This post features the second half of the Budd Rail Diesel Car operating manual. Also included is a 1953 article by Omer Lavallee, from the CPR Spanner about the RDC project and the history of some of the CPR's self-propelled cars.
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Thank you to Jim Christie for sending me the following ad from Railway Age circa 1953. He had it professionally scanned and restored so that it looks as fresh as the day it was printed. From it, you can get an idea of the features Budd had been working on and how they were intended to meet the needs of railroads trying to provide passenger service in a more cost-effective manner.
The ad is clean, bold and modern.
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... and that was the last clean, crisp image you'll see in this posting!
The rest of this post will come from that well-travelled manual
and from the CPR Spanner of over 60 years ago.
While my father took relatively few photos of RDCs
- perhaps because they resembled buses more than traditional railway equipment -
his association with the CPR was recent enough that he preserved
a good deal of the early public relations material on the CPR Dayliners.
After all, they were a well-designed, efficient 'system'.
I collected the RDC manual and some other materials for future posts at railway shows over the years.
After the initial presentation of manual pages with photographs,
I have enlarged the images and tried to get you as much detail as can be resolved.
It seems that the equipment is designed so the engineers can solve most
away-from-terminal, backwoods-end-of-subdivision problems themselves.
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Here are articles my father saved from the CPR Spanner.
The first is undated.
... 'Montreal and Mont Laurier ... highly popular with passengers' ...
Compared to what?
Once again, this old chestnut ...
Not many CPR subdivisions had had songs written about their passenger service, circa 1950 ...
Felix Leclerc, Le train du nord
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The cover illustration for the November 1953 edition appears at the end of this post.
The print is easiest to read without much modification.
The photos are restored to resolve as much detail as possible and reprinted below each page.
A couple of months later,
Trains magazine used a night shot
of the opposite end of the same Dayliner.
