Observation car "Olympic", one of the feature cars on the Spirit of Washington Dinner Train, was not just far from its Budd Company birthplace, it was also far, far removed from its 1937 birthdate.

Nearly 70 years after it emerged from Budd's Hunting Park plant for the Reading Company's "Crusader", it was still soldiering on out of Renton, Wash., near Seattle.

After the dinner train ended operations in 2007, the consist was stored first in Battle Ground, Wash., near Vancouver, then in Wheeler, Wash., near Moses Lake in the central part of the state. The entire set was subsequently acquired by Iowa Pacific Holdings, and is expected to enter dinner train service on the former SP Santa Cruz branch.

The unique "Crusader" trainset had a coach-observation on each end to eliminate turning the train at its end points. The other obs from the "Crusader" also survives, at the Railroad Museum of Pennsylvania in Strasburg. Both cars operated on Canadian National and VIA Rail Canada after their Reading career.

Photographed by Thomas McCann, February 15, 2005.
Added to the photo archive by Thomas McCann, November 24, 2006.

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