Burlington
At one of the lowest points in the Great Depression, January 1, 1932 Ralph Budd left the Great Northern to become president of the Burlington. While leading the Burlington, he met Edward G. Budd (distant relation), who had formed the Budd Company in 1912, and had recently begun to apply his automobile body construction knowledge to build railroad passenger equipment in a new venture using stainless steel.
The Budd Company built the Pioneer Zephyr for Burlington, and the train's "dawn-to-dusk" run from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago, Illinois, on May 26, 1934, in an unprecedented thirteen hours and five minutes, helped usher in the railroad streamliner era. Both Ralph and Edward Budd, among other notable men including H. L. Hamilton, president of the Winton Motor Company which built the motor for the train, were passengers aboard the record-setting run; the train's speed averaged 77.1 miles per hour (124.1 km/h), reaching a top speed of 112.5 miles per hour (181 km/h). The name of the new train came from The Canterbury Tales, which Ralph Budd had been reading. The story begins with pilgrims setting out on a journey, inspired by the budding springtime and by Zephyrus, the gentle and nurturing west wind. Ralph Budd thought that would be an excellent name for a sleek new traveling machine: "Zephyr." In the summer of 1939 he persuaded the Denver and Rio Grande and the Western Pacific to join the Burlington in establishing a daily through train to the Pacific Coast; a decade later it was replaced by the fabled California Zephyr.
Budd also worked to complete the Dotsero Cut-Off, which opened in 1934, and led to fourfold increase of Burlington business through Denver.
In 1939, Budd was awarded the George R. Henderson Medal.
By 1945, Budd had become intrigued with Electro-Motive Diesel’s R. Osborne’s idea of a dome passenger car, and built the first experimental one in the Burlington's Aurora Shops.
In 1940 and again in 1949, Budd sponsored two elaborate historical pageants on the Burlington and was one of the moving spirits behind the extremely successful Railroad Fair held on Chicago’s lakefront in 1948-49.
Burlington historian Richard C. Overton wrote: "The Burlington, with Budd in command, was virtually a training school for railway executives. Men like Fred Gurley, John Farrington, Fred Whitman, Harry Murphy, and E. Perlman, all of whom went on to head great railways, served varying terms on the Burlington while Budd was at its head. As James G. Lyne put it in Railway Age at the time of his retirement in 1949, the Burlington was 'principally the lengthened shadow of Ralph Budd.'"
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