In 1937 the Southern Pacific trumpeted a new train in full-page magazine ads:
Let us stand by the tracks of Southern Pacific's Coast Line, as thousands now do every day and listen.Suddenly from far off comes a musical note, rising. Round a curve flashes a streak of color. Here comes the Daylight, the most beautiful train in the West!
The Daylights linked Los Angeles and San Francisco "in a glorious daylight trip, streaking along the Pacific Ocean for more than a hundred breathless miles." Travelers were invited to "Step inside the Daylight and see the beauty and luxury that have already won the West. Notice the wide, soft seats in the coaches. They are cushioned with sponge rubber and turn to face the extraordinarily large windows." Presenting a glorious streak of orange and red from locomotive to observation car, the Daylights were a sharp departure from the SP's normal dark olive passenger cars.
Leading the trains were the Southern Pacific's class GS (for "Golden State") Northerns, arguably among the handsomest steam engines ever built. Constructed by Lima Locomotive Works, inventor of the super-power concept, the Daylight 4-8-4s had the combination of power and speed that characterized steam power at its zenith. Class GS-4 engines, delivered in 1941 and 1942, were among the last and best-looking of the breed, with tall 80" drivers and enclosed all-weather cabs. In addition to handling premier passenger trains, the Golden State 4-8-4s were regularly used on the SP's famed Overnight high-speed freight service. Long before FedEx existed, it provided overnight business deliveries between San Francisco and Los Angeles, carrying everything from groceries to replacement car engines.
A lone GS-4, No. 4449, was saved from the scrapper and donated to the city of Portland, Oregon, where it sat mounted and stuffed in a city park for 16 years. Jack Holst, an elderly Southern Pacific employee, visited the engine regularly, oiling its bearings and rods in the hope that it would someday return to steam. As a result of his efforts, No. 4449 was in good enough shape that it was chosen as the western engine for the American Freedom Train, returning to steam just four months to begin touring the country in 1975 in celebration of our nation's 200th anniversary. Repainted in Daylight colors, the engine still operates today in excursion service.
The lightweight, streamlined passenger car was a product of the Great Depression. While the heavyweight steel cars built in the teens and 1920s were dependable and often luxurious, their dark colors and solid, battleship-like exteriors did little to lift the spirits at a time when the entire nation needed a pick-me-up. As noted railroad historian John H. White, Jr. put it in The American Railroad Passenger Car, "Some hope during these gloomy years was offered by a new design concept called streamlining. It presented a sleek, modern image of speed and innovation. What had been an obscure technical term in aerodynamics was made into a household word through an astute publicity campaign mounted by severalrailroad traffic departments. It succeeded in creating a general interest in railroading practically unknown since the opening of the first transcontinental line. According to Railway Age, 'For the first time in many years, the words 'sold out' re-entered the ticket clerk's vocabulary.'"
But as White notes, the real change in passenger car construction was in weight, not the streamlined appearance that was largely for show: "Weight, not air friction, was the chief obstacle to economic operation." Unlike the heavyweights, the lightweight cars that debuted in the mid-1930s featured sides and roofs that contributed to their structural strength, eliminating the need for the heavyweights' massive underframes. Trucks went from six wheels to four, non-revenue space was decreased by using a vestibule on only one end of the car, and lighter, stronger, more rust resistant steel alloys came into widespread use. A typical new lightweight could be 15-20 tons lighter than the heavyweight car it replaced.
As with the diesel revolution that was simultaneously taking place, one of the key players in the changeover to lightweights was not an established industry name, but an upstart new player from the automotive industry: the Budd Company of Philadelphia, a supplier of auto body stampings. In 1928, Edward G. Budd had heard about stainless steel, a lightweight, rustproof metal introduced in 1912 by Krupp of Germany. Budd was the first to grasp the potential of stainless beyond cutlery and novelty items. The key problem was the inability of stainless steel to be fabricated with normal welding techniques. Budd's chief engineer, Colonel Earl J.W. Ragsdale, spent five years developing the key process needed to make stainless into a viable structural material: the patented Shotweld electric welding process.
Beginning with the Burlington's Pioneer Zephyr of 1934, gleaming Budd-built trains, constructed almost entirely of stainless, helped define the look of the streamlined era to the American public - even on railroads like the Pennsylvania and Norfolk and Western that painted over the stainless with company colors. While other car builders such as Pullman countered with stainless-sheathed steel cars like the Southern Pacific's Daylights, they were forced to use rivets rather than welding for construction. In later years, the result was that Budd cars lasted almost indefinitely, while the stainless-sheathed imitators were plagued with out-of-sight rusting under the sheathing.
The majority of lightweights were 80'-85' long, which scales out to about 21" in O gauge. Many O gauge modelers, however, find cars of this length impractical, as they require large curves and create long trains that can overwhelm a typical-sized layout. For those reasons, our Premier lightweights are about 70 scale feet in length - reproducing the look and feel of prototype streamliners in a model that will round O-42 curves with ease and look at home on most scale-detailed O gauge layouts.
