Pioneer Zephyr - Regular Revenue Service

Regular Revenue Service

The Zephyr's power (leading) car was numbered 9900, the baggage-coach combine car 505, and the coach-observation 570. The train was placed in regular service between Kansas City, Missouri, Omaha and Lincoln, Nebraska, on November 11, 1934, replacing a pair of steam locomotives and six heavyweight passenger cars, weighing up to eight times as much as the Zephyr. By June 1935, it proved popular enough to add a fourth car, providing additional coach seating. The fourth car was originally a 40-seat coach number 525, but the following June it was switched to Twin Cities service, then back to the Pioneer Zephyr in December. Car 525 remained on the train until June 1938. Just over five years after it was introduced, the Pioneer Zephyr crossed the one million mile mark in regular service on December 29, 1939, near Council Bluffs, Iowa.

Ralph Budd and the Burlington capitalized on the Zephyr's success. However, most passenger trains needed larger capacity. Thus, as the Burlington made a transition to larger diesel-electric locomotives pulling individual passenger cars, new streamlined cars of standard-size were ordered, which quickly became the standard of many railroads. However, Burlington was determined to be the leader, and ordered its large "E" series passenger diesels to also be equipped with matching stainless-steel fluting. Many of the Burlington's long distance named passenger trains began operating under the Zephyr banner, including the Nebraska Zephyr, Twin Cities Zephyr, and perhaps the most famous of the namesake, the California Zephyr.

On the second anniversary of the train's famous dash, the original Zephyr was rechristened the Pioneer Zephyr to distinguish it as the first of the Burlington's growing Zephyr fleet. In 1938, car 525 was replaced by car number 500, a 40-seat buffet/lounge car, to provide light meals. Car number 505, the baggage-coach combine, was rebuilt at this time into a full baggage car, but it kept its original windows.

In regular service, the Pioneer Zephyr had its share of accidents. In 1939 it was involved in a head-on collision with a freight train that completely destroyed the cab. The train was rebuilt and re-entered revenue service soon afterward, but the accident strengthened the desire of locomotive designers to move the cab back from the front of the locomotive to above a large nose, as on EMD F-unit and EMD E-unit locomotives.

Since the Pioneer Zephyr was built of stainless steel, which is not as recyclable as aluminum, the train was spared from the metal recycling drives of World War II. By contrast, Union Pacific's M-10000, built of aluminum, was scrapped in 1942 for the war effort, among other reasons.

In 1948 and 1949, the Pioneer Zephyr was temporarily removed from service to participate in the Chicago Railroad Fair's "Wheels A-Rolling" pageant. The fair's purpose was to celebrate 100 years of railroad history west of Chicago, and Pioneer Zephyr's role in the pageant was to highlight the latest strides in railroad technology. It resumed regular passenger operations when the fair ended on October 2, 1949. By 1955 the Pioneer Zephyr's route had been updated to run between Galesburg, Illinois, and Saint Joseph, Missouri; the trainset had been in continual service since 1934, operating over nearly 3 million miles (4.8 million kilometres). The Pioneer Zephyr's last revenue run was a trip from Lincoln, Nebraska, to Kansas City, Missouri, (along the train's regular revenue route) that then continued to Chicago on March 20, 1960. When Amtrak took over passenger rail services in 1971, the legendary Zephyr name was preserved, and the California Zephyr is an Amtrak route in the 21st century.