This is Roald Tweet on Rock Island.
When the Rock Island Lines announced their new streamlined Golden Rocket early in 1946, they expected it to go down in the record books, but not as "the train that never ran a mile."
As the first post-war luxury train, the Golden Rocket was intended to cash in on the expected boom in travel following the austerity of the war years, especially, the pent-up demand for travel in speed and style. The million-and-a-half-dollar luxury streamliner was designed to whisk passengers between Chicago and Los Angeles in less than forty hours—three round trips per week at ninety miles an hour at a fare only fifteen dollars higher than a regular train.
News articles featuring the Golden Rocket appeared in hundreds of newspapers across the country, where it was called "the world's most beautiful train," "a meteor of vibrant red and silver.” Each of the eleven cars, the coaches, the Pullmans, the dining car, coffee shop and observation car had its own special appointments reflecting the colors of the American Southwest. "Passengers will sip coffee in a lounge like a Mexican patio, or sip drinks at a bar of adobe," reported the Indianapolis Times.
Moving from car to car, with their different colors of yellow, copper, turquoise, reds, and soft browns, passengers would imagine the wheat fields of Kansas, the old Spanish missions at Santa Barbara, the Apache Trail, Monument Valley, Juarez, and, and as a tribute to the brand new atomic bomb, the "glittering White Sands at Alamogordo."
As it turned out, a walk such as this through all eleven cars was the only traveling any tourist ever did on the Golden Rocket. Elaborate plans were announced for the premier run. There was talk of running the first train east to Chicago from the corner of Hollywood and Vine, filled with movie stars.
In November of 1947, the Rock Island Lines announced an equipment delay. Then, nothing. There was no premier run; the eleven cars were sent into service on other trains and gradually modified for other needs. The Rock Island Lines had been correct about the pent-up demand for travel after the war. But even the promise of drinks on a moving Mexican patio could not lure passengers from behind the wheels of those hundreds of thousands of brand new pesky little pieces of competition, the automobile.
Rock Island Lines with Roald Tweet is underwritten by the Scott County Regional Authority, with additional funding from the Illinois Arts Council and Augustana College, Rock Island.
