Borrowing a figure from antiquity, Burlington officials named their new streamlined train for Zephyrus, Greek god of the west wind, and used his likeness on a 1933 promotional brochure (above).
The railroad industry was hit hard by the Great Depression. Many people simply could not afford to travel, and those who could increasingly relied upon buses, automobiles, and airplanes. As the nation’s rail center, Chicago felt the downturn keenly, but one of its major players, the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad, took an innovative approach to address the problem. Founded in 1855, the Burlington served Illinois, Iowa, Missouri, and Nebraska but lost half of its passengers between 1926 and 1931, prompting company president Ralph Budd to rethink the operation. He envisioned a lighter stainless-steel train to replace the previous era’s heavy steam locomotives, a notion supported by President Franklin D. Roosevelt’s administration, which encouraged the use of new materials and technical improvements to save the American railroad industry from collapsing.3 In September 1932, Budd approached the (unrelated) Edward G. Budd Manufacturing Company of Philadelphia to carry out his ideas. Ensuing efforts called upon the talents of many people, chiefly Earl Ragsdale, an engineer working for the Budd Company, who developed a new method of shot welding stainless steel to give it greater strength and resistance to corrosion; brothers Albert and Walter Dean, engineers at Budd, who designed the train’s aerodynamic shape and articulated In 1934, fair visitors flocked to see the streamlined Zephyr standing in sharp contrast to a steam locomotive from an earlier period. Photograph by Kenneth A. Hedrich for Hedrich-Blessing 6 | Chicago History | Winter 2019