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San Francisco’s Adolph Sutro, the self-made millionaire who designed Sutro Heights and later the second Cliff House, developed the amazing Sutro Baths in 1894.  The baths became a major attraction for the entire Bay Area, from San Jose to San Raphael. He constructed an ocean pool aquarium among the rocks ... Read More »

The new RMS TITANIC game is based on James Cameron’s massively successful 1997 movie Titanic, catapulting its stars Leonardo DiCaprio and Kate Winslet into Hollywood super-stardom. Spin Master Games has used the 1997 movie Titanic for its inspiration for the game, pulling the characters that Cameron used in the movie ... Read More »

Pacific Southwest Airlines (PSA) was a California airline headquartered in San Diego that operated from 1949 to 1988. It was the first large discount airline in the United States. PSA called itself “The World’s Friendliest Airline” and painted a smile on its airplanes’ nose, the PSA Grinningbirds. PSA was very successful and a ... Read More »

The Santa Fe introduced the streamliner on June 6, 1954; it was Santa Fe’s last new streamliner and its first direct train from Chicago to the San Francisco Bay Area via Fresno and the San Joaquin Valley. Like the other Santa Fe passenger trains, the streamliners Golden Gates serving the ... Read More »

For first-class passengers aboard ocean liners and cruises, from the 1930s into the 1960s, the menu choices were staggering. On ships like the SS Europa, RMS Queen Mary, and the SS United States, dinner might have had 12 courses, with 8 to 10 options for each course. It is difficult ... Read More »

More than a century after the Titanic sank in April 1912; few new stories surface from the wreck. When documentary filmmaker Arthur Jones and his team started work on “The Six” — their film about the ship’s six Chinese survivors — in 2012, they kept expecting to find that someone ... Read More »

From 1949 until 1970, the California Zephyr operated daily during the 1950s and 1960s between Chicago and San Francisco. Over two days and nights, across prairies, through canyons, over (and through) mountains, on a timetable that maximized the impact of the scenery for tourists rather than meeting the schedule of ... Read More »

Chewing gum magnate William Wrigley Jr.’s twin interests in baseball and Catalina Island – he bought Catalina in 1919 and gained a controlling interest in the Chicago Cubs in 1921 – dovetailed nicely when he made the decision to have the Cubs train on Catalina starting in 1921.  In doing ... Read More »

Premiere Passenger Trains during the 1950s were the finest in the world. With excellent meals, suburb Pullman service, dinner in the diner, club lounges, train secretaries, barbershops, cocktail bars, observation cars… trains like the Super Chief, 20th Century Limited, and the California Zypher were world-famous.   New York Central’s streamlined ... Read More »

During these difficult times, cruise lines are scrambling to ride out the global health crisis and the suspension of operations. Carnival Corporation is one of those companies which is making efforts to ride out the bad times by selling off cruise ships and now possibly even selling cruise lines. According ... Read More »