PAGING AMERICAN FLYER. The elder Walter Dorwin Teague, who design historians tend to recognize for his work on consumer goods and airliners, also worked with Pullman's Osgood Bradley division and the New Haven Railroad to design a fleet of streamlined passenger coaches that were on northeastern rails a little bit ahead of the Union Pacific's and Burlington's motor trains and well ahead of the Hiawatha (or the Coronation). The largest fleet was on New Haven, with Bangor and Aroostook and Boston and Maine also using the design. (A few railroads outside New England also bought such cars.)


The design allowed for easy tooling in a tin shop, with New Haven's A.C. Gilbert quickly turning out S (and later O-27) approximation of the cars, which may be the first time in ferroequinology that a fleet of prototype cars received a nickname based on a model. (Yes, American Flyer put names on incorrect cars: only Bangor and Aroostook had Teague baggage cars.)

I just received the 40^th anniversary issue of Passenger Train Journal, which included an intriguing article on the Alaska Railroad's passenger trains, including an interior shot of what looked like an updated American Flyer car. The article mentioned some Pullman-design cars licensed to Daewoo. I did a bit more research and came up with some exterior shots.

Going shot of a train Near Denali, from the Alaska Railroad gallery.

Here's a roster shot.

Alaska Rails image.

I suppose the roof had to be squared-off for manufacturing practicality. Now, if Amtrak ever had a proper capital budget, wouldn't a rake of these look good on the Downeasters or the Northeast Regionals? Heck, I wouldn't mind some being assigned to the Hiawathas and the Illinois service. The Passenger Train Journal article noted that Daewoo built the cars for Alaska in order to establish a presence in the North American rolling stock market.

PLAY VALUE. Tonight's CBS Christmas special, "The Man who Saved Christmas," might just be a Christmas heart-tugger, or it might be a shameless ploy for paid family leave, day-care at the office, and saying no to the overtime treadmill, or it might be Franklin Roosevelt's first opportunity to say happy days are here again, but it is based on a real person. There was an A. C. Gilbert, and his company did make Erector sets, and later the American Flyer line of S gauge toy trains (they did make some three-rail O Gauge as well). Gilbert's inspiration for the Erector sets is the latticed metalwork installed as part of the New Haven Railroad electrification, according to this source, and American Flyer might be the only toy manufacturer to have named a series of railway coaches. The lightweight coaches manufactured for the New Haven and assorted other railroads by Osgood-Bradley were simply intended as full-length streamlined coaches. Because many of these coaches ran through New Haven, the Gilbert Company built models of them for their American Flyer line and offered them for sale. Enthusiasts often refer to the full-size coaches as "American Flyer cars," although as far as I know no railroad ever referred to them in those terms.

Endorsement: there are six of the new Weaver coaches as well as four from other sources now running on the railroad. The Weaver coaches are a good buy for the money although some might want to modify a few things to achieve full prototype fidelity. I will allocate time to building the diners and parlor cars to go with them.

REHABILITATING AMFLEET. William Polley recommends the Kansas City, er, Illinois Zephyr, and the American Royal, or is it the Carl Sandburg? He's not alone in Everywhere West country. Senator Durbin has asked Amtrak president Alex Kummant for some more seats.

Durbin asked Kummant to bring five rail cars to Illinois to add capacity to those routes, as well as ones between Chicago and St. Louis and Chicago and Carbondale. Kummant has agreed to have five rail cars rehabilitated and ready for immediate use on the routes by the end of this year.

Five cars, to be pulled from the dead line at Wilmington, Delaware, or perhaps Beech Grove, Indiana, and put back in shape for probably seventy seats each on the Quincy and Carbondale trains and one St. Louis trip. We're a long way from spare commuter cars available for weekend excursions to Wisconsin Dells or that huge fleet of Pullman 12 & 1s that once hauled rich retirees to and from Florida each winter and rich kids to and from summah camp in Maine.

A related article notes intermodal developments at Galesburg.

