Far From the Daylight

Although the striking Daylight streamliners have for many years been an iconic part of railroad history, the routes these ran on are a good chunk of what made them super famous. Although the main services were the Coast Daylight, Shasta Daylight, and San Joaquin Daylight, there was also a smaller route called the Sacramento Daylight. On top of this, SP had launched a few in Texas, the Sunbeam, Hustler, and Owl, however these were less known and shorter lived trains. The creation of Amtrak saw the end of these iconic streamliners, and eventually the Coast and Shasta Daylight routes were merged to create the Coast Starlight. However, a couple changes were made: the new route would not go to San Francisco, but would rather continue north out of San Jose, and an extension was made for the train to connect all the way to Seattle from Portland. Amtrak had the commuter operations take care of the passengers going to San Francisco until Caltrain was formed in 1985 to take over all passenger operations between San Jose and San Francisco.

 

Over fifty years after the end of the Daylights and nearly thirty after the demise of the Southern Pacific, passenger trains looks a lot different through the Cascades now. On this day, Amtrak 14 rolls along the Upper Klamath Lake in the late morning. Standing tall behind the train is Mt. Shasta, which the train had been going around only a couple hours prior. The orange and red streak has been gone for decades, long replaced with a streak of grey with red, white, and blue stripes. As unfortunate as it is that the colorful and unique streamliners are a thing of the past, at least passenger service still exists, and if you get lucky you may even see an old car or two still roaming the rails.

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