Author Description

This book by 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 ending with Amtrak's takeover in 1971, much of the information has never before been published. Especially during the 1920-1971 period, 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 - a wealth of detail. Mail, express, dining car, sleeping car, and ancillary service are 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, greatly successful, widely known, and well 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. The feeling was 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.