A Variety of Blogs
This Budd Company half-dome car, name "Silver Feather," rode on the California Zephyr between 1949 and 1970, when the route was operated by the Chicago Burlington & Quincy, the Denver & Rio Grande Western, and the Western Pacific railroads. Today, it still gives a delightful ride on the Arkansas & Missouri Railroad's excursion trains.
There is nothing sadder, I think, than a train station that stands alone, forlorn, and all but forgotten. Too many stand today in various stages of decay. The train does not stop there, anymore. In most cases, the train stopped visiting small towns.
In the case of the station I will tell you about today, the owner of the tracks -- Canadian National, which bought out the Illinois Central -- refused to spend the money to upgrade them for passenger use, and so, Amtrak began taking its trains down another track, the old Yazoo & Mississippi Valley Railroad track. Now, the trains run diagonally from Memphis; through Greenwood and Yazoo City and down to Jackson before they rejoin the old Illinois Central tracks on their southbound run.
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The train in question is the Illinois Central's City of New Orleans, which ran between New Orleans and Chicago. Yep! That’s the one, the train that's last privatized run was immortalized in a song of the same name. The song was composed by Steve Goodman and sung by Arlo Guthrie. The run was actually worse than Mr. Guthrie portrayed in the song. Too often, equipment did not work properly. Dining and café cars were absent. Schedules were close to being lip service, only.
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The station in question is a Queen Anne Victorian in the sleepy Mississippi town of Winona. An untold number of stations that looked essentially alike were built in the early 20th century. The brick is red, the trim is dark green, and the windows are long, narrow two-over-two. There are two waiting rooms, one on either side of the ticket agent’s office, and the Railway Express Agency office is at one end of the structure. The platform is red brick, although someone black-topped over it many years ago. Today, even the blacktop is cracked and worn away at the edges.
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By rights, Winona should be a bustling town, since it stands at the intersection of Interstate Highway 55 and US Highway 82. I-55 runs between LaPlace, Louisiana, and Chicago, Illinois; in fact, it supersedes Route 66 between St. Louis and Chicago. US Highway 82 runs between Brunswick, Georgia, and Alamogordo, New Mexico.
Maybe Winona would be a bustling town if it weren’t located slap dab between I-20 and I-40. The east-west traffic has disappeared just as surely as the north-south rail traffic. Cotton’s all but dried up in the delta, some thirty miles to the west. Few farmers milk cows, anymore. Unless one is en route to one of the state universities, one might not even see Winona.
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Even so, the local folk have hopes for saving the old station. Someone’s running a restaurant in part of the building, and someone else sells flowers there. A group has purchased a wooden caboose and a Budd Company sleeping car, ex-Southern Railway, but the old rail cars are in such a state of disrepair that only a miracle will save them. Sometimes, life is just not fair.​
Ex-Southern Railway Budd sleeping car
(Webmaster)
As for me, I stand on the cracked platform, look down the grass-filled tracks, and still see the old brown-and-orange Electromotive Division (EMD) E-8 locomotive making its way slowly into the station followed by Pullman coaches. This is the train I rode as a child to visit my grandparents, and this is the train that gave me my love for riding the rails. They can stop running the train, and they can close the station, but they never will take away my memories -- they and the conductor who made it all come to life.
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Mr. Conductor wasn't on the City of New Orleans, but on the Cardinal, fifteen years after Amtrak took over operations from the Chesapeake and Ohio. In those days, the route was known as the George Washington. But back to September 1986, as I returned from a visit to my cousin in Virginia. Mr. Conductor joined me at my table in the cafe car and asked whether it was my first train trip. I explained that I had ridden the Illinois Central's City of New Orleans. He asked about the rolling stock. I didn't know Electromotive and Pullman from squat in those days, but I described the locomotive as having a sad-eyed Basset Hound windshield. He explained that it was an EMD E-8. I hope I never forget that day. It was the day when I first started to learn about trains.
Pennsylvania-Reading Seashore Lines RDC
(Smallbones - in the public domain via Wikimedia Commons
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The Budd Company enjoyed enormous success with its streamliner rail diesel cars (RDCs). They were built for use on short lines to connect outlying areas with towns and cities. Only two employees were needed to operate them, the engineer (driver) and the conductor. Not only that, but they could be driven from either end, meaning they did not have to be turned around for the return trip. Multiple RDCs could be used together, providing transportation for more passengers in a single run and, also, to allow the consist to be divided along the route to send the separate parts to different destinations.
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Constructed like passenger rail cars, they were powered by Detroit Diesel engines, which were located under the car. Exhaust ducts ran up either side of the passenger compartment, half-way along the corridor, while the exhaust vents stood side by side midway along the roofline.
This interior shot of an RDC shows the dividing panels that hid the exhaust ducts.
(Lewis and Gilman, public relations for the Budd Company.
In the public domain via Wikimedia Commons)
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A number of RDCs were sent to the Morrison Knudsen plant in Boise, Idaho, by the Massachusetts Bay Transportation Authority (MBTA) for conversion to conventional passenger rail cars. The engines, ducts, and vents were removed, and the interiors were rearranged to provide conventional seating. They became known as Boise Budds and were returned to Massachusetts, where they continued to serve in conventional train consists.
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When the MBTA began acquiring newer rail cars, they sold the RDCs. The newly formed Virginia Railway Express (VRE) purchased fifteen of them for use on their Manassas and Fredericksburg lines. The VRE used them for about ten years, from 1992 until the early 2000s. Despite pleading from a number of us RDC fans, they sold them to Metro North (New York), Cal Tran (California), and the Grand Canyon Railway (Arizona). Metro North and Cal Tran used them only briefly; however, the Grand Canyon Railway continues to use them to this day.
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The last Boise Budd RDC in VRE inventory
(Donated by the Virginia Railway Express)
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Notice the scars on the roof, where once the vents were located. Notice that the distance between windows is slightly wider directly beneath the location of the vents.
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So, what is the attraction to the VRE Boise Budds? Well, their history, in the first place. But, then, there was the very distinctive clickety clack that is noticeably missing on newer trains with more insulation. But, most of all, it was one last chance to ride aboard a Budd Company streamliner car.
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