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Adjusting nicely to the traction life!

On this day in 1947, the Olympian Hiawatha, Milwaukee Roadโs overnight passenger train, started service!
Railroads in the mid-twentieth century took great pain...s to outfit their long-distance trains with the most comfortable, appealing accommodations they could imagine. The Chicago, Milwaukee, St. Paul and Pacific Railroad, more commonly known as the Milwaukee Road, was no exception. This swiveling, reclining upholstered railroad seat was designed by the Milwaukee industrial designer Brooks Stevens for the Milwaukee Road's streamlined Hiawatha service from Chicago to points west.
This chair was built in 1948 at the Milwaukee Road's massive car factory in Milwaukee's Menomonee Valley which, in addition to extensive metalworking facilities, was outfitted with a complete trim shop. The chair is upholstered in an uncut pile synthetic fabric, and the control for the reclining mechanism is cleverly hidden in the decorative aluminum castings on the right arm rest.
Milwaukee-born Clifford Brooks Stevens was Wisconsin's foremost industrial designer. He was the youngest of 15 American designers to found the Society of Industrial Designers in 1944, and one of the few to work outside of New York. Stevens chose to center his business in the industrial Midwest, setting up shop in his home town in 1935.
In 1943, the Milwaukee Road began planning for its postwar passenger service on the highly competitive Pacific Coast routes and approached Stevens for advice. The railroad hired Brooks Stevens Associates to redesign its signature Olympian Hiawatha streamliners from stem to stern, inside and out.
Stevens' best known work on the Hiawathas was the Sky Top lounge car, a glass-domed observation car at the end of the train, ideal for viewing the majestic scenery of the Rocky Mountains. 27 flat windows in 15 different shapes created the "solarium" portion of the car, an enclosure of almost 90% glass. Milwaukee Road historian Jim Scribbins described it as "the most strikingly contoured termination of any train in the United States."
Learn more: https://wihist.org/39IeTVt
๐ธ: Luxury railroad car seat designed by Brooks Stevens, 1948
Wisconsin Historical Museum object 1991.92
๐ธ: View of people seated in the Hiawatha's observation parlor with sky-top solar lounge | WHI Image ID 6881
๐ธ: View of a โRapidsโ series Sky Top observation car, 1948 Source: Milwaukee Art Museum, Brooks Stevens Archives; Gift of the Brooks Stevens Family and the Milwaukee Institute of Art & Design, [9H 3796]



































