City of Miami - 1
Modeling the City of Miami, part 1
Model this late steam era name passenger
train, car-for-car
By James Eager
D
ecember 18, 1940 the inaugural run of the City of
Miami ,a seven-car coach streamliner. Its route was
from Chicago to Miami, a distance of 1,493 miles
(2,403 km). Like a ship leaving harbor, her bow had a wave-like
pattern that cut the prairie as she moved.
I first saw an image of this train on the cover of Paul M. Somers
book, “Illinois Central Streamliners 1936-1946”. A whole chap-
ter of the book is devoted to this train.
My City of Miami train is a study in stops and starts, errors, and
doing something over until you get it right. As I learned dur-
ing this process, passenger cars take more effort to get work-
ing correctly than freight cars. I thought they would be easier. I
ended up farming out some parts of that could get done faster
and better by others.
I also discovered that there are no good color photographs of
this train in existence. The only color images I have seen, so
far, are a 16mm film of the train. Unfortunately, the film does
not show the lettering on the sides of the cars. The only clues
to the actual colors are statements such as: “The entire train
was painted in an orange and palm green scheme with scar-
let stripes and lettering. This color scheme only lasted a few
years and then
the whole train
was repainted
into the choco-
late and orange
scheme that the
ICRR settled on.”
I decided I would
build a version of
this train for my
layout. This was
in the late 1990s,
I started by look-
ing around for
what was avail-
able. Not much,
so I shelved
the project as
my job situa-
tion changed. By
2001, I moved
and my layout-
was history. The
book was mis-
placed in the
1
1: The City of Miami on the cover of the
book by Paul M. Somers called
. A whole
chapter of this book is devoted to this train
– it’s a research source worth getting.
MRH-Jul 2013
