Out of the approximately 120,000 steam locomotives built and used in the United States, only about 220 were streamlined—referred to as steamlined by the Chicago & North Western—for passenger service. The decision to streamline these locomotives was driven by several practical reasons.
First, many railroads, like the Burlington, wanted to keep steam locomotives as backups in case the diesel engines powering most of their streamliners broke down. Diesel engines were relatively new, and their reliability wasn’t fully proven at the time, so having a backup steam locomotive ensured that operations wouldn’t be disrupted.
Second, some railroads, such as the Milwaukee Road, didn’t believe diesel locomotives were powerful enough to reliably pull a full-sized train. The demand for passenger travel in their markets required more than the small, three- or four-car streamliners that Union Pacific and Burlington had pioneered. Although the Santa Fe demonstrated in 1937 that diesel engines could handle full-sized trains, other railroads held on to steam technology for many years afterward, often because it was more familiar and reliable.
Third, streamlining an existing steam locomotive was a much cheaper alternative to purchasing new diesel engines. Some railroads realized that adding a streamlined shroud to an older steam locomotive made it look modern, fast, and new, at a fraction of the cost of new, expensive, and unproven diesel engines. Even the Union Pacific, known for its diesel-powered streamliners, occasionally ran trains with shrouded steam locomotives, adding to their fleet of “streamliners.”
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The New York Central was the first railroad in the United States to fully streamline a steam locomotive, adding a shovel-nose shroud to a three-year-old Hudson (4-6-4) locomotive and naming it the Commodore Vanderbilt. Unveiled to the public in December 1934, the locomotive began revenue service in February 1935, pulling the railroad’s prestigious, though still heavyweight, 20th Century Limited. The Central later applied a nearly identical shroud to a 4-8-2 steam locomotive, which was used to haul a rolling showroom for the Rexall Drug Company.
The New York Central claimed that their tests showed streamlining allowed the locomotive to pull between 2.5 to 12 percent more weight. While the higher number may be optimistic, the truth likely lies closer to the lower figure. Streamlining, it seems, was more about marketing than about creating faster or more efficient locomotives.
As designer Otto Kuhler pointed out in a 1935 speech, despite significant technological advancements—such as superheating and roller bearings—“the man on the street” couldn’t easily tell the difference between a 1915 locomotive and one from 1935. Adding a streamlined shroud made the older engine appear more modern and special, as some railroads would later discover when they applied shrouds to locomotives built much earlier.
The next streamlined locomotives were the Hiawathas, introduced in April 1935. Designed by Otto Kuhler, the significance of these locomotives lies in the fact that they were the first American steam engines to be streamlined at the time of their construction, rather than being shrouded with a streamlined casing later. This was a major step forward in locomotive design, as it marked a move toward purpose-built streamlined steam engines, rather than retrofitting older models. The Hiawathas set a new standard for both performance and aesthetic appeal in American railroading.
In response to rival New York Central, the Pennsylvania Railroad asked Raymond Loewy–probably the world’s leading industrial designer–to design a shroud for one of its many Pacific locomotives. Loewy’s design, sometimes called a torpedo or bullet style, looked much more like a steam locomotive–but a very fast one–than the Zephyr that the Commodore Vanderbilt was clearly imitating. Loewy’s style would be favored for most future steamliners, even those designed by Dreyfuss.
On the West Coast, the Southern Pacific Railroad was another that was cautious about fully embracing diesel locomotives. As a result, when the railroad streamlined its San Francisco-Los Angeles trains, it opted to order semi-streamlined Northern (4-8-4) locomotives from Lima, often referred to as the “Chrysler of steam locomotive manufacturers.” The first of these locomotives entered service in March 1937, and eventually, Southern Pacific would own 36 of them.
While these locomotives lacked full streamlining, they were highly popular, particularly due to their striking bright orange-and-red color scheme, which made them stand out on the rails. In addition to these Northern locomotives, the Southern Pacific also semi-streamlined some older 1913-built Pacifics for use on its Sunbeam train, which ran between Dallas and Houston. These semi-streamlined designs allowed the Southern Pacific to maintain the modern, streamlined look while staying true to their trusted steam locomotives.
Also in March, 1937, Baldwin Locomotive Works delivered the first of ten streamlined Hudson locomotives to the New Haven Railroad, which operated between Boston and New York. The engines pulled a train called the Shore Liner between Boston and New Haven.
