Synopsis
136 illustrations, one color tip in of the cover and one color fold out. A relentless rain drenched Los Angeles on a night in late May, 1937. It dripped everywhere and gilded any surface not sheltered at the old La Grande depot. It that downpour, the Super Chief s stainless sides glistened under a continually replenished coating of raindrops. Her lighted windows, like an incandescent chain, revealed warm and cozy rooms. Fluted car-faces led one s eyes, perspectively, into the wet distance where grimy clouds edged across a sky black enough and thick enough to muffle light and sound. Charcoal burning in the dining car stoves smoke-signaled up out of vents to take on a yellowish cast from bare bulbs that glowed weakly in dirty reflectors overhead. Oily fumes meandered off the diesel engines smudging a background where carts of mail bags rattled in follow-the-leader with a snarling Fordson tractor. Cigars pungently challenged the gentle fragrance of rose bouquets and running feet slapped and splashed in puddles. The smell of wet raincoats and fur coats lingered in the wake of passengers who hurried to dry sanctuary in the beckoning Pullman cars parked nearby. A steam engine roamed around the lacework of tracks to mingle its discrete puffing with clanging trolley car bells and honking taxi horns out on Santa Fe Avenue. Thunder rumbled as air hissed from brake lines and cylinders. The Super Chief sighed as a choir, eased ahead, and was on her way to Chicago. Her air horn trailing back from somewhere off n the rainy night. Time has a way of fogging things and a train, even a great and famous train, can be obscured in the haze of years gone by. Surveys show that many of today s readers automobile and airliner oriented have only vague impressions of older trains. In many instances, they are all but unaware of what they looked like. Few, if any, of those readers have ever been on a train, least of all, one that ran over forty years ago. The author is cognizant of this lack of familiarity and so it is that he offers, for inspection, earnestly and affectionately, the legendary Super Chief. May this meeting of reader and train be easy, unhurried, and, most assuredly, worthwhile. Stan Repp, was, at one time, called, much to his pleasure, a one-man latter-day promotion team for the Super Chief. In accepting that devotive laurel wreath, he is mindful of the responsibility that goes with the accolade and, accordingly, presents this book as his best effort at time-lapse recollection in revealing a Great American Train of the past; the Santa Fe Railway s Super Chief.
About the Author
Born in Buffalo, New York in 1919, Stan Repp has, from the tenderest age, admired, been intrigued by, and just plain reveled in railway [passenger cars and the people who rode in them. He frequented and found fascination in coach yards, commissaries, supply rooms, paint shops, designers studios, Pullman-Dining-Lounge cars (peopled and deserted), diesel cabs and repair tracks, engineers homes, sooty depots, back-country crossings, and, best of all, trips aboard the Super Chief. Thirty five years an illustrator, Repp sketched and painted trains favoring those eminently appealing accommodations, observation cards and, of course, the variety of name-signs which adorned them. A Californian since 1936, Repp, who lived by the sea, laments the passing of gentler and less contrived times, misses real trains, and is glad, as are many old-timers that he was around in the halcyon days of the passenger cars, most prominently, most remarkable, most memorably those which comprised the first lightweight Super Chief.
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