136 illustrations, one color tip in of the cover and one color fold out. A relentless rain drenched Los Angeles on a night in late May, 1937. It dripped everywhere and gilded any surface not sheltered at the old La Grande depot. It that downpour, the Super Chief s stainless sides glistened under a continually replenished coating of raindrops. Her lighted windows, like an incandescent chain, revealed warm and cozy rooms. Fluted car-faces led one s eyes, perspectively, into the wet distance where grimy clouds edged across a sky black enough and thick enough to muffle light and sound. Charcoal burning in the dining car stoves smoke-signaled up out of vents to take on a yellowish cast from bare bulbs that glowed weakly in dirty reflectors overhead. Oily fumes meandered off the diesel engines smudging a background where carts of mail bags rattled in follow-the-leader with a snarling Fordson tractor. Cigars pungently challenged the gentle fragrance of rose bouquets and running feet slapped and splashed in puddles. The smell of wet raincoats and fur coats lingered in the wake of passengers who hurried to dry sanctuary in the beckoning Pullman cars parked nearby. A steam engine roamed around the lacework of tracks to mingle its discrete puffing with clanging trolley car bells and honking taxi horns out on Santa Fe Avenue. Thunder rumbled as air hissed from brake lines and cylinders. The Super Chief sighed as a choir, eased ahead, and was on her way to Chicago. Her air horn trailing back from somewhere off n the rainy night. Time has a way of fogging things and a train, even a great and famous train, can be obscured in the haze of years gone by. Surveys show that many of today s readers automobile and airliner oriented have only vague impressions of older trains. In many instances, they are all but unaware of what they looked like. Few, if any, of those readers have ever been on a train, least of all, one that ran over forty years ago. The author is cognizant of this lack of familiarity and so it is that he offers, for inspection, earnestly and affectionately, the legendary Super Chief. May this meeting of reader and train be easy, unhurried, and, most assuredly, worthwhile. Stan Repp, was, at one time, called, much to his pleasure, a one-man latter-day promotion team for the Super Chief. In accepting that devotive laurel wreath, he is mindful of the responsibility that goes with the accolade and, accordingly, presents this book as his best effort at time-lapse recollection in revealing a Great American Train of the past; the Santa Fe Railway s Super Chief.
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Book Description
Editorial Reviews
Review
It s the Super Chief! The Super Chief ...Train of the Stars is an unusual book by an unusual author, who wrote it longhand sitting with his left arm hooked to a dialysis machine. That was better than sitting there fuming, which some were doing, Stan Repp said. I had my notes beside me and wrote on paper held by a clip board placed on my lap. Those notes are the secret of the meticulous detail in this volume of more than 250 pages published by Golden West Books of San Marino. And he saw a lot as he rode the Santa Fe s Super Chief on its inaugural run from Chicago to Los Angeles, leaving at 7:15 p.m. on May 12, 1936. He made full notes on people, what they did and ate, and often what they wore. Repp also went along on the Super Chief s record run from Los Angeles to Chicago in May of 1937. Writing with elegant flourishes straight out of the Lucius Beebe era, his report recreates the excitement of a tingling race against time. The Super Chief pulled into Chicago s Dearborn Station 2 hours and 56 minutes ahead of the regular schedule of 39 hours and 45 minutes. That may not seem like much to a generation used to jet plane speeds, but it was phenomenal 40 years ago. The elapsed time for the 2,227.3 miles gave and average speed of 60.8 miles per hour, but the actual running time average was 64 miles per hour. The Super Chief often touched 100 miles an hour. No one ever knew how fast it could go. Engineers on a test run hit 150 miles an hour, then slowed for fear of jumping the track, Repp writes. On that record run the Super Chief stopped at Pasadena to pick up W. K. Etter and other Santa Fe brass that lived in San Marino. Pasadena, mentioned frequently in the book, was one of only two regular passenger stops made by the train between Los Angeles and Chicago. The other was Kansas City. Pasadena was the station used by the motion picture stars and other studio people on their trips across the country. The book has many photographs of the Super Chief in various phases of its development and in action, including one showing it zipping through a Pasadena orange grove at 100 miles per hour. Many of the pictures are rare and previously unpublished. For those who lived in the era of the Super Chief, the book is a nostalgic treat. For later generations, it is a delightful view of an earlier time, a remarkable train, of how it was made, of its operation and of the famous movie stars and others who rode it. This is a must have for any train enthusiast s library. Review written by Harold N. Hubbard, Pasadena Star News Staff Writer. Sunday, September 7, 1980
Art and Book Section --Pasadena Star News Art and Books
Art and Book Section --Pasadena Star News Art and Books
About the Author
Born in Buffalo, New York in 1919, Stan Repp has, from the tenderest age, admired, been intrigued by, and just plain reveled in railway [passenger cars and the people who rode in them. He frequented and found fascination in coach yards, commissaries, supply rooms, paint shops, designers studios, Pullman-Dining-Lounge cars (peopled and deserted), diesel cabs and repair tracks, engineers homes, sooty depots, back-country crossings, and, best of all, trips aboard the Super Chief. Thirty five years an illustrator, Repp sketched and painted trains favoring those eminently appealing accommodations, observation cards and, of course, the variety of name-signs which adorned them. A Californian since 1936, Repp, who lived by the sea, laments the passing of gentler and less contrived times, misses real trains, and is glad, as are many old-timers that he was around in the halcyon days of the passenger cars, most prominently, most remarkable, most memorably those which comprised the first lightweight Super Chief.
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1 of 1 people found the following review helpful:
3.0 out of 5 stars
Begs for color photos,
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This review is from: The Super Chief, Train of the Stars (Hardcover)
Hard to imagine what author and publisher were thinking to not have color photos of a train makeup that was all about style, design and color. Decent read if your into a time gone buy.
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