The First Hundred Years

Into the depot at Aurora, Ill. last week glided a diesel locomotive with two spanking new streamlined, bubble-domed coaches. Out of one stepped Ralph Budd, 69, the highballing president of the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, who had done more than any other railroader to make such dream trains a reality.

Ralph Budd had come to Aurora, the "Q's" birthplace, to celebrate the road's first 100 years. He donned a claw hammer coat and stovepipe hat, glued on a black mustache, and helped re-enact the granting of the Q's 1849 charter for its first twelve miles of track. But Budd, whose 10,600-mile railroad system is now the U.S.'s fourth longest,* had his eye, as usual, on the future.

Next month, Budd told his Aurora hosts, the Burlington will introduce its "Vista Dome" double-deck coaches on the Chicago-San Francisco run, with six new streamliners costing about $15 million. The Q cannot compete, timewise, with the Union Pacific, which has a much shorter route. So Budd shrewdly decided, by use of the Vista Dome, to "sell the breath-taking scenery" of the road's route through the Colorado Rockies and California's Feather River Canyon.

Improve the Service. For Budd, such up & coming railroading was a matter of habit. An Iowa farm boy trained as a civil engineer, he began railroading at 20 on the Chicago Great Western. After a spell of work on the Panama Canal, he became an assistant to Empire Builder Jim Hill on the Great Northern. In 1919, a few years after Hill's death, Budd, at 40, stepped into Hill's job.

Budd spent $240 million improving the service. In 1930, as a sort of busman's holiday, he took on a job for the Soviet Union. He inspected its 4,800 miles of badly managed railways and recommended ways of improving them. In 1932, Budd stepped into the Burlington (jointly owned by Hill's Great Northern and the Northern Pacific) which had been hit hard by the depression.

Obey the Rules. Budd rescued the Burlington, chiefly by foreseeing the revolutionary potential of the diesel engine. His Pioneer Zephyr (1934) was the first diesel-powered streamliner.*

It proved so successful that Budd dieselized his entire run as fast as he could plow back earnings (now diesels power 80% of the Q's passenger miles, 50% of its freight). The big diesel payoff came in freight. Because of the easier maintenance of diesels, Budd stepped up the Burlington's freight car mileage to 62.7 miles a day by 1947 (v. a national average of 47.6). And the Burlington's net rose last year to an estimated $28 million.

Other railroaders call Budd "the presidents' president" because such big wheels as the Rock Island's President John Farrington, Santa Fe's President Fred Gurley and the Great Northern's President Frank Gavin are Budd-trained men. Soon a protege will succeed him. Next August, Ralph Budd will be 70 -- and the Burlington has an inflexible rule that its men must retire at that age. Budd has no intention of breaking the rule: he made it.

* The longest systems: Santa Fe, Southern Pacific, New York Central. * It and the new streamliners were built by Philadelphia's Budd Co., headed by Edward G. Budd Jr., no kin.

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