Chesapeake & Ohio Passenger Service 1847-1971 C&O Railway Train Book

Description

Chesapeake & Ohio Passenger Service 1847-1971 C&O Railway Book
This new and sealed book by noted C&O historian and C&O Historical Society founder T. W. Dixon, Jr., details the whole history of passenger train service on the C&O beginning with the Virginia Central in the 1840s and enduring with Amtrak’s takeover in 1971.  Much of the information has never before been published, especially in the earlier period. The history will be most detailed in the period 1920-1971, the era of the heavyweight steel passenger equipment and the lightweight streamlined cars, the heaviest and most powerful steam locomotives, and the iconic E8 diesels. Mail, express, dining car, sleeping car, and ancillary service all will be covered, as well as motive power, cars, schedules, consists, methods of operation, stations, staff/personnel, advertising, and all the elements that went to make the C&O’s passenger trains not only highly efficient and greatly successful, but also widely known and respected.
Though passengers accounted for only 5% of C&O’s revenue in the mid-20th century era, the company lavished a great deal of attention on it, feeling that to truly be a first class railway, C&O had to have the very best passenger service.  Innovations starting in the 1880s and leading up into the 1950s, put C&O at the forefront of passenger service development from an operational and technological viewpoint. In the final decades C&O absorbed the passenger losses in the belief that the passenger train was the best advertising that it could have.
All this is documented and explained in a cogent chronological text supplemented with maps, diagrams, charts, tables, timetable reproductions, ads, menus, as well as photos both from general sources and from the C&O’s own publicity photographers in the 1930-1960s era.
This book will have something for everyone: the passenger train buff, the modeler, the general C&O historian, the railfan who remembers the trains, and the socio-economic historian interested in how passenger trains affected the country.
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