The first successful dome design in the United States was the "Vista Dome", which began test runs in 1945. The Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad rebuilt a stainless steel Budd-built coach in their shops in Aurora, Illinois, with the Vista Dome design imagined and sketched by Cyrus Osborn. The dome area featured seats positioned lengthwise in the cabin facing double-pane windows which were designed to improve insulation. While popular with travelers, dome cars could not be used on most railroads in the Eastern United States because of the low clearance on various tunnels. Even the low-slung "Strata-Domes", designed by Pullman-Standard for the Chesapeake and Ohio Railway, could not travel north of Washington, D.C. due to low tunnel clearances in Baltimore and New York City. The concept of a "sun lounge" or a "sun parlor" was not new in railroading. The Illinois Central Railroad's Panama Limited, introduced in 1911, included a "sun-parlor" observation car, with wrap-around windows and a mahogany interior. In 1931 the Seaboard itself added a "lounge sun-parlor car" to the Southern States Special, one of its New York-Florida trains. The Seaboard turned to Pullman to design a sleeper-lounge which captured the ambiance of a dome car in a single-level car. The resulting Sun Lounge was split into two parts. At one end were five double bedrooms. At the other was a lounge for use by sleeping car passengers on the train. The lounge was unique, enclosed by large picture windows and glass windows on the roof, creating the effect of a dome without a dome. The lounge interior included such Floridian touches as light fixtures made of driftwood. In contemporary advertising the Seaboard touted the Sun Lounges as "unlike anything on the rails at present."
Service history
Pullman delivered three Sun Lounges to the Seaboard: Miami Beach, Palm Beach, and Hollywood Beach. All three entered service in 1956 on the Silver Meteor. When the Seaboard merged with its rival the Atlantic Coast Line Railroad in 1967 to create the Seaboard Coast Line Railroad the cars remained in service but were renamed, becoming the Sun View, Sun Beam, and Sun Ray, respectively. Amtrak inherited all three lounges in 1971. It retired Sun View in 1977; Sun Beam and Sun Ray in 1981. None of three were converted to head-end power under the Heritage Fleet program. The Sun Beam was scrapped in the 1980s. The other two cars are privately owned.