Those Amfleet cars to be rehabilitated are thirtysomethings. Amtrak bought them to replace thirtysomething stainless steel cars built in that period of optimism about passenger trains immediately after World War II.

It's time for some new coaches for Amtrak. My vote is for those Alaskan latter-day American Flyer cars.

I hope to have pictures of some slightly smaller traditional American Flyers and 12 & 1s running by Christmas.

THEY MADE SOME TRAINS WORTH TRAVELING AGAIN.

Amtrak began operating on 1 May, 1971.  The title of this post refers to their original slogan.  Here's coverage of the first day in Milwaukee, where we no longer had train service to Green Bay, but we regained a train to Seattle.  Today, we'll look at some evidence of what has changed (sometimes for the better) and what has stagnated.

Let's start with the Empire Builder, my canonical example of an overpurposed train.  By Thanksgiving of 1971, it had become what looked very much like a Burlington Northern train, despite Milwaukee Road, and on occasion Union Pacific or Gulf Mobile and Ohio diesels in charge.

I WANT THOSE AMERICAN FLYER CARS. Senator Durbin has become an advocate for expanding Amtrak.

The Democrat's proposal includes seeking authorization for Amtrak to issue up to $2.8 billion in bonds annually to pay for such projects. He also says he'd like to see Illinois as one of the centers of a rejuvenated industry.

Durbin spoke today in Chicago between meetings with Amtrak president Alex Kummant.

Kummant says ridership is expected to boom further from around 25 million riders a year now to 50 million in ten years.

He says that means Amtrak's current fleet of 1,500 passengers cars and 400 locomotives would have to double.

Here are my candidate cars (keep scrolling). I'd like to see more sleepers, club cars, and consideration of dome cars.

The Chicago - Rockford - Dubuque train is part of this expansion.

THE CREAKY ROLLING BANK VAULT.

I had occasion to ride the Acela Express a couple of different times early in 2001, i.e. before the terrorist attacks.  At the time, the trains rode rather solidly, as you would expect of something built to North American crashworthiness standards and expected to be Amtrak's entry in the bullet train sweepstakes.  The paired windows put me in mind of the prewar "American Flyer" lightweight cars common on New Haven and Boston and Maine, and for a while the name American Flyer was in the running for the name of the fleet.  "Acela" is a neologist portmanteau of "acceleration" and "excellence" undoubtedly cooked up by an expensive steering committee.

Images and commentary below the jump.

DONALD TRUMP, CHAMPIONING THE BABBITTS.

Sing unto me, O Muse, of reality dawning on Ruy "Liberal Patriot" Teixeira.  "In the wake of the Democrats’ drubbing at the hands of Donald Trump and the GOP, you’d assume the party would be all-in on a fundamental rethink, starting with some serious soul-searching on how the party came to be so out of sync with the majority of America on key cultural questions."

And thus will the promised epic post, with musical interludes, on the impatience of the Normals with Their Intellectual Betters commences.

Chris Cuomo joins the chorus.  “That’s exactly why you lost the election. You are out of touch. You lost the plot about how people feel in the majority. That’s what you did.”  As does Thomas "Listen, Liberal" Frank.  "Liberals had nine years to decipher Mr. Trump’s appeal — and they failed. The Democrats are a party of college graduates, as the whole world understands by now, of Ph.D.s and genius-grant winners and the best consultants money can buy."

Joel Kotkin is thinking along similar lines.

The traditional Democratic focus on class mobility would be far more effective than their current approach, which is largely shaped by their own ideological and sociological bubbles rather than the concerns of regular Americans. As long-time Democratic operative Van Jones has observed, once voters choose wrongly, they’re dismissed as racists and fascists. It goes without saying that this kind of selective scapegoating is not a workable political strategy.

People who voted with the winning side concur.  Rita Panahi puts it bluntly.  "One of the main reasons behind the political alignment we’re seeing in the West is that the working & middle classes finally woke up to the fact that the Left hates them."  The editors at Issues & Insights spike the football.

Despite having won five of the last eight presidential elections, the Democratic Party today is in far worse shape than it was in 1980.

