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Budget cuts have claimed one of the nation's celebrated passenger trains - the Broadway Limited. Passengers still can travel between Chicago and New York, but the curtain has fallen on a piece of history.

The Broadway Limited, a train swift and luxurious enough to outrun and outlast its equally celebrated rival, the Twentieth Century Limited, has fallen to the budget ax. One of the most famous trains to die since Amtrak took over the nation's long-distance passenger rail service in 1971, the Broadway Limited made its final run Sept. 9.

"They're canceling this train?" asked a surprised Bonny Luna as she and her 12-year-old daughter, Laura, ate dinner in the Broadway's dining car on their way home from a vacation. For the Lunas and many other travelers, the Broadway was a link not only between New York and Amtrak's hub in Chicago, but also to history.

"The demise of the Broadway ... is not merely sad," the Patriot-News of Harrisburg, Pa., editorialized earlier in the month. "It is a mistake of no small significance. This service didn't simply die; it was killed by years of neglect, substandard service and equipment, and a schedule that was geared more to getting the mail through than to the convenience of travelers."

Amtrak says eliminating the Broadway will save it about $17.3 million, a good chunk of the $240 million budget shortfall the railroad had anticipated in its 1995 budget.

Travelers along the Broadway's route still will be able to travel between New York and Chicago by train, but they will have to switch in Pittsburgh to the Washington-to-Chicago Capitol Limited, a transfer that will force them to wait nearly two ours late at night.

The Broadway ran the same basic route mapped out by the old Pennsylnia Railroad, which began the service June 15, 1902, as an all-first-class, all-Pullman train. Inaugurated as the Pennsylvania Special, it became the Broadway Limited in 1912, taking its name not from New York's theater district but from the railroad's wide right-of-way of four and even six tracks across the heartland.

"The train was there day in and day out, year in and year out," railroad historian Mike Bezilla told the Associated Press. "It's been there through the world wars, through the Depression, the Sputnik, the atom bomb, you name it - there's been a Broadway." It competed with the New York Central System's Twentieth Century Limited, an all-first-class train that began service the same day but linked the nation's first and second cities by way of Albany and Buffalo, N.Y

The Broadway and the Century rivaled each other for speed, luxury and on-board amenities such as barbers (beards trimmed for 35 cents), early on-train telephones and gourmet meals. The Broadway "really was the Concorde of its day," says Dan Cupper, a noted railroad author and Harrisburg-based correspondent for Trains Magazine. There was even a library for passengers, who also were provided with regular stock and baseball reports, maids and valets.

The competition between the Broadway and the Century "was by no means just limited to the high iron. The limiteds also competed in the cinema and around the Christmas tree," wrote rail historians Joel Rosenbaum and Tom Gallo in their 1989 history, The Broadway Limited. The Broadway Limited's name was adopted for a 1941 movie about a Hollywood publicity stunt set aboard the train; the Century became the basis for a Ben Hecht play that ran on the real Broadway.

Until Dec. 12, 1967, all the Broadway's cars were Pullman sleepers or observation, lounge or dining cars. It added coaches for the common folk that year, after outlasting the Twentieth Century, which made its last run on Dec. 2, 1967.

At Amtrak's high point in the 1980s, it was operating four trains a day between New York and Chicago: the Broadway; the Lake Shore Limited, which runs on the old New York Central route; the Capitol Limited, which runs by way of Western Maryland on the old Baltimore & Ohio route; and the Cