Episode 11 - Streamline moderne, Part 1

 “The airplane is the symbol of the new age .  A new state of modern conscience. A new plastic vision. A new aesthetic. "

Welcome back to the second season of Talking Modernism, and the first of a 2-part series on Streamline Moderne, the style that is so evocative of Depression era  America.  In this episode I'll be talking about the glamorous world of train travel in the 1930s, and the ground-breaking Pioneer Zephyr,  the first of the streamliner trains.

To explore further :

• Wikipedia on Pioneer Zephyr 
• Book Shafer& Welsh, "Streamliners - History of a Railroad Icon", MBI Publishing, 1997
• Article on the economics of rail travel in America 
• Article on railway dining 
• Wikipedia on the Shienenzeppelin 
• Article on the Fliegender Hamburger train
• Film of the 1938 20th Century Limited:  the most beautiful train ever made? 
• Photos of Mossehaus by Erich Mendelsohn
• Article on the Universum Cinema, also by Mendelsohn 
• PDF copy of Aircraft  by Le Corbusier, 1935
• 1934 film The Silver Streak 

Transcript

Episode 11 – Streamline Moderne, Part 1

Welcome back! To the second series of “Talking Modernism”, the podcast of the 1920s and 1930s, and how our grandparents and great-grandparents changed their world. 

I am your host, Michael Hauptman, and I am excited to be once again sharing with you stories of the fascinating, long-ago age of modernism. To kick off the second season I will be talking about the glamorous world of train travel in the 1930s, and the distinctive style that marked that decade, Streamline Moderne.

The birth of the streamliner

Chicago is a city blessed with some o the world’s best museums, and one of the finest is the Museum of Science and Industry. Housed in the Palace of Fine Arts built for the 1893  Worlds Fair it’s 75 halls contain a host of amazing exhibits to dazzle the vistor, including a reconstruction of a working coal mine, a Boeing 727 suspended from the ceiling, a replica main street from Chicago in the early 1900s and an entire German submarine from WW2. 

Coming into the Entry Hall, the exhibit that greets you is a train from the 1930s, the “Pioneer Zephyr”, the first of what were known as “streamliners” The Streamliners not only heralded a golden, gracious age in rail travel, but introduced the distinctive style so evocative of 1930s America that would come to be known as streamline moderne.

The Pioneer Zephyr on display consists of 3 cars, comprising the engine and 2 passenger cars, though when it was in service it had 3 passenger cars. The styling of the train is striking. Words don’t really do it justice, so I’ve included links to photos on the prodcast website. There are no breaks or couplings between the cabins so it looks like a single integrated object, and the shovel nose of the driver’s cabin at the front blends seamlessly into the rest of the train. And reinforcing that sense of unity there are parallel “speed lines” which were a characteristic feature “streamline moderne”, running along the length of the train, above and below an unbroken band of windows that wrap around both the driver cabin the front and and observation lounge at the rear, . They Zephyr’s polished stainless steel exterior gleams brightly under the lights of the entry hall. Even though the train has been a static museum exhibit since 1960, its polished streamlined shape still seems poised for imminent movement, coiled and waiting to rush forward down long glamorous 1930s railways towards a bright space age future just over the horizon.

The Pioneer Zephyr, which first began operations in 1934, was the “pioneer” of the new type of streamline trains, and these were very much a consequence of the forces of modernity. One key force was disruptive impact of new technologies. Back in the 1800s, railways had transformed America just as they had transformed the rest of the world, A transcontinental railway had been completed in 1869, just 4 years after the end of the Civil War, and by 1900 the country was crossed by more than 315 thousand kilometres of railroad, or 195k miles. 

But the advent of the motor car was to work another transformation. In 1900, there were 100,000 cars in America, fabulously expensive yet basic and unreliable, a fragile plaything of the 1%-ers. By 1930, America had more than 23 million cars with more than half the population owning one. This was largely due to the mass production techniques pioneered by Henry Ford, which brought the price of cars within the budgets of the masses. Intercity highways began to improved, and along them grew a network of gas stations, restaurants and motels – the first motel, the Milestone Mo-tel, was opened in San Luis Obispo, California in 1925. In a scant 30 years America had become a nation on wheels.

The railways were slow to react to the challenges of the new motor age. At the start of the 1920s the railways were at peak profitability, flush with cash first from transporting men and materiel in WW1 and then from a consumer boom in the years immediately after the war. But part of the reason that the railways were so profitable during WW1 was that the government had directed that the railway industry, which was composed of a multitude of private companies, improve coordination to increase efficiency and reduce costs, with innovations such as coordinated timetables and common ticketing across companies. After the war these arrangements ceased, but the government still enforced the focus on efficiency through the Interstate Commerce Committee, which set and limited the prices that the railways could charge. So railways in the 1920s focused on ways to reduce costs and increase capacity rather than to innovate and update their services. The American train passenger was largely taken for granted.

The year 1920 marked a high water mark for American rail travel. In that year 1.2 billion passengers traveled between American cities aboard 9 thousand daily services. In 2013 by comparison there were a scant 32 million passengers and only 300 daily services. Tin 1920 the average American traveled 400 miles each year on intercity trains, 15 times the 25-30 miles they travel today. But the rail services that the 1920s passenger received had scarcely improved on those enjoyed by their parents 30 years before. Rail travel was slow by the standards of a world growing accustomed to the car and the aeroplane, typically traveling at 60 km per hour, that’s 35 miles per hour. The Twentieth Century Limited between New York and Chicago, probably the fastest train at the time, averaged 49 miles per hour, but many services traveled as slow as 20 miles per hour. Nearly all trains still relied on coal and steam, not a particularly tidy way to travel, especially in warm weather when “cooling” such as it was, was usually accomplished by opening windows. 

Car-owning Americans began to quickly abandon the intercity rail network. By 1928 annual train travel had halved from 400 miles a year to 200 miles, a similar amount as in 1900. And the great Depression saw a further halving to 100 miles a year by 1930. As one 1932 book noted:

“Unless the rail road s change their “public be damned” attitude, unless speed, economy, comfort and beauty become features of rail travel, the passenger service will become obsolete”

The railways could not simply abandon passenger services: their operating charter with the government required that they provide a certain number of passenger trains along key routes. They would need instead to entice customers back onto the train. And they would need to do this in a way that would control costs so that they could turn a profit. And so they embraced a series of innovations that led to streamliners like the Pioneer Zephyr that ushered in a fabulously glamourous era of rail travel in America and indeed around the world.

The Zephyr itself was the brainchild of Ralph Budd, chairman of the Burlington & Quincy railroad, or B&Q as it was known, based in Chicago and servicing the Midwest. The train was launched in April 1934, 2 years from initial conception, and it incorporated a host of revolutionary technologies that fully justified the name Pioneer. It was the first diesel-electric train in American service, powered by a modest 660 hp engine, equivalent to 2 Toyota Landcruiser engines today, but powerful enough nonetheless to propel the train at speeds up to 104 mph, or 170 kph. Economically speaking, diesel/electric power was a huge advance over steam, having much higher power/weight ratio and avoiding the need for the huge maintenance burden of steam engines, which required regular cleaning and descaling, plus steam’s huge infrastructure of water towers and coaling points. 

 The Zephyr’s carriages was made of stainless steel, rustproof and lighter than traditional wood and hardened steel construction. And this was made possible by a patented technique for welding stainless steel – “shot welding”, involving precisely timed “shots” of electricity – that were invented by the carriage works that constructed the Zephyr. The Zephyr also incorporated “unibody’ construction, where the entire external shell of the carriage provides structural strength rather than just the chassis. And the Zephyr also was an early example of “articulation”, where the train carriages shared sets of wheels – Jacob bogies is the technical term -which reduced weight and also improved ride quality. These 3 innovations meant that the entire 3-carriage Zephyr weighed only 110 imperial tons, which was only slightly heavier than the weight of a single Pullman sleeper carriage at 88 tons.

Passengers on the Zephyr enjoyed air conditioning and central heating, a small buffet section and a 12 seat observation lounge at the rear, all furnished in a luxurious streamline style to complement the exterior. The was seating for 77 in its original configuration, and no sleepers – the Pioneer Zephyr only serviced routes of intermediate length and less than 6 hours travel time.

Even the name “Zephyr” was an innovation, and its reintroduction from old English to contemporary English dates to the train. Ralph Budd, the head of B&Q, wanted the train to have a name starting with the letter “Z” , the last letter of the alphabet since the train would be the last word in train travel. His staff scoured the dictionary in a fruitless search for candidates – zebra, zealot and zigzag for instance didn’t really capture the desired impression. The name of the new train ultimately came from The Canterbury Tales, which Budd had been reading. That story begins with pilgrims setting out on a journey, inspired by the start of springtime and by Zephyrus, the gentle and nurturing west wind. Budd thought that would be an excellent name for a sleek new traveling machine—Zephyr. 

But the most striking innovation of the train was its use of streamlining. Railways knew that the attribute the trvelling public valued above all other was speed. The quicker an intercity service, the more patronage it would attract. Now there are many factors that affect the speed of a train: the condition and layout of the tracks, the effectiveness of the signalling and control system, the priority or otherwise of the train over other rail traffic. But the design of the train itself is the ultimate defining factor, and by the 1920s train designers in their quest for speed turned their attention to the field of aerodynamics. 

The science of aerodynamics can be traced to the work of Swiss mathematician and physicist Daniel Bernoulli, who discovered the relationship between fluid pressure and energy in the principle that bears his name, published in 1738 in his book Hydrodynamica. Hydrodynamics and aerodynamics studies continued to advance in the 1800s. The first wind tunnel was installed in Greenwich England in 1871, and various forms that offered minimum resistance to air and water were studied. These forms were often drawn from nature, such as the snipe, the trout and the dolphin. And also the humble chickens egg, which if you think about it is also a form designed to offer minimum resistance. The difference between the smooth laminar flow of water over a trout’s body as it swims through a stream versus the turbulence of, say, a box placed in the same stream began to be understood and translated into design equations. 

The new science of aerodynamics was central to the birth of powered flight – the Wright Brothers studied wing design at a wind tunnel they built themselves in 1901 at their bicycle workshop in Dayton Ohio. But the first planes themselves were certainly not streamlined, boxy biplanes full of struts and wires, the imperative to make a plane’s structure light and strong overriding considerations of the niceties of streamlining. For most of the biplanes that fought in WW1, the only concession to streamlining was an occasional bullet-shaped fairing on the propeller.

There was one type of flying object t the start of the 1920s that did embody streamlining a however and that was the dirigible airship, or “zeppelins” as they are commonly called, long sleek cylinders tapered at eack end. The first zeppelin was launched in 1897 and they were extensively used by both Britain and Germany in WW1, and Germany conducted transatlantic zeppelin passenger services from 1928 until the Hindenburg disaster in 1937 .

It was the zeppelin that was to inspire the first serious attempt to apply the principles of aerodynamic streamlining to trains in the quest to make then faster. In 1929 Germany built the “Schienenzeppelin“ , or “rail zeppelin”, an experimental single unit engine and passenger car for 44 passengers incorporating streamlining, and powered by a 12 cylinder aircraft engine driving a propeller at the rear of the train. 

The Shienenzeppelin in turn was no doubt inspired by the “Aerowagon” developed in Russia at the start of the Bolshevik evolution in 1917. The Aerowagon had a propeller at the front of the train rather than at the rear, and was intended to be used as a high speed transport for senior Bolshevik officials. Unfortunately the safety considerations in 1917 Russia wasn’t very high, and the train crashed in 1921, killing the inventor and 6 other passengers, foreign union leaders visiting an international congress in Moscow. Amongst the dead was an Australian delegate Paul Freeman, and you can see still him commemorated today amongst the list of heroes in the wall of the Kremlin.

The Shienenzeppelin was a much more polished product, incorporating the latest developments in streamlining. Indeed, the front of the 1929 train looks the spitting image of the first Japanese shinkasen, or bullet trains, built in the 1960s – I’ve included a link to a picture in the podcast website. The back of the train with its exposed propeller though looks like something from an occupational health and safety nightmare. The combination though of streamining and a powerful aircraft engine allowed the Shienenzeppelin to achieve a world rail speed record of 140 mph or 230 kph on the Berlin-Hamburg line. 

Propeller driven trains were a dead end. You can’t add carriages behind them, they can’t go up steep inclines and they are difficult to reverse. The streamlining of the Shienenzeppelin however was to be hugely influential and railways across the world raced to apply streamlining in the quest for speed. The pioneer here was the “Brill Bullet” and electric trolley, or light rail car , built in 1931 by the Brill Trolley company for the for the Philadelphia & Western Railway, and was the first train in America to be designed in a wind tunnel. The Bullet traveled the 20 miles between Philadelphia and Norristown at an average speed of 52 mph, or 87 kph. The “Brill Bullet” was a tram rather than a proper train, but in 1933 Germany developed the heavily streamlined Fliegender Hamburger . Which I’ve seen translated as both "The Hamburg Flyer" and considerably more memorably as “The Flying Hamburger”. This was a 2 car diesel electric articulated train that travelled the 287km between Berlin and Hamburg at an average speed of 126 km/hr, or 78 mph. You can still see it today at the Railway Museum in Nuremberg, and a working Brill Bullet can be found at the Rockhill Trolley Museum in Pennsylvania.

The Pioneer Zephyr has a layout very similar to the Fliegender Hamburger. The train sits low to the ground, facilitated by shared Jacobs bogies. The whole train is smooth and streamlined, with the windows set flush and with minimum of protuberances, save for a headlight atop a dramatic central fin at the front like the crest of a helmet – a dramatic touch lacking in the more sober Fliegender Hamburger. The streamlining even extended to the undercarriage of the train in the quest to minimise drag.

Thanks to streamlining, the Zephyr could achieve a top speed of 104 mph, or 167 kph, despite being powered by a diesel-electric engine of only 660 hp, compared to a typical steam locomotive engine of 8,000 hp. In May 1934 the train made a "Dawn-to-Dusk" 1,000 mile dash from Denver to Chicago in a publicity stunt timed to coincide with the opening day of the Century of Progress fair in Chicago, averaging 124 kph or 77 mph over its 13 and a half hour trip. In November 1934 it entered regular service between Kansas City, Missouri and Lincoln, Omaha, traveling the 250 miles or 400 km in 5 and a half hours, an average speed of 46 mph or 74 kmh, including 12 stops along the way. 

The Zephyr might have been twice as expensive to build as a regular steam train, but being diesel rather than steam it cost half as much to operate. And because of its comfort and appealing design it began to attract new patronage. Indeed it was a public sensation, attracting over 1 m visitors in a 7 month publicity tour in undertook before entering regular service. It even stared in its own 1934 movie, The Silver Streak, a decidedly B-grade effort by RKO with the compelling tagline “A streamline saga of straining steel on a heroic race with death”. 

In addition to being a hit with the public, Zephyr’s high speed and lower maintenance requirements allowed it to do the work of 2 heavyweight steam powered trains. It completely fulfilled the railway’s hopes for reviving the economics of intercity train travel, breaking even in its first year of operation, and this in the depths of the Great Depression. This marked the start of the “streamliner” age of rail travel. By the late 1930s sleek, shiny and fast passenger trains became the must-have sensation, and by 1940 nearly every major railroad had at least one in service. The later streamliners evolved the format of the Pioneer Zephyr. In particular the “articulated” scheme involving shared Jacobs bogies were abandoned for the more tradition arrangement in the interests of flexibility, so that passenger cars could be easily added or removed over a route to match demand, and also so the entire train wasn’t affected if a problem occured in a single car Also steam was not completely displaced by diesel electric until the 1950s, with many steam locomotives being redesigned with a streamlined casing. One of the most dramatic was the steam locomotive for New York’s “20th Century Limited”, remodelled in 1938 by the designer Henry Dreyfuss, and considered by some to be the most beautiful locomotive every built. I’ve included a link on the podcast website. 

And the craze for streamliner trains crossed the world. In 1934 the Netherlands introduced a similar diesel-electric integrated train, the Class DE3. In 1935 England introduced its first of a long series of streamlined steam locomotives, the Class A4, Italy the very modern looking ETR200 integrated trainset in 1937, to name but a few. The Soviet Union introduced a number of classes of streamlined locomotives, beginning with the Josef Stalin class in 1937. Even Australia developed a heavily streamlined S-class steam locomotive in 1937 to power the Sydney-Melbourne service the Spirit of Progress.

The demise of the streamliners

Unfortunately for train lovers everywhere, the American streamliner age lasted barely 25 years, with most luxury intercity train services halted by 1960 – indeed the Pioneer Zephyr itself made its final run in March 1960. Ths was due to a combination of factors that favoured road and air travel in America and disadvantaged rail. Most important were regulations introduced in 1951 that restricted the train speeds to 79 mph, or 127 kph, unless the railways invested in expensive upgrades to train signalling and control system. This speed limit negated one of the key advantages of rail travel over the automobile, which was becoming an increasingly attractive alternative as postwar construction of highways progressed. Also, the luxurious levels of service in streamliners requiring a team of porters, chefs, cocktail waiters and the like that were economically feasible with the low wages of the Depression-era 1930s, but were no longer affordable with the post-war boom of the 1950s. In 1963 for instance the Burlington & Quincy railroad removed the cocktail lounges from the Nebraska Zephyr service, and in 1966 replaced its dining cars with vending machines. 

A gracious age had come to an end, and this was a symptom of a wider malaise in American intercity rail travel. In 1916, 98% of intercity travel in America was by rail. By 1950, this had dropped to 46%, and by 1970 it had plummeted to only 7%. Intercity rail in America eventually had to be nationalised, with the formation of Amtrak in 1971. 

The sad reality was that America could not and cannot operate intercity rail at a cost that was competitive with road or air travel. Back in 1926, a sleeping car berth on the Chicago to Seattle train cost the equivalent of $4k US dollars in today’s money. A 2017 American study found that air travel costs a average 14 cents a passenger mile, intercity bus fares average about 10 cents, and driving averages 25 cents. But Amtrak fares average 34 cents per passenger mile, and the high-speed Acela service between Boston and Washington costs 93 cents a passenger mile. When you factor in government subsidies to Amtrak of 22 cents per mile, intercity rail travel in America is twice as expensive as driving, three times as expensive as air travel, and more than four times as expensive as intercity buses. 

Today intercity rail is undergoing something of a revival as countries try to reduce greenhouse gas emissions – France has recently banned air routes where train travel time is less than 2 and a half hours, and Sweden has coined the term Flygskam, flight shaming. However, if a substantial, long term change is to be made the underlying economics of rail travel will need to be addressed, especially in America.

From Streamlining to Streamline Moderne

 Streamlining might have made the Pioneer Zephyr fast and economical, but streamling had an aesthetic and cultural impact far more significant than it’s practical dimension. Streamlining tapped into the zeitgiest of the 1930s because it was associated with aeroplanes and airships, the icons of modernism at the time. Air travel was changing the world by annihilated distance. And at the individual level airplanes was creating new heroes, air aces like Richthofen and Albert Ball were mythologised as glamorous heroes in the otherwise unglamourous conflict of WW1. And pioneering aviators like Charles Lindenberg and Amelia Earhart were possibly the most celebrated international personalities since Napoleon. 

And aeroplanes were inspirational as they expressed one of the key features of the modern age, namely speed. Speed had meaning in the narrow literal sense of how technological advances allowed people to travel faster than ever before. But it also had meaning a the broader sense as a metaphor. A metaphor for the quickening pace of life as populations migrated farms and towns to large cities, and as those cities became larger and larger. And all this was due to the rise of urbanisation which was a key feature of modernity. In 1870, there were only two American cities with a population of more than 500,000; by 1900, 30 years later there were six, and by 1920, only 20 years later there were 12. In 1870, only a quarter of Americans lived in cities. By 1910 this had increased to 45%, and by 1930 to 56%, When you consider the change of pace a person would would have encountered in moving from say, sleepy little Podunk Hollow, population 213, to Chicago, which by 1910 had a population 2.2 million, it is easy to see why one of the key impressions that people had of the modern world was one of rapid change, of life speeding by. The romantic Art Deco movement often used the gazelle, the cheetah and the goddess Nike as the symbols of rapid change, the technology-minded Italian Futurists tended to use the motor car. But for designers in the 1930s the avatar of rapid pace of modern life, was the sleek and streamlined aeroplane, such as the Douglas DC-2 which had debuted in 1932, precursor to the iconic Douglas DC-3 which debuted in 1935. 

You may recall way back in the first episode of this podcast I mentioned the architect Le Corbusier and his book “Towards a New Architecture”, published in 1931 and considered by many as the most influential book on architecture written in the 20th century. In 1935 he was commissioned to write the book “Aircraft”. His brief was to focus on the industrial design of aircraft, but Corbusier chose instead to widen his subject to aviation as a cultural and social phenomenon.

“The airplane is the symbol of the new age , he wrote. “A new state of modern conscience. A new plastic vision. A new aesthetic. “

His 1931 book “Towards a New Architecture” had included photos of airplanes, but these were boxy biplanes. The photos of aircraft that filled his 1935 book were now sleek and streamlined.

Streamlining was even applied to architecture. Erich Mendelsohn, one of the founders and most successful practitioners of the German Expressionist architecture movement of the 1910s and 20s, pioneered the streamlined style of architecture with his 1923 remodeling and extension of the Mossehaus publishing building, making it for a time the tallest building in Berlin. The extra floors were made of reinforced concrete, a relatively new construction method and this led to a disaster during construction when one of the slabs of the new extension fell into the newspaper offices, which were still in use, killing 14 people. 

The remodeled Mosshas facade had horizontal bands of aluminium and glass wrapping and sweeping around the curved corner of site, giving the building a dramatic sense of movement, appropriate for a building sitting on what was one of Berlin’s busier intersections. Thoughout the 1920s Mendelsohn would repeat this combination of corner curves and horizontal bands of windows on a series of buildings that expressed the dynamism of a busy city, in particular the Schaubuhne cinema in Belin, the Schoken department store in Chemnitz in Germany, and the de la Waar seaside pavillion in Bexhill in England, each of them long low horizontal buildings with flat rooves amd sweeping bands of horizontal windows. And fortunately all still standing today, along with the Mossehaus which started it all.

 The continuous flowing lines and gentle curves of Mendelsohn’s streamlined designs and indeed of the Pioneer Zephyr evoked a benign vision of speed and change, smooth and integrated, denoting advance and progress towards a bright future. This was a harmonious view of change appropriate to symbols of a comfortable middle class such as cinemas, department stores and luxury passenger trains. But there were, at the start of the start of the 20th century, competing, less benign depictions of change For instance the 1911 painting “The City Rises” by Futurist painter Umberto Boccioni, shows men and horses at work, straining, distorted and exhausted under heroic effort. Slabs of colour and lines indicate movement, but these radiate in all directions, there is no discernible harmonious progression to a single goal or destination beyond the frame of the work. And in the 1919 poster “Beat The Whites With The Red Wedge” by Constructionist artist El Lissitzky, a Bolshevik propoganda poster from the Russian Civil war, manages to express violent struggle with a simple composition of a red triangle penetrating a white circle. But by the 1930s, for much of the world the gloss had fallen away from the radical prescriptions of political avant-garde, as the brutal reality of actual communism, facism and nazism began to reveal itself. In contrast Streamline moderne was art unashamedly in the service of established, reactionary capitalism. 

With that message of the promise of a bright future, lets leave our podcast for now. Join me next time when I’ll continue the story of Streamline Moderne, and explain how the style came to dominate Depression-era America. I look forward to speaking with you then.