In April, 1937, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy unveiled the Æolus, which it billed as the first stainless-steel streamlined steam locomotive. Based on a three-year-old Hudson, locomotive #4000 was actually the first of two–the other numbered 4001–both named Æolus. (Click here to download a PDF of a Burlington brochure on the Æolus.)
Rail crews called the locomotives “Big Alice the Goon,” after a character out of Popeye. But they were fast, easily reaching 100 mph and, rumor has it, sometimes hitting 120 mph. Of course, they were designed to resemble the Zephyr locomotives, even down to the grills, and the profile of the tenders perfectly matched that of the Twin or Denver Zephyr’s lead car.
In 1937, the Union Pacific inaugurated the 49er, a five-times-a-month all-Pullman train from Chicago to Oakland to complement its five-times-a-month City of San Francisco on the same route. Except for the observation car, all the cars on the Pullman train were heavyweights. To give it a streamlined aura, it shrouded two locomotives: a 4-6-2 and a 4-8-2.
The locomotives were painted in a distinctive brown color with bright yellow and red trim to match the railroad’s Diesel-powered streamliners, although they were actually pulling heavyweight trains rather than the lighter, more modern streamliners. The 4-6-2 locomotives were used on the plains between Omaha and Cheyenne, where the terrain was relatively flat, while the more powerful 4-8-2 locomotives were assigned to the mountainous routes between Cheyenne and Ogden, where the demanding grades required extra power. This division allowed the railroad to use the most appropriate locomotives for different sections of the route, balancing both performance and aesthetics.
Otto Kuhler designed the 1937 Royal Blue, which was the Baltimore & Ohio’s attempt to compete with the Pennsylvania in the New York-Washington corridor. His bullet-style streamlining was applied to a ten-year-old Pacific locomotive that had been built by Baldwin. The streamlining didn’t last long, as the B&O replaced the locomotive with General Motors E units in 1939. After going unstreamlined for eight years, the locomotive was later re-streamlined for the Cincinnatian.
In December 1937, the Philadelphia and Reading Railroad introduced the Crusader, a sleek, Budd-built train that, starting the following February, made twice-daily round trips between Philadelphia and Jersey City, which was just a short ferry ride from lower Manhattan. To avoid the need for turning the train at each terminus, the stainless steel Crusader featured observation cars at both ends, allowing it to easily reverse direction without any hassle.
The matching stainless steel steam locomotive, originally built in 1918, was also streamlined and featured a unique design: its tender wrapped around the observation car. While this likely obstructed some of the views from the observation car, it may have helped increase the tender’s capacity. Additionally, the locomotive’s shroud added 12 percent more weight (nearly 33,000 pounds). While this made the locomotive heavier, the added weight was not necessarily a downside for steam engines, as it provided more traction, enabling faster starts with less slippage.
In January 1938, Baldwin delivered a streamlined Hudson to the Santa Fe Railroad. The locomotive weighed about 8,000 pounds more than its non-streamlined counterparts and cost approximately $15,000 more than the other Hudsons in the same order. Although the Santa Fe initially planned to use the locomotive for its passenger trains, it did not attempt to replicate its iconic Warbonnet color scheme. Instead, the streamlined Hudson was painted light blue, giving it a distinct appearance.
The Santa Fe used this streamlined Hudson, along with its unstreamlined sister locomotives, to pull passenger trains on the nearly 1,000-mile route between Chicago and La Junta, Colorado. Despite the addition of streamlining, the locomotive’s role was largely similar to the other Hudsons, helping the railroad maintain long-distance passenger service on this significant route.
In September, 1939, Alco–the same company that made the Milwaukee’s Hiawatha locomotives–delivered new Kuhler-designed streamlined locomotives to the Chicago & North Western that the railroad bragged were the largest and most powerful Hudsons ever. Painted dark green with yellow stripes, the locomotives were intended for use on the 400 in competition with the Hiawathas. Ironically they turned out to be more powerful than needed for the day trains that ran between Chicago and the Twin Cities, so the C&NW used them for the Chicago-Omaha trains that connected with the Union Pacific to the West Coast.
In March 1938, the New York Central received the first of ten Hudson locomotives built by Alco and streamlined according to a design by Henry Dreyfuss. These locomotives are arguably the most famous streamlined steam engines ever, largely due to the relentless promotional efforts of the New York Central’s publicity department. They were intended to pull the railroad’s new streamlined 20th Century Limited, which also featured Dreyfuss’ design expertise.
