Word: budd
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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...
...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...
...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...