Travel as it should be.

Through the second World War the two powerhouse cities of the United States were New York and Chicago, after you got your education in Boston. Be it finance, marketing, commodities or industrial prowess, all you could ever need was to be found in and around these magnificent cities with Chicago arguably home to the finest high rise architecture on the planet. Thus there was much demand for high end travel between the two cities and, without a doubt, the travel method of choice was the Twentieth Century Limited train which ran between Grand Central in New York and La Salle Station in Chicago.

The route today.

In the last days of steam the New York Central commissioned the premier industrial designer of the time, Henry Dreyfuss, to skin the steam train in Art Deco splendor, which commission Dreyfuss discharged with aplomb, giving us this:

Dreyfuss’s take on the Twentieth Century Limited, 1938.

The trip from New York took 16 hours by 1945 when powerful – if unromantic – diesel-electrics replaced steam. The successful executive would board the Twentieth Century at the world’s most magnificent (to this day!) interior space, Grand Central Station, repairing to the dining car, after cocktails with the boys in the lounge. Women still knew their place was in the kitchen and the nursery, or as decoration for powerful spouses when called for.

Grand Central – the main concourse.

If you were Roger O. Thornhill (“The ‘O’ stands for nothing”), busy Madison Avenue marketing executive in Alfred Hitchcock’s 1959 thriller ‘North by Northwest’, on the lam from the law, then your dinner companion would be Eva Marie-Saint, the epitome of cool blonde elegance, and your main course would be suggested by her:

“Any suggestions?” “The brook trout. A little trouty, but quite good”.

And there you have the finest train scene, bar none, ever made for the movies.

The fare was $2,500 in today’s money for a sleeper berth with the comforting knowledge that you would arrive on time.

Your tax dollars at work. Amtrak today.

Amtrak wants $566 today for the trip from NYC’s awful Penn Station with the proviso that you may never arrive. The travel time is now 3 hrs more.

With the introduction of Boeing’s 707 jet aircraft in the late 1950s the Twentieth Century Limited was doomed, Americans forever confusing motion with action. Now they opted to be treated like sardines and the misery of air travel continues to grow to the present day. So instead of arriving at 8am, well rested in your sleeping berth and well fed and entertained, ready for a day’s work, you now arrive frazzled many times faster as you search out yet another miserable hotel in your struggle to make that breakfast meeting. And, of course, it’s all far cheaper, which means that crowd sizes are ever greater and airline legroom ever shorter.

Those who have no need to travel now do so all the time and the results is nothing short of misery and premature death from stress. And airlines reward these traveling salesmen with …. frequent flier miles, which sounds like adding insult to injury.

For more stunning images from what may be Hitchcock’s greatest movie, click here. Interestingly, as this was made in 1959, the movie foretells the demise of train travel, the culprit being the ‘Northwest’ in the title.