It has been completely overrun by its America-hating, DEI-ESG-CRT-socialist-Marxist-spewing radical fringe, which obsesses over things such as “transgender” rights and a phony climate crisis instead of jobs and opportunity.

You don't have to dig that deep into the polemical reservoir.

REJECT THE FALSE BINARY.

Haven't the Establishment Pundits inflicted enough pain on us already?

Not somebody who suggested the way to punish Republicans who were too Trump-friendly is to vote for Democrats, no way. That is to say, S. E. Cupp, and the Bulwark types, and George Will. The pompous, bow-tied, Chicago Cub and American Flyer fan is still at it, still trying to shame the Trumpian elements of the Republican coalition.

Mr Will recognized, dimly, what his advocacy brought.  Follow the link if you want.  It's this message I want to reinforce.  "Dear reader, if you're uneasy about that sort of Republican ...  and your choice is between a Trumpian showboater and a Squad-adjacent Democrat, reject the false binary, and don't let those irritated rumps on the extreme get your vote.  There might be libertarians or socialists or free-soilers elsewhere on the ballot."

Earlier today, I had a little fun with one of the Bulwark types.

Dear #NeverTrump crowd, reject the false binary. Your "punish the Trumpians by electing Democrats" contributed to this. https://t.co/x2zXCSckEM

— Stephen Karlson (@StephenKarlson) June 24, 2022

But I also came across a somewhat foolish column by occasional Reason contributor Steve Chapman.

Now is a terrible time for sane, sensible Republicans. It's not bad enough that in 2020, Americans installed Joe Biden in the presidency with a Democratic Congress. Worse is that their fellow Republicans have become a dire threat to common sense, mature governance and constitutional democracy.

The Jan. 6 committee hearings have made it plain that the critical divide in this country is not between Republicans and Democrats. It's between Republicans and Republicans.

He could have noted, as a number of people with bigger platforms than I have, that the national election of 2020 was popular sentiment to gridlock the national government, with the Democrats only getting that slim margin thanks to Donald Trump being his own worst enemy and queering the pitch in the Georgia Senate runoffs.  That filled the Jarrett regency with all sorts of delusions, and we find ourselves scrambling for baby formula, scrimping to fuel the cars, and being told by Our Intellectual Betters to buy electric cars.

That makes Mr Chapman's advice to more traditional Republicans sound tone-deaf.

Republicans who follow in the path of Ronald Reagan and Jack Kemp, once conservative heroes, are now outnumbered and reviled as RINOs.

How can they fight back? They can, of course, run and support primary candidates who are willing to break with Trump, his lies and his reckless indulgence of extremism.

But when that fails, they also have to be prepared to do what many have never done before: vote Democratic. However large their differences on taxes, abortion rights, oil drilling or immigration, they agree with Democrats on the most urgent issue of our day, which is upholding the Constitution and saving democracy.

We have to look no further than the streets of Washington, D.C. on days other than 6 January 2021, or the empty jails of Democrat cities to see the kind of regard Democrats have for regular order.  Mr Chapman's advice simply gives the agenda of Bernie Sanders more purchase than it otherwise would have.

TODAY'S MODEL RAILROAD READING. In the Shadow of Mount Hollywood discovers the downside of operating your model railroad according to the prototype.

I came away from my discovery with a good deal of admiration and respect for Jacques, and increased frustration at my fellow hobbyists, who by and large don't share this admiration and respect -- I was, in fact, attending a meeting of fellow hobbyists, and one of the centerpiece presentations covered how a fellow was, in pedantic detail, duplicating the bureaucratic paperwork attendant to moving iron ore that was used by the real railroads in the pre-computer age on his model railroad layout. I much prefer the Lee Jacques approach. In fact, one of Jacques Barzun's most telling critiques of Western bourgeois culture is its glorification of pedantry (James Bond, after all, wanted his martinis shaken, not stirred).

