About
"We should send the Carlin comp guy an Edible Arrangement or something."
- Ray
This all started when some enterprising individual took clips of Thomas and Friends and edited George Carlin's stand-up into them. It was all laughs until Ray told me that some of the edits were still relevant to the original stories. Turns out Thomas the Tank Engine is not, as I had thought as a child, about toy trains learning basic life lessons. It is actually a workplace comedy-drama set on an island under the keen watch of swift and merciless karma. Ray and I watched the whole show together (all twenty-four seasons) and wrote some stories in the style of the original books that people seem to like.
Ray lives in Chicago, which just so happens to have the largest railway museum in the United States, the Illinois Railway Museum. Since we were now such fans of trains, they invited me to come up for the last steam engine service of the year. Most of the engines in The Railway Series are steam engines so that was our interest then; we had come to see the Frisco 1630 and Shay 5.
We had no idea we were going to fall in love with a diesel that day.
At the IRM, we saw the Nebraska Zephyr tucked away in its berth in Barn 9. It's a stainless steel art deco trainset, each of its five fluted cars named after Roman goddesses. And even more notable, the train is pulled by an EMD E5 named "Silver Pilot"; the only surviving E5, in fact. Together, they're the last stainless steel streamlined Zephyr train still in operational service.
The next day we went to the Museum of Science and Industry. There we saw the Pioneer Zephyr, the first of the Burlington Zephyrs. This train was and still is treated as much like a celebrity as a train could be. It was built in 1934 and Burlington promoted it in a way almost... vaudevillian, with promotional stunts throughout its service life. It broke the land speed rail record on its way to debut at the 1934 World's Fair, it went on an exhibition tour, it was asked to appear at events, people named their businesses after it, there were commemorative letter covers given for its service milestones, there was a ride-on children's toy made in its likeness, it starred in a movie!
And it began a long lineage of stainless steel fluted trainsets that continues on to this day.
One thing that you glean from the Pioneer Zephyr exhibit is that the full fleet of Zephyr trains is quite large and confusing. We were curious where the Nebraska Zephyr fit in so as we waited for our train at the Metra Station, we looked it up. And that's when we learned that "Silver Pilot" did not originally belong to the Nebraska Zephyr. The engine was narrowly rescued from scrap by the IRM to pull it. At that point, we couldn't find an immediate answer to what happened to the train's original engine. A minor mystery!
Over the next few weeks, we did more research. Every new piece of information we found about "Silver Pilot" just made its story even better. The whole thing is wild and we had to dig to find most of it. It's insane because the engine has this amazing story (a story that Ray often points out would sound contrived if it wasn't true) and apparently no one has cared to document it in detail. The train's placard at the museum only briefly mentions how it came to be there and the guides mostly focus on the history of the cars with barely a mention for its engine, despite that the trainset is one of the museum's most popular attractions.
So me and Ray were now thoroughly enthralled by these two separate but related trains and how different their service lives were - and continue to be - when we get an idea.
It wasn't hard to make the leap that clearly these trains should be friends and that given the circumstances, it'd have to be a long distance coorespondence. Them being pen pals is adorable when one of them has a Railway Post Office. The premise is absurd, trains writing letters to each other, but we had advanced trainrot by this point. It was now second nature to personify the trains and turn their histories into narratives. That "Silver Pilot"'s wasn't more widely known was a travesty as far as we were concerned.
Then we found someting serendipitous, a sign that this was the correct way to tell the story.
Remember how the Pioneer Zephyr had all those publicity stunts and events to promote it? Well, on its tenth anniversary, they made a six-foot birthday cake and rigged up an eight-foot-long knife such that the train could pull forward, break a ribbon, and cut its own birthday cake.
Most of this cake was given to hospital patients, but individual pieces were also boxed up and sent off to each of Pioneer's "brothers" and a hundred-ish other fellow streamliners across the country.
With a letter.
The train actually, canonically, wrote a letter.
If Ralph Budd himself thought his train oughta to be writing letters, then our premise can't be too ridiculous, can it?
- DJ
P.S. This is a work in progress. Though the broad strokes will remain the same, it will be subject to minor changes as we continually learn more.
About Us
About the Title
| Ray: | M-10000 was doomed when they decided to make it banana yellow. |
| DJ: | The banana yellow probably seemed marketable at the time, but the silver was just too good comparatively. |
| Ray: | I realize part of it is that we're biased by the fact that we've grown up into the future which, arguably, Pioneer helped define. Minimalist, silver and black. Like, I'm not saying he did it singlehandedly, there's a lot of factors at play, lmfao. But like, the future is still silver to us. M-10000 looks and feels, to our modern eyes, like a thing of the past. |
| DJ: | That banana yellow/brown color combo woulda ended up being the future in the 70's. Maybe M-10000 was ahead of his time. |
| Ray: | Yeah, it's the color and shape of retro-futurism! His rounded shape, it almost feels like it came from another timeline. |
