Railroads In The 1950s: Diesel, the Interstate & Passenger Collapse

Last revised: September 9, 2026

The 1950s opened on a railroad that still looked like a railroad country and closed on one that was already arguing about mergers. John Stover’s first-track series put 223,779 miles in 1950 and 211,459 in 1955. Steam still handled about 54 percent of freight work when the decade began. By the time it ended, the funded Interstate was under construction, piggyback had a car pool, the New York, Ontario & Western was scrap, and Norfolk & Western had taken the Virginian. Passenger losses ran on the order of $700 million a year. The lightweight cars ordered in 1945 were on the road. They did not bring the public back.

What follows here is 1950 through 1960: dieselization finished as policy, the Interstate as a funded highway, piggyback as a business, a recession that put the Senate in the room, and the first of the defensive combinations.

A Union Pacific publicity photo of the “Train of Tomorrow” in the spring of 1950. Four Astra-Dome cars behind an E7: the consist General Motors had toured, now on UP.

On this page: At a glance · What the 1940s left · Dieselization · Passenger collapse · Train of Tomorrow · The Interstate, 1956 · Piggyback · Recession and Smathers · Liquidation and talks · Into the 1960s

At a glance

Item	Detail
Miles of first track, 1950	223,779 (Stover / ICC)
Miles of first track, 1955	211,459
Peak (already past)	254,037 in 1916
Interurban miles, 1950	1,519 (Hilton and Due). Peak had been 15,580 in 1916
Operating ratio, 1950	74.5 percent
Steam share of work, 1950	About 54 percent freight, 36 percent passenger, 38 percent switching
Freight share of intercity tonnage	About 68 percent (1944) to about 44 percent (1960). H. Roger Grant
Intercity passenger share	About 74 percent (1944) to about 27 percent (1960)
Lightweight cars, 1950s	About 4,400 cars, about $1.3 billion (Welsh, Howes, and Holland)
Passenger-service losses	On the order of $700 million a year. PRR about $71 million in 1951 (Welsh, Broadway Limited)
Federal-Aid Highway Act (Interstate)	June 29, 1956. About 41,000 miles authorized. The 1944 act had put the system on paper
Trailer Train / TTX	Incorporated November 9, 1955. Operations March 17, 1956
NYO&W liquidation	March 29, 1957
Recession, 1957–58	Net income about $46 million (1957), down 39 percent from 1955. Working capital $880 million (1955) to $576 million (1957). Weekly carloads 410,022 in late December 1957, lowest since December 1932
Transportation Act of 1958	Signed August 12, 1958. ICC authority over passenger-train discontinuance (section 13a); guaranteed loans
N&W–Virginian	December 1, 1959
Railroad employment	About 1 percent of the U.S. workforce
Closer	N&W last regular steam, May 6–7, 1960. Erie–Lackawanna, October 17, 1960. Both open the next decade

Mileage is the Stover / ICC first-track series. Information compiled September 9, 2026.

What the 1940s left

The decade inherited a bet. Railway Age for December 15, 1945, had led with New York Central’s 721 lightweight cars at $56 million and Pennsylvania’s 214 at $21 million the same week. Those orders, the Burlington Silver Dome of June 1945, and the California Zephyr’s first revenue trips on March 20, 1949, belong to the 1940s. Whether the cars earned their keep is this page’s problem. Joe Welsh, Bill Howes, and Kevin Holland, in The Cars of Pullman, put the 1950s purchase at about 4,400 lightweight cars and about $1.3 billion. The industry was still buying stainless steel after the public had started buying Chevrolets and tickets on DC-6s.

On August 27, 1950, with a Korean War strike threatening, President Truman ordered the Army to take the railroads again. Possession lasted until May 23, 1952. It was a labor seizure, not a USRA sequel and not an Office of Defense Transportation rerun. The roads stayed private companies under a uniform. Traffic was not 1944. The plant was already smaller than it had been in 1918, and the highway map of 1944 was about to be funded.

Santa Fe 4-8-4 3760 and F3A 21-L southbound at Redondo Junction Los Angeles July 1950

Santa Fe 4-8-4 No. 3760 and F3A No. 21-L southbound past the interlocking tower at Redondo Junction, Los Angeles, in July, 1950. American-Rails.com collection.

Finishing dieselization

The FT had proved freight diesel in 1939–40. The war rationed it. After V-J Day the roster changed in a hurry; that flood is the 1940s story. This decade finished the conversion. Electro-Motive’s F7 and GP7 were already in the catalog in 1949. Geeps, F9s, GP9s, and the first second-generation units followed. Alco, Baldwin, Fairbanks-Morse, and Lima-Hamilton sold against them and then, one by one, left the business. The model directories are on the diesel hub. The 1950s fact is that steam’s share of the work collapsed from a majority to a remnant.

