I have seen what look to be passenger cars parked in a rail yard on McDuff for some time now, This morning as I was headed to work I was stopped by what I thought was the morning Amtrak train but to my surprise it was a CSX locomotive pulling 4 to 5 of the passenger cars from the CSX yard that actually had a few people in them. Does anyone know what this was about?
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I saw that, too. I was heading north on Roosevelt around 7:30 this morning and saw that train passing under the expressway just north of McDuff. I too thought it was strange that passenger cars were being pulled by a CSX locomotive.
These are CSX Office Cars. They use them for various business trips and railroad inspections. They are stored over on McDuff.
You have seen the elephant, a glimpse of another age who's time may be upon us again. This is what is going on at the CSX McDuff facilities.
The golden age of the private railroad car was, obviously, the bright noontide of the nabobs who took pleasure in such ornate and often beautiful conveniences and could afford to possess and maintain them. The privately owned Pullman was, lrom the mid-Seventies until the stock market, an accepted and conventional symbol of wealth. Only a handful survive today.
The private railroad car was a way of life. To a certain extent it still is.
A modern generation of railroaders makes a sharp distinction between the privately owned Pullman operated for the pleasure, convenience, and social occasions of its proprietor and the business cars occupied by railroad officials in the discharge of their executive duties and generally known as office cars. The latter, be they ever so ornate and handsome of decor, are still the property of the stockholders and not the president, general manager, or superintendent of motive power who rides them. When he dies, resigns, or goes to higher office, the car goes to his successor.
Such wasn’t always the case. In an earlier generation of American railroading belore the Interstate Commerce Commission had bared its fangs and when railroad presidents were apt to be railroad owners as well, the differenee between private cars and office cars was negligible or, at best, academic, Jay Gould or Edward Harriman or William H. Vanderbilt owned the road, and the cars went with it.
Traditionally the personal office car of the president of a railroad is numbered 100 and those of ranking brass in the upper bracketsâ€"division superintendents, legal heads, duel engineers and suchâ€"occupy adjacent designations 101, 102 and 103. Traditionally, too, the lower echelons of business car occupants maintain their cars in a state of repair and visual elegance in keeping with their rank in the railroad hierarchy. The president’s car is immaculate of paint, brass work, running gear, and trim. A chief engineer’s hack is apt to be less ostentaiiousK clapper. Legend has it that during a particularly austere regime on the New York Central in the Nineties a lowly member of the maintenance-of-way department wired the general superintendent at Albany for permission to attach his worka-day office car to the crack Day Express at Albany.
The drawing room of “The Gold Coast†boasted a handsome green marble fireplace ravished by the decorator from the Nob Hill mansion of some nabob of the San Francisco Nineties. It was strictly a property, illuminated from behind imitation logs by electricity. The owners of the car heard about Mrs. Donahue’s actually functional fireplace and set their sights a notch higher. When their present all-steel, air-conditioned, 93-foot Pullman “Virginia City†was delivered, its economy included a white marble fireplace from the palace of a Venetian doge, which burns propane from the same supply that activates the galley.
“Virginia City,†named for the owners’ Nevada home above the storied Comstock Lode, was furnished by a decorator from Hollywood’s Sunset Boulevard and is finished throughout with a Venetian Renaissance décor of red and gold, with antiqued gold panels on the walls, gold-backed mirrors in the dining salon, specially woven carpets shot with metallic gold threads, and Venetian crystal chandeliers secured to the car’s transoms with thin steel wires. Each of its three master staterooms is decorated with a mural depicting a scene on Nevada’s vanished but still legendary Virginia & Truckee Railroad. Music is piped from a central source and its volume controlled in each room in the car including the crew’s quarters and galley, the details of which are the last word in culinary modernity in a kitchen with pastel canary walls. Doors throughout the car are on two-way hinges to accommodate the independent goings and comings of the owners’ 185-pound St. Bernard, Mr. T-Bone Towser.
The cost of private Pullmans and business cars for railroad executives has soared astronomically with the years, and the $50,000 spent in the long-ago Seventies for Leland Stanford’s rosewood and satin elegance's would today be the mere first installment on an all steel private and handmade automobile.
For many years the private cars of railroad officials were routed free over all lines in the United States as a sort of princely courtesy between the moguls of the age, but abuses eventually came of the practice. The cars of general managers and presidents of obscure short lines in Arkansas and North Dakota were being hauled gratis and extended special privileges over the main lines of the New York Central and Santa Fe. Directors of large corporations which were also shippers of vast quantities of freight or otherwise doing business with the carriers rode without charge in their private cars to the inconvenience of the management and often the cash fare public.
The I.C.C. stepped in and today it costs a private individual eighteen full first-class fares, plus taxes, switching charges, insurance, service and parking fees at terminals, to move his private varnish if he owns one. Business cars of accredited members of the Association of American Railroads ride over connecting lines at a somewhat abated rate.
Amtrak, that beastly creation of a Republican President, soon to be impeached, saw to the accelerated demise of the grand conveyance of tradition. Today, outside of CSX and like railroads large and small and the Association of Private Railroad Car owners, one is more likely to find the glory of the gilded age, rotting in the yard of mere peasants.
Ocklawaha's family started the whole affair, with a disowned Yankee uncle who originated the patents of the Mann Boudoir Car Company, which was then sold to Pullman Standard.
Lucius Beebe a post gilded age socialite that disdained progress as poppycock, and his pen became perhaps the last true symbol of a travelers paradise lost.
OCKLAWAHA with the late LUCIUS BEEBE