Tag Archives: PULLMAN

The New York to Detroit market was once crowded with trains, served primarily by the New York Central and Pennsylvania while the Baltimore & Ohio also offered exceptional services via Washington, D.C. The trains weren’t the victims of cancellation due to weather. The North Easter last week wouldn’t have stopped ... Read More »

Star of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, Janet Leigh is ready to board the famous SUPER CHIEF and Virginia Leith, star of A KISS BEFORE DYING shows us the all-Pullman train during the 1950s in a promotional film. Even the characters from TV’s MAD MEN may have been aboard the train all ... Read More »

Southern Pacific’s streamlined Shasta Daylight train operated daily between San Francisco, California (by ferry boat to Oakland), and Portland, Oregon through the 1950s and into the early 1960s. From 1949 until 1966, the custom-built daylight train had a tight 15-hour-30-minute schedule in either direction for the 713-mile trip through some of the most beautiful ... 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 »

From the late 1930s to the 1950s, Hollywood adopted the Super Chief as the primary mode of travel as well as the subject of novels and motion pictures. In MGM’s The Hucksters, a brutal satire on the ad industry, Clark Gable says to another character: “Only talent agents and kept ... Read More »

From the devilish mountain peaks, deep gorges to a temperamental bridge, these trains cross some of the world’s most spectacular and downright dangerous landscapes. If you can handle hair-raising bends and gut-clenching drops, take a ride on the world’s most dangerous railways. Here are the twelve famous dangerous railways featured ... Read More »

“Elvis who?”   Photographer Alfred Wertheimer recalls uttering that very question in early 1956. A publicist from RCA Victor Records had contacted him, asking if he was available to photograph a young singer named Elvis Presley. “I’d never heard of the man,” Wertheimer told TIME Magazine in an article 40 ... Read More »

Star of Alfred Hitchcock’s PSYCHO, Janet Leigh is ready to board the famous SUPER CHIEF and Virginia Leith, star of A KISS BEFORE DYING shows us the all-Pullman train during the 1950s in a promotional film. Even the characters from TV’s MAD MEN may have been aboard the train all ... Read More »

Faced with the likely loss of the 1948 presidential elections, President Harry S. Truman set out from Washington on September 17 on a twelve-day cross-country political barnstorming trip aboard the “Truman Special” from Washington Union Station. The barnstorming “Truman Special” makes a whistle-stop. At the last minute, wealthy Democrats had come ... Read More »

Messageries Maritimes was a French merchant shipping company. It was originally created in 1851 as Messageries Nationales, later called Messageries impériales, and from 1871, Compagnie des Messageries Maritimes, casually known as “MesMar” or by its initials “MM”. Its rectangular house flag, with the letters MM on a white background and ... Read More »