The "pedantic detail" clearly refers to the modeller of an iron ore hauling railroad, who wants the switch crew working the ore dock to provide the proper mix of ores into the hold of the boat -- did you think smelting iron simply involved dumping some rocks into a furnace, applying some heat, and crossing your fingers? -- and perhaps going so far as to pull the tracks in the order the cars were emptied, so as to avoid breaking the boat's back.

But the hobby has many individuals for whom the height of excitement is shuffling hopper cars at a mine, or shuffling boxcars in Peoria. The discipline of clearing the main line for a first-class train while keeping the other trains active escapes them.

The Jacques he refers to is Francis Lee Jacques, wildlife illustrator and early kitbasher (a Depression era model railroad, improvised out of American Flyer mechanisms, in preservation in Chisholm, Minnesota) who apparently did a fine job of improvising with the materials he had.

Scratchbuilding and kit-bashing are becoming lost arts. There is so much good stuff available ready-to-run (gains from trade with China and Korea at work) that modellers have more time to think about the paperwork, and preprinted forms for the paperwork are available now from Micro Mark.

The scratch builders still have the circus to turn to: ready-built circus models are still not as easily available, but the standard of work the best craftsmen have set is pretty good.

HINTS OF ADVANCING AGE. What message is there in this Chicago and North Western Commuter Streamliner, a few of which were still in revenue service in 1986-1987 when I started at Northern Illinois, now the air-conditioned diesel train at the Illinois Railway Museum?


The train includes one of the original North Western gallery commuter coaches, as well as one of the early cab control cars, allowing the museum to run trains in both directions without a conductor on the cow's tail.

For that matter, here's a Milwaukee "New Look" bus from the class that used to get me home from Allen-Bradley. It's been in preservation long enough to rate a vintage vehicle license tag, in this instance one recognizing that buses in this style were known among bus enthusiasts as "fishbowls."


Elsewhere on the grounds, the car shop is doing what Cold Spring Shops used to do, preparing streetcars for use on the Wells St. line (does the roll sign include "County Stadium"?)


Here's an unusual item in a Midwestern museum. These motors provided the prototype for early Lionel, Ives, and American Flyer electric locomotives of the Christmas-tree-circling type. That supposedly too-small pantograph on the Lionel units was in fact a believable representation of the fitting used to draw power from overhead contact rails in the throat of Grand Central Terminal.


Is there a better looking power source for a passenger train than an E unit?


And enough rolling stock was out of the barn to permit a relatively unobstructed view of an Electroliner.


Museum visitors continue to marvel that such a modern-looking train is in the collection. It has been in the museum collection longer than it served either the North Shore Line or Philadelphia Suburban.

IT'S TORNADO SEASON.

Model railroad swap meet season is winding down, as later sunsets and warmer temperatures draw people out of their basements.  One of the final shows of the year in the North West Frontier is the Depot Stove Gang show at Lena-Winslow High School.  The traders run heavily to secondhand HO scale trains, as well as Lionel and American Flyer.  The show offers a convenient excuse to patronize a local craft brewery that knows how to make lagers and stouts.

It's probably a good thing this sort of craft project wasn't a thing when I was in kindergarten or elementary school as I would be tempted to add a dome or two to each of those tank cars.

School administrators are comfortable enough with the traditional forms to post advice in the lunch room.

You'd think some of those things would go without saying.  Such, though, are the times we live in.

And now the students, and their teachers, and the support staff, have a new challenge.  "Lena-Winslow School District prepares to go back to school after devastating tornado."  That storm hit Friday a week ago, as students were gathering for a concert.

Part of the school’s roof was ripped off during Friday’s storm, causing damage and leaving students and staff sheltering inside.

Band director Renee Schultz says dozens of students were already in the building for a music event when the weather quickly turned.

She says the moment the tornado hit was intense.

“It felt like the building got picked up and sucked up,” said Schultz. “There was a pressure change and then it was like how people describe it, like a freight train and the doors shaking and all of that.”

Despite the damage, no one was hurt. Superintendent Tom Chiles says students and staff responded quickly and professionally.