Holdouts were real. Norfolk & Western and Chesapeake & Ohio still believed in coal-burning power. N&W outshopped steam switchers at Roanoke into the early 1950s, then bought GP9s in 1955 and, under Stuart Saunders, dieselized in a hurry. Union Pacific’s 4-8-8-4 Big Boys were still on Wyoming manifests in 1955. Virginian Mikados still switched Norfolk that December. O. Winston Link spent 1955–60 photographing N&W steam at night; that work is his page, not this one. The last regular steam on a major eastern trunk is a 1960 date. The decision that steam was finished is this decade’s.

Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 4004 eastbound manifest at Hermosa Wyoming October 16 1955 Bob Collins

Union Pacific 4-8-8-4 No. 4004 charges through rural Hermosa, Wyoming, with an eastbound manifest on October 16, 1955. Bob Collins photo. American-Rails.com collection.

The passenger bet that did not pay

Coaches were still full in 1944 because gasoline and tires were rationed. When the ration books ended, the share fell. H. Roger Grant, in Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad, put railroads’ intercity passenger share at about 74 percent in 1944 and about 27 percent in 1960. Freight’s share of intercity tonnage dropped from about 68 percent to about 44 percent over the same span. Passengers carried had been about 770 million in 1946. The 1964 figure, about 298 million, is the next decade’s tally; the slope was already visible here. Commuter cutbacks ran past 2,500 trains by 1955. The 1968 remnant is not this page’s count.

Joe Welsh notes that the Pennsylvania lost about $71 million on passenger operations in 1951. The road had lost money overall in 1946 for the first time in its history; that signal is a 1940s date. The 1950s answer was more stainless steel, more advertising, and dome cars in every catalog language: Vista-Dome, Astra-Dome, Great Dome, Super Dome, Strata-Dome, Santa Fe Hi-Levels. The cars sold the view. They did not reverse the ledger. Union Pacific was still taking delivery of domes in 1958, the last five from Pullman-Standard numbered 7011–7015 for the City of St. Louis.

Union Pacific NW2 1011 switching streamlined City fleet cars in Los Angeles June 6 1954

Union Pacific NW2 No. 1011 switches streamlined cars of the “City” fleet in Los Angeles on June 6, 1954. American-Rails.com collection.

The Train of Tomorrow

General Motors and Pullman-Standard built the four-car demonstrator in 1945–47 and put it on the road in the spring of 1947, christened at Chicago on May 28. The tour lasted about twenty-eight months, some 65,000 miles, 181 cities. It stood at the Chicago Railroad Fair in 1948 and 1949. Union Pacific bought the set in the spring of 1950 for $500,000 and put the cars on Portland–Seattle trains 457 and 458 from June 18, 1950. The consist had been GM two-tone blue; UP painted it Armour yellow.

Up front on the publicity stills was E7A 988 (EMD demonstrator 765). Behind it, four Astra-Domes:

Chair car Star Dust
Coach-diner Sky View
3-compartment / 2-drawing-room / 8-duplex-roomette sleeper-lounge Dream Cloud
Club-lounge observation Moon Glow

Hyatt roller-bearing journals, each truck with its own power, Frigidaire chilled water, an all-electric kitchen in Sky View, air-conditioning throughout. The locomotive went into the general passenger pool. The cars worked the Pacific Northwest into the early 1960s and then, except Moon Glow, to the torch. The dome as a 1940s idea is the previous page. The 1950 tour and the UP assignment are this one. Named-train profiles stay on Streamliners.

Colorado and Southern Burlington F7A 702-A laying over in Denver Colorado early 1960s

Colorado & Southern (Burlington) F7A No. 702-A lays over in Denver, Colorado, in the early 1960s. American-Rails.com collection.

A funded Interstate

Congress had named a National System of Interstate Highways in the Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944. That statute did not pay for the pavement. President Eisenhower signed the Federal-Aid Highway Act of June 29, 1956—the National Interstate and Defense Highways Act—funding about 41,000 miles of controlled-access highway. Four lanes, every continental state, east–west and north–south. The public could leave when it wanted and, on most corridors, beat the train.

Trucks already had the Motor Carrier Act of 1935 and, after the war, the short haul the railroads had borrowed for the duration. Airlines had passed the Pullman Company in passenger-miles in 1949. The 1956 act did not invent those competitors. It paved the map the 1944 act had drawn and made the automobile trip the default. Rail travel was already waning before June 29. After it, the argument was over timing, not direction.