While Dreyfuss chose the bullet style for these locomotives—setting them apart from the bathtub style he used for the Mercurys—some critics argued that Raymond Loewy’s designs, which emphasized horizontal lines, were better suited for trains. The 20th Century Limited locomotives, on the other hand, emphasized the vertical from the front. This difference sparked debate about the most appropriate styling for locomotives. Later, the New York Central would restreamline the Commodore Vanderbilt in a similar vertical style to match the 20th Century Limited locomotives, highlighting Dreyfuss’ influence on the era’s train design trends.
With an eye on competitor C&NW, the Milwaukee Road took delivery of new Kuhler-streamlined Hudson locomotives from Alco in late 1938. Milwaukee’s Hudson’s were slightly smaller and less powerful than the C&NW’s, but they were sufficient to haul fifteen or more cars between Chicago and the Twin Cities at the Hiawatha’s usual top speeds of more than 100 mph. In fact, they reputedly reached an unofficial top speed of 125 mph, which would make them equal to the fastest officially recorded steam locomotives in the world.
Like the New York Central, the Lehigh Valley Railroad’s main line ran between New York City and Buffalo. However, they weren’t direct competitors, as the Lehigh’s route was more circuitous, resulting in trains taking hours longer than those on the Central’s faster “water-level route.” Despite this, the Lehigh Valley had access to the rich anthracite coal fields, which led the railroad to name its premier train the Black Diamond.
In 1939, the Lehigh Valley asked designer Otto Kuhler to streamline several of its older Pacific locomotives. These locomotives were painted in bright red and black—colors that reflected the distinctive colors of Cornell University, a school the railroad had strong ties with. These streamlined locomotives were paired with similarly painted heavyweight passenger cars that had been remodeled for modern service, giving the Black Diamond a fresh, bold look that still carried the weight of tradition.
In response to Dreyfuss’ 20th Century Limited, the Pennsylvania asked Loewy to design a new Broadway Limited, and as a part of that commission he also helped design the S1, a remarkably innovative “duplex” locomotive, meaning one with two pairs of cylinders, each driving four wheels, whose drivers do not independently rotate with the curvature of the track. The engine had six-wheel leading and trailing trucks, making it the only 6-4-4-6 ever built.
The goal was to build a locomotive as fast and powerful as the GG-1 electric engines that Loewy also helped design. The supposed advantage of two sets of cylinders was that the reciprocating parts that drove the wheels could be lighter in weight and thus cause less damage to track at high speeds. While the S1 was fast and beautiful, its long rigid wheelbase meant it could only work on tracks that had very gentle curves. No more were ever built and the locomotive was scrapped after only ten years.
In December, 1939, the St. Louis and San Francisco Railroad (which never came close to San Francisco) began operating a heavyweight, but semi-streamlined, train between Kansas City and Oklahoma City called the Firefly. The train was pulled by three crudely streamlined Pacific locomotives that dated back to 1910. Locomotive and train were painted blue and aluminum.
Having learned from the experience with the S1 locomotives, the Pennsylvania Railroad decided to order 4-4-4-4 locomotives, designated T1s, from Baldwin. The first of these locomotives were delivered in the spring of 1942 and were enshrouded in a streamlined design by Raymond Loewy, which became known as the “shark-nose” style. Although not as visually striking as the S1, the T1 locomotives operated well enough that the Pennsylvania Railroad eventually purchased 50 units from Baldwin. The T1s were an important part of the Pennsy’s fleet, offering a balance of performance and distinctive design, even if they didn’t capture the same level of aesthetic admiration as their predecessors.
In 1941, Otto Kuhler streamlined a 1923 Alco Pacific locomotive for the Southern Railway, which was to be used on its Tennessean train. This service, in conjunction with the Pennsylvania and Norfolk & Western Railroads, connected New York with Memphis. The streamlined locomotive was painted in a distinctive color scheme, combining the Southern Railway’s signature bright green with the bullet-style design of the B&O Royal Blue. One of the Southern Railway’s bright green Pacific locomotives is now on display at the Smithsonian Museum, serving as a lasting testament to this innovative, streamlined design. The Tennessean locomotive, with its unique combination of color and style, remains a notable example of mid-20th-century American railroading.
In October, 1941, the Norfolk & Western–which built many of its own locomotives–completed the first of fourteen streamlined Northern (4-8-4) steam engines. Large drivers mean faster speeds, but rather than the 80-inch drivers on the Southern Pacific’s Daylights, the N&W elected to put 70-inch drivers on its Northerns and compensate by carefully balancing the drive gear (to minimize track damage at high speeds) and increasing boiler pressures to 300 psi. The resulting locomotives were the most powerful Northerns ever built and nearly twice as powerful as many of the Hudsons streamlined by other railroads.
