At 5:04:40 on Saturday morning, May 26, 1934, the first diesel-powered, stainless-steel, streamlined train pulled out of Union Station, Denver, on a dawn-to-dusk race for Chicago. Called the Zephyr, it had been delivered to the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy Railroad in Philadelphia just six weeks earlier and had traveled west in a series of short trips. To reach Chicago before sunset, it had to cover 1,015 miles nonstop in less than fourteen hours. No train in railroad history had run more than 775 miles nonstop, and the Burlington’s crack passenger train, the steam-powered Aristocrat, took twenty-seven hours from Denver to Chicago. Newspapers called the Zephyr’s race “chancy.”

Sleek and shiny in the early morning sun, the Zephyr looked like a rocket in a Buck Rogers cartoon. Its technology, as novel as its appearance, had been developed over the previous three years, the result of major breakthroughs both in metallurgy and in the design of the diesel engine. Such breakthroughs had seemed so unlikely as the thirties got under way that most railroad officials had assumed high-speed, diesel-powered trains were “decades and millions of dollars away.”

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