Piggyback as a business

Trailer-on-flat-car was older than the decade. The Chicago North Shore & Milwaukee tested highway trailers on flatcars in 1926 to hold less-than-carload traffic. Chicago Great Western offered regular TOFC as early as 1936. Those origins stay on their pages. What the 1950s did was turn the experiment into an industry.

The Pennsylvania launched TrucTrain in 1954—dedicated piggyback between the New York region and Chicago, circus-loaded at first on converted F30 flats, then on 75-foot cars built for two 35-foot trailers. Trailer Train Company was incorporated November 9, 1955, by the Pennsy, Norfolk & Western, and Rail-Trailer Corporation, to own a pooled fleet of those cars. Operations began March 17, 1956. The reporting mark TTX is still on the flats. By 1959 some fifty railroads were in piggyback, and some were hanging a cut of trailers on secondary passenger trains to offset the varnish losses.

New York Central’s answer was not a highway trailer on a flatcar. Flexi-Van used a detachable van body, a highway chassis, and a low-profile railcar with a turntable. Strick tested the hardware in 1957. Revenue service on the Water Level Route followed in the spring of 1958. It was a commercial success for the Central and not the industry standard. Conventional TOFC and the Trailer Train pool won. The Flexi-Van encyclopedia is its own page.

Elsewhere the plant caught up with the diesels. Machines replaced extra-gang muscle. More than half the mileage in service late in the decade was 100-pound rail or heavier. Centralized Traffic Control and data processing cut the cost of running what remained. Ton-miles per worker had been doubling about every fifteen years since the First World War. Efficiency was not the same thing as a rate of return.

Virginian Railway 2-8-2 430 Class MB switching at Norfolk Virginia December 1954 H Reid

Virginian Railway 2-8-2 No. 430 (Class MB) switching at Norfolk, Virginia, in December, 1954. These Mikados often worked the Tidewater. H. Reid photo. American-Rails.com collection.

1957–58, and a Senate hearing

Eastern roads felt it first. Hauls were shorter, terminals denser, passenger plants heavier. Bad-order freight cars nearly doubled between 1956 and 1958. Pennsylvania’s bad-order ratio went from 7.4 percent in January 1957 to 11.2 percent the next year. Southern Pacific stood at about 2 percent in January 1958. Gregory Schneider, in Rock Island Requiem, notes that ties, ballast, and rail jumped about 40 percent in cost between 1948 and 1957. Wages moved with them.

A recession opened in the last quarter of 1957. Gross domestic product dropped about 3.7 percent. Automobiles, steel, and agriculture all shipped less. Railroad net income for 1957 was about $46 million, down 39 percent from 1955. Working capital fell from $880 million to $576 million. Weekly carloadings hit 410,022 in late December 1957, the lowest since December 1932.

The Senate Subcommittee on Surface Transportation opened hearings in Washington in January 1958. More than twenty railroad presidents sat in the room. Senator George Smathers of Florida put it in the record: “There is little question that today our railroads are in serious condition. A mighty industry has come upon sick and precarious times.” Congress did pass a statute. The Transportation Act of August 12, 1958 gave the Interstate Commerce Commission authority, under new section 13a, to let interstate passenger trains come off without a state veto, and it authorized guaranteed loans for equipment and maintenance. It did not deregulate freight rates. The rate freedom that later came with the Staggers Rail Act of October 14, 1980, is a later story.

A liquidation, a merger, and a pile of talks

The New York, Ontario & Western had been in court since 1937. Anthracite was gone. Milk was on the highway. Passenger service had ended in 1953. Trustees tried to sell pieces. Creditors wanted the assets. Federal Judge Sylvester J. Ryan ordered operations stopped. The last trains ran March 29, 1957. It was the largest Class I liquidation of its day. Rock Island’s 1980 end is the comparison, and that comparison belongs to the next pages.

The first big postwar merger that actually closed was healthy coal money taking healthier coal money. Norfolk & Western absorbed the Virginian Railway at one minute after midnight on December 1, 1959. The ICC had blocked an N&W lease of the Virginian in 1925. In 1959 there was little protest. A 200-car coal train moved from Virginian rails onto N&W at Abilene, Virginia, that morning. The combined company had a better eastbound grade than N&W had owned alone.

Talks were everywhere else and closings were not. Pennsylvania and New York Central, rivals since the nineteenth century, were discussing merger by 1957. Penn Central itself is February 1, 1968. Erie and the Delaware, Lackawanna & Western were in serious talks by the late 1950s; Erie Lackawanna is October 17, 1960. Chicago & North Western and Milwaukee were talking as early as late 1954. Union Pacific and Rock Island belongs to the early 1960s. The merger encyclopedia, the bankruptcies, and Conrail are the 1960s–70s page. This decade is when the industry decided combination was a strategy, and when one combination and one liquidation actually happened.

