Chessie's elusive market

Chesapeake and Ohio Historical Magazine, Dec 2001 by Smith, Jesse J

What new could be said today about The Chessie, C&Os dream train of 1948? What revelation could possibly surface now, more than half a century after "The Train That Was (But Never Was)"' was delivered new from Budd ... and then immediately sacrificed by C&O before it ever boarded even a single customer?

With this article, the author proposes a new theory in answer to Chessie's greatest and longest-held secret!

Persistent Questions

There has always been something odd about the fabulous Chessie train-something that never made sense. The Chesapeake & Ohio's Chessie was perhaps the finest and most luxurious passenger train ever built, but its existence has always been perplexing for two reasons.

First, with the domeliner's many onboard perks and extras-had the train actually entered service-its financial break-even point would have clearly been on the "impossible" side of the ledger. Its operating costs would have far exceeded revenues.

Second, the trains all-important passenger market had always seemed nearly non-existent. (It was a luxury all-coach speedster with no head-end business, tearing across C&O's sparsely populated terrain.)

Clearly, with its extremely high operating costs and limited revenue potential, the new train would have been a financial disaster. Why would any railroad conceive such a train, investing millions in its planning and construction, when no economic justification for its operation seemed to exist? These important questions have always confounded, and have never been answered.

In addition, The Chessie's apparent lack of purpose has always made its creator, C&O Chairman Robert RI Young, look extremely foolish. Being the financial genius he was, how could he possibly father such a poor business venture? If The Chessie was such a disastrous concept, then Robert Young must have been an irresponsible planner-but he was not.

Early in 2001, while discussing The Chessie with fellow C&OHS member Greig Goodall, we happened upon a logical theory which puts to rest all of these persistant and troubling questions.

Customers

In August 1945, just as World War II incinerated to a fiery end at Hiroshima and Nagasaki, the C&O Board of Directors was making an important and costly decision in Cleveland. Led by the powerful and flamboyant Young, Chessie management decided to commit the many millions of dollars necessary to purchase the former Greenbrier Hotel resort back from the U.S. government. The railroad was getting back into the hotel business! Over the next two years, Young turned the huge, faded and overworked Army hospital into one of the finest and most prestigious resort properties in the world.

Whether to purchase the Greenbrier at the close of the war was a controversial issue for the railroad. Some board members thought re-entering the resort business was a mistake, especially considering the frightening condition to which the property had sunk by 1945. As a prisoner internment center during the war, and then as a busy Army hospital, it had been considerably altered over those five years. By war's end most of its furnishings (in addition to the mystique) had long since vanished.

The springs hostelry at White Sulphur had opened its doors in 1778, first called Bowyer's Sulphur Spring, then later as the Old White at White Sulphur Springs. Like so many mineral water baths in the area, it provided "healing" sulphur waters to the infirm, and then later offered exceptional service to the well-to-do and the wellheeled, becoming a welcome getaway from the stifling summer conditions in the South. As all those local springs developed, the Old White prospered, becoming by the 1820s a respected summer meeting place for antebellum Southern society. Later in the railroad age, the resort became a major and lucrative destination for Chesapeake & Ohio passengers. From the beginning, its fortunate location on the stage line of the Old State Road helped business in the 18th century, and then the railroad really "made" the Old White when it located its right-ofway through White Sulphur in 1869.

In 1910, President George Stevens committed C&O funds and purchased the property outright, renewing the grounds and then replacing the famous but aged hotel with the much more opulent worldclass Greenbrier which stands today. By 1913, construction of the new million-dollar, six-story, 250-room hotel was complete (two new wings increased capacity to 600 rooms by 1931), and from then on the C&O proudly possessed one of America's finest resorts. Naturally, railroad passenger service flourished.

With the United States at war in 1941, the federal government made a decision: treating its high-level German, Italian, Hungarian, Bulgarian, and Japanese diplomatic prisoners to the finest conditions feasible might be America's best chance of securing humane treatment for our own U.S. diplomatic detainees abroad. Until prisoner exchanges were effected, in the next 20 months some 1700 foreign diplomats, their staffs and families reluctantly called the Greenbrier "home."