Later, the railroad also shopped 22 of its Mountain (4-8-2) locomotives with similar styling. A coal railroad, the Norfolk & Western resisted the Diesel revolution for longer than any other major U.S. railroad, and operated these steam locomotives as late as 1958.
In December 1941, the New York Central introduced a new Budd-built train between New York and Cleveland called the Empire State Express. Leading these trains were Dreyfuss-designed Hudson locomotives, which many would argue were an aesthetic improvement over the 20th Century Limited locomotives. These new Hudsons were partly clad in stainless steel, with the boiler and smokebox painted in aluminum and black. This design emphasized the horizontal lines of the locomotive, as opposed to the more vertical emphasis seen on the 20th Century Limited engines. The streamlined design of the Empire State Express locomotives, with their sleek, modern look, helped solidify the New York Central’s reputation for innovation and style in the golden age of rail travel.
The four locomotives for the Baltimore & Ohio’s Cincinnatian, one of which had previously been streamlined by Otto Kuhler for the Royal Blue, were notable for having been designed by Olive Dennis, the first woman civil engineer ever employed by a U.S. railroad. Dennis’ design clearly owes a debt to Kuhler.
The two five-car trains themselves consisted of heavyweight cars modified by B&O shops to appear streamlined. The train operated between Baltimore and Cincinnati from 1947 through 1950, then was changed to a Cincinnati-Detroit run which it maintained until 1956, when Dennis’ steam locomotives were replaced by General Motors Diesels.
In 1946, the mercurial Robert Young–CEO of the Chesapeake and Ohio who was married to Georgia O’Keefe’s sister and who famously criticized American railroads by saying, “A pig can go from coast to coast without changing trains, but you can’t”–ordered a dome-car train from Budd that he planned to run between Washington DC and Cincinnati. To power the train, the C&O–like Norfolk & Western, a coal railroad–rebuilt four two-decade-old Pacific locomotives into Hudson’s with stainless steel sides and a unique, orange-painted, forward-thrusting nose.
Unfortunately, the train, which was to be called the Chessie, never ran, as the railroad decided (based partly on the experience of the B&O’s streamlined Cincinnatian) that there was little market for passengers in that corridor. By 1948 it had sold most of the Budd cars to other railroads. The C&O’s experiments with a steam-turbine locomotive also failed, and the railroad quickly converted to Diesel’s despite its access to cheap coal.
Probably the last “streamlined” train in the U.S. was the City of Memphis, which the Nashville, Chattanooga & St. Louis Railroad began operating between Nashville and Memphis in May 1947. Due to a limited budget, the railroad added a shovel-nose shroud to one of its Pacific locomotives and rebuilt heavyweight passenger cars to give them a streamlined appearance.
According to Kevin Holland’s book Steam Liners, there were 213 streamlined steam locomotives in the U.S., spanning from the Commodore Vanderbilt to the City of Memphis (though not all of these are included in the count). At least 50 Northern locomotives were streamlined, all done by the Southern Pacific and Norfolk & Western Railroads. This number is matched by the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 50 distinctive 4-4-4-4 T1 locomotives. The next largest group of streamlined steam locomotives were the Hudsons, with 43 in total (including the Commodore Vanderbilt, which was streamlined twice), owned by six different railroads.
Additionally, well over a dozen railroads streamlined at least 41 Pacifics, many of which were modifications of existing locomotives, usually between 10 and 25 years old. Other than the Pennsylvania Railroad’s 6-4-4-6, the only other wheel arrangement to be streamlined was the 4-8-2, with the Norfolk & Western doing 22 Mountain-type locomotives, and both the Union Pacific and New York Central each streamlining one, all modifications of older engines.
As noted earlier, the primary reason for streamlining was for publicity rather than practicality. The changes didn’t significantly save energy, partly because the added weight of the streamlining increased the locomotive’s total mass. It also didn’t make the locomotives significantly faster, although other modifications, such as roller bearings, lighter-weight driving rods, and improved balancing, did contribute to better performance.
Many railroads that introduced streamlined trains reported increased ridership, a boost that was likely partly due to the faster speeds and more comfortable passenger cars, but also due to the publicity surrounding the modernized and stylish appearance. In the end, streamlined steam locomotives played a small but significant role in the transition from the heavyweight, steam-powered trains of the past to the lighter, more efficient diesel-powered trains that would dominate the rail industry in the postwar years.
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