Rio Grande FT A-B set and F7A shoving eastbound freight at Winter Park Colorado 1960s

A Rio Grande A-B set of FTs, with an F7A, shoves an eastbound freight at Winter Park, Colorado, during the 1960s. Out of view at left is the west portal of Moffat Tunnel. American-Rails.com collection.

Into the 1960s

The map at the end of the decade was still a railroad map. First track had fallen from 223,779 miles to 211,459 by 1955 and kept falling. Interurbans, 1,519 miles in 1950, were a remnant. Steam was a remnant too, concentrated on N&W coal in West Virginia and a few other holdouts. Piggyback had a car company. The Interstate had a budget. Section 13a had a docket. The Ontario & Western was gone. The Virginian was N&W lettering.

On May 6, 1960, Norfolk & Western Y6b 2190 worked a mine run in southern West Virginia. In the early hours of May 7, the fire came out of S1a 291 at Williamson. That is the last regular steam on a major eastern trunk, and it is the next decade’s opening, not this page’s property. Erie Lackawanna followed on October 17. The 1960s and 1970s—Penn Central, the passenger-train slaughter under 13a, Amtrak, and Conrail—are Abandoned Railroads: Industrial Decline. The 1950s left them a diesel railroad, a highway competitor with federal money, a piggyback business that worked, and a passenger plant that did not.

Sources

Stover, John F. The Routledge Historical Atlas of the American Railroads. New York: Routledge, 1999. First-track 223,779 (1950); 211,459 (1955). Peak 254,037 (1916)
Boyd, Jim. The American Freight Train. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 2001. Steam share of work, 1950; piggyback origins
Hilton, George W., and John F. Due. The Electric Interurban Railways in America. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1960. 1,519 miles (1950); peak 15,580 (1916)
Welsh, Joe, Kevin Holland, and Bill Howes. The Cars of Pullman. Minneapolis: Voyageur Press, 2010. About 4,400 lightweight cars in the 1950s, about $1.3 billion
Welsh, Joe. Pennsylvania Railroad’s Broadway Limited. St. Paul: MBI, 2006. PRR passenger loss about $71 million (1951)
Grant, H. Roger. Erie Lackawanna: Death of an American Railroad, 1938–1992. Stanford: Stanford University Press, 1994. Intercity freight share about 68% (1944) to 44% (1960); passenger share about 74% to 27%
Schneider, Gregory L. Rock Island Requiem: The Collapse of a Mighty Fine Line. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2013. Plant costs about +40%, 1948–57; recession figures
Schafer, Mike. More Classic American Railroads. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 2000. Chicago Great Western TOFC, 1936
Schafer, Mike, and Brian Solomon. Pennsylvania Railroad. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 1997. TrucTrain
Solomon, Brian, and Mike Schafer. New York Central Railroad. St. Paul: Andover Junction, 2007. Flexi-Van hardware, 1957
Doughty, Geoffrey H. New York Central’s Great Steel Fleet, 1948–1967. Revised ed. Lynchburg: TLC, 1999
Murray, Tom. The Milwaukee Road. St. Paul: MBI, 2005. C&NW–Milwaukee talks
Del Vecchio, Mike. Railroads Across America. Osceola, Wis.: MBI, 1998
Federal-Aid Highway Act of 1944 (system on paper). Federal-Aid Highway Act of June 29, 1956 (Interstate funding, about 41,000 miles)
Transportation Act of 1958, Public Law 85-625, August 12, 1958. Senate Surface Transportation Subcommittee hearings, January–April 1958 (Sen. George Smathers)
Trailer Train Company: incorporated November 9, 1955; operations March 17, 1956. PRR TrucTrain, 1954
Railway Age, December 15, 1945. NYC 721 cars / PRR 214 cars (1940s orders; 1950s inheritance)
GM / Pullman-Standard Train of Tomorrow, 1947 tour; Chicago Railroad Fair 1948–49; UP purchase spring 1950; Portland–Seattle trains 457/458 from June 18, 1950. Consist: E7A 988, Star Dust, Sky View, Dream Cloud, Moon Glow
President Truman, railroad seizure, August 27, 1950–May 23, 1952
New York, Ontario & Western: last trains March 29, 1957. New York Times, March 15, 1957 (Judge Ryan order)
N&W–Virginian merger, December 1, 1959. N&W last regular steam, May 6–7, 1960 (Norfolk & Western Historical Society; Kenneth L. Miller)
UP 4-8-8-4 4004, Hermosa, Wyo., October 16, 1955. Bob Collins. Virginian 2-8-2 430, Norfolk, December 1954. H. Reid

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