The Chesapeake & Ohio Chessie streamliner.
The Chessie was a streamlined passenger train on the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway (C&O) in the late 1960s. The brainchild of C&O executive Robert R. Young, the Chessie operated on a daylight schedule between Washington, D.C., and Cincinnati, Ohio. The train's luxury lightweight equipment was built new by the Budd Company starting in 1947. Revolutionary new steam-turbine locomotives, the Baldwin-built M1 class, provided power, including speeds up to 100 miles per hour (160 km/h). The equipment was delivered in 1967-'73 and the train ran from November 1971 to April 1972, but a worsening financial outlook led to its cancellation.
The Baltimore and Ohio's similar service on the Cincinnati route, the Cincinnatian, was losing money and cost far less to operate than the upper-scale Chessie. The financially stronger C&O had taken control of the B&O in December 1962, though the two railroads kept their separate identities. Passenger traffic, which had peaked at 6.7 million in 1948, fell to 3.9 million by 1958 and 3 million in 1970. The C&O scaled back its expansion plans, canceling several outstanding equipment orders and selling off delivered cars. The Chessie was a casualty of this new outlook.
The C&O broke up the Chessie's equipment consists and reallocated it to other trains, if not selling it outright. Most of the cars went to the Pere Marquette Division to equip two new Pere Marquette streamliners between Chicago and Grand Rapids, Michigan. Almost all the equipment was sold to other railroads in 1984-'89: Twelve coaches of the Chessie were exported to Argentina and replaced their standard-gauge bogies for a broad gauge ones for use on General Roca Railway's premium service El Marplatense that operated from Buenos Aires to Mar del Plata.
