulated, sharing a truck at each end rather than being coupled in the normal manner. This proved inflexible, so later streamlined trains returned to the proven system of joining coaches.

I find these early streamliners deliciously 1930s, and hope you enjoy the photos below and might even be inspited to do some Web exploring of the subject on your own. You can try clicking on most of the photos to enlarge.

Gallery

Pre-streamliner passenger train
This was photographed somewhere in Alabama in 1948. Steam locomotives were well on their way out by then, but I included this scene-setting photo because it could just as easily have been taken in 1930, before streamliners appeared.

Locomotive No. 1, a Norman Bel Geddes design - 1931
Although Geddes' design was never actualized, it might have helped inspire streamliners that hit the tracks a few years later.

Union Pacific M-10000 (left) and Burlington Pioneer Zephyr
America's first two diesel-powered streamliners pose side-by-side at Kansas City's Union Station.

The M-10000 is open for inspection in Denver - 1934
This shows the rounded tail of the train. The Zephyr had windows at the rear of its final coach making for a popular observation area.

M-10000 and Chrysler Airflow - 1934
Streamlining was an idea whose time had come by the early 1930s. Chrysler introduced its at-the-time radically streamlined Airflow about the same time as the M-10000 hit the tracks. This publicity photo was intended to call attention to the similarity of the otherwise disparate vehicles' front ends.

Full-length photo of the Zephyr - 1935

Philadelphia Suburban Trolley Cars of the 1930s

People joke about Brooklyn. And New Jersey (pronounced "joy-zee" when joking or actually from Hoboken).

Then there is Philadelphia, "city of brotherly love" and the subject of a few knife-twisters. For example (if I remember this right), W.C. Fields on the matter of death mused "on the whole, I'd rather be in Philadelphia." Then there is the apocryphal contest where first prize is one week in Philadelphia and the second prize is two weeks there.

Me? I lived there the better part of three years as a Penn grad student.

Actually, I'm not telling the complete truth. For about six months of that time I lived in Lansdowne, a suburb just west of the city. Across the street in front of our apartment house and parallel to it ran the Red Arrow trolley line (Some links about the Red Arrow are here and here). The coaches were pretty old-fashioned looking even in 1967, but I found that kinda neat.

Inbound trains rolled past our place down the hill to the station at 69th Street where the line terminated and a Philly-bound passenger would have to transfer to a bus or subway line to continue his journey.

The 69th Street Terminal is also anchor to one end of the Philadelphia-Norristown interurban line (some links are here and here). In those days, the interurban ran fascinating coaches whose ends were shaped in a early Buck Rogers sci-fi fashion. I never had a reason to travel that route, but once upon a time decided that I had to do so, and did before some fool decided to get rid of those fabulously archaic-futuristic coaches.

Here's what I'm raving about:

Red Arrow car

Red Arrow car as seen in the 1960s

Philadelphia and Western (Philadelphia-Norristown) interurban Brill "Bullet" car

Lineup of Bullet cars in the 1970s

The Norristown Bullet cars were built around 1930 by Philadelphia's Brill company (Wikipedia link here). Since they ran as fast as 70 miles per hour (a bit more than 100 kph), end designs were tested in a wind tunnel -- a progressive and unusual practice at the time.

The bottom photo gives the better sense of the Bullets, but to fully appreciate their look, they had to be seen in motion -- particularly at speed.