How America Destroyed Its Greatest Train in 2 Years

Every departure, they rolled out a red carpet — literally, the full length of the platform. There was a barber on board. A manicurist. A secretary for dictation. Fresh lake trout loaded at the Erie division stop. For sixty-five years, the 20th Century Limited ran New York to Chicago in sixteen hours and made the act of departure feel like the opening movement of something important. On December 2, 1967, it left Grand Central with four cars and no ceremony. The porter who had worked the train for decades watched it go. There was no red carpet. This is the full story. #TrainHistory #LostLegends #AmericaRailroads #20thCenturyLimited --- The New York Central Railroad was assembled by Cornelius Vanderbilt in the 1860s from the ruthless consolidation of competing lines along the flattest rail corridor in North America — the Water Level Route, following the Hudson River, the Erie Canal corridor, and the southern shore of the Great Lakes from New York to Chicago. No mountains. No significant grades. The most efficient long-distance rail corridor on earth, still carrying billions of dollars in freight today for CSX Transportation. The 20th Century Limited launched in June 1902. By 1938, redesigned by industrial designer Henry Dreyfuss — the man who shaped the Bell telephone and the Honeywell thermostat — it was the most considered passenger train in the world. Every surface, every fitting, every piece of tableware had been designed as part of a coherent whole. The dining car staff had been with the railroad for fifteen years on average. The locomotive was one of the most beautiful machines in American history. Clark Gable rode it. Winston Churchill rode it. Babe Ruth rode it. The senators and the film directors and the steel executives who needed to be in Chicago by morning all rode it, and many of them scheduled their departures specifically to do so. Then came the Interstate Highway Act of 1956. Then commercial aviation at scale. Then the merger that was supposed to save everything and destroyed it instead. In 1968, the Pennsylvania Railroad and the New York Central merged to form the Penn Central Transportation Company — the largest corporate merger in American railroad history. Within two years, Penn Central was in bankruptcy. The largest corporate bankruptcy in American history at the time. Liabilities of $4.6 billion. Ninety-four thousand employees. A railroad that had been profitable for a century, destroyed in two years by management that diversified aggressively into real estate and amusement parks while the railroad's tracks deteriorated under deferred maintenance. The tracks are still there. The Lake Shore Limited runs New York to Chicago today, on the same Water Level Route, in nineteen hours and thirty minutes — three hours slower than the 1938 Century, on better-maintained track, in adequate but uninspired equipment. Grand Central Terminal was saved from demolition by a preservation campaign that reached the Supreme Court. The 1978 ruling in Penn Central Transportation Co. v. City of New York established the constitutional basis for landmark preservation in American law. The most beautiful room in New York still stands. The train it was built for no longer uses it. --- *Like this video* if the 20th Century Limited stayed with you. *Subscribe* for more stories of the transport institutions — the trains, the ships, the airlines — that defined what American movement could be, and the forces that ended them. *Share* it with someone who has ever stood in Grand Central's main concourse and looked up at the constellation ceiling and understood that someone, once, believed a departure was worth making beautiful. Which legend should we cover next? --- This video is for educational and entertainment purposes only. All facts are based on publicly available historical sources.