The car was named after Bob Burns, a highly popular American radio comedian and musical entertainer of the 1930s and 1940s.
Burns was famous for inventing a bizarre, makeshift horn instrument crafted from copper pipes and a funnel, which he dubbed the "bazooka" (the word later used by the military to describe the rocket launcher).
Because Burns was known nationwide for creating functional items out of scrap and household objects, naming a homemade washtub car the "Bob Burns Special" was a fitting tribute to his comedic persona.
The S1 was displayed at the New York World's Fair of 1939–40 where 27 eastern railroads had one combined 17-acre exhibit, which also included the Baltimore and Ohio Class N-1.
The S1 was the only one of it's kind made, it was built when they still experimented, before steam locomotives were made obsolete, and it was intended to demonstrate duplex drive advantages
It was the longest and heaviest rigid frame reciprocating steam loco ever built, the Streamlined Art Deco fairing designed by Raymond Loewy. It had the largest single-piece casting ever made for any locomotive, and the largest boiler ever built by PRR.
The Pennsylvania Railroad was at one time, the largest publicly traded corporation in world, and had a budget larger than the U.S. government and workforce of 250,000.
At the Fair, the drive wheels operated under the locomotive's steam power ran continuously on the roller platform at 60 mph all day long. Film footage shows that all the wheels on S1, besides the drive wheels, were also placed on rollers powered by electricity; every time S1 started its performance by moving the drive wheels, all the wheels were rolling, including the wheels on the tender's truck.
At the Fair, there were two other streamliners that performed at another exhibit, and came in front of the crown across the exhibit facing each other on the same track:
in the following video, which has lots of other interesting stuff, these trains are at 1:51
this was in the “Railroads on Parade,” a pageant of the streamlined engines and more common steam locomotive designs.
In 16 scenes and actual settings and costumes of the early days, actors, horses, covered wagons, stage coaches, oxen, mules and locomotives, demonstrated the importance of transportation in the opening of this continent.
Starting over 194 years ago, at the New York water-front, in the covered wagon era, the parade of actors, chorus and ballet told the story of America's evolution in transportation
Which surprising to me, is NSFW, as the amount of topless beautiful young women is astonishing. The mermaids were topless, the "sun worshipers" had transparent bikinis, the ballerinas were topless, the burlesque dancers were transparent bikini tops, and there was one dancing women show that had a half dozen styles of night club topless stripper dances, frankly, that surprises me... that the '39 worlds fair has never had any mention of all the breasts and nipples in anything I've ever heard about it.
"News reporters found it difficult to understand the role of the Amusement Zone. "The smell of popcorn and hamburgers mixed with wiffs from Frank Buck's fauna display gave the place a Coney Island air." "Culture seems to be having a struggle with Entertainment at the fair. The tendency among visitors is to draw the line along World's Fair Boulevard, which geographically separates the (the Amusement zone from the exhibit area)."
And seemingly ignoring the constant controversy over the "nude shows,"
"It is a credit to the management that none of the obscene exhibits in the Chicago Midway were permitted. It was all good and wholesome fun reflecting the changed public sentiment."
George Smith, the man in charge of the Amusement Zone concessions, began his World's Fair career as a chair pusher at Buffalo's Pan-American Exposition in 1901.