“Their reaction to the whole situation couldn’t have been any better,” said Chiles. “I thought our adults handled it really well and then the kids listened to those directions very well and that’s why we didn’t have any injuries.”

The storm left visible damage to the building, including the stage area and parts of the roof.

Chiles hosted an open house Wednesday which allowed families to walk through the school, ease some anxiety and feel more comfortable after what many describe as a traumatic experience.

“I just felt it was important that if kids really did feel a lot of trauma, to have mom or dad with them when they got back into the same space again,” explained Chiles.

One parent says their six-year-old daughter was at school when the twister hit.

“So, we wanted to make sure to stop back in and make sure she was good to go, and it looks like so far so good,” said Morgan Howe a parent at Lena-Winslow School District.

Chiles says repairs will take time and could be costly, but much of the building has already been secured and cleared for students to return.

The kids listened when the adults talked, and that made tornado day less bad than it could have been.  Classes resumed Thursday.  If the Depot Stove Gang announce tornado relief efforts we'll let you know.

RAILROADS CONNECT PEOPLE.

A few years ago, Union Pacific sent Big Boy 4014 on a tour of its metals, and ferroequinologist and casual observer alike came to trackside.  To call attention to a unification that no political power could dream of, Canadian Pacific is sending a passenger Hudson, 2816, on what it calls the Final Spike Tour, with the train and assorted exhibits making calls in British, French, and Spanish North America, er, Canada, the United States, and Mexico.

The train called at Davenport, Iowa, Friday last week.

The Final Spike Tour is on its way to Kansas City, where on Friday the combined railroad's new livery will be revealed.  Other calls will be May 28 at Laredo, June 7 at Mexico City, and June 30 at Winnipeg.  No protracted stops have been announced for that June jump back to Winnipeg.

THE LATTER DAY TRACKLESS TROLLEY.

Milwaukee will be getting a new bus rapid transit line.

The Federal Transit Administration is supposed to pick up most of the tab for the project.

[The transit authority] said in a statement Thursday that riders will be able to enter the buses through either the front or back entrances due to wider aisles and level boarding.

The buses are able to operate 247 miles on a single charge. During the winter months, diesel-powered heaters will be installed to keep the passenger department comfortable.

I wonder if there will be Hamburg-style recharging installations at the ends of the line, where the buses lay over.

Work on those reserved lanes and safety islands is now under way.

Expected to be operational by October of 2022, battery-powered electric buses will connect Milwaukee's lakefront, Marquette University, Milwaukee's near west side, Wauwatosa, Froedtert, the Medical College of Wisconsin, and Children's Wisconsin. It will also link people to areas like Fiserv Forum, the Art Museum, American Family Field, and Milwaukee County Zoo.

Does anyone else have memories of the Wells-Wauwatosa car line of long ago?  The last remnants of that line, from near Cathedral Square to Hoyt Park in Wauwatosa and Allis-Chalmers in West Allis, with direct access to County Stadium, quit running in March 1958.

One reason the Wells cars kept running as long as they did was Milwaukee's city engineers wondered about converting the Wells Street streetcar-only viaduct to a busway.

Wells Street Viaduct postcard courtesy
Wisconsin Electric Railway Historical Society.

That conversion proved not to make sense, and city officials of the era thought extra-fare "Freeway Flyer" buses running on the new expressways to park and ride lots at the outer parts of the county were the way to go.  Up to a point, but not so much, and even in Milwaukee there are a lot of days when the expressway isn't expressing.

The new trackless trolleys will use a reservation on the Wisconsin Avenue viaduct just to the south of Wells.  Whether road-ragey motorists on the Avenue will put up with their stroad being put on a road diet for the use by buses that city officials envision as enhancing service to transit-dependent populations remains to be seen.

As part of the lead-up to the project commencing, one guest on that Milwaukee radio station indulged in some wishes for a light rail service from the Summerfest grounds past the baseball stadium and the fairgrounds, and on to Waukesha.  Um, there's an expressway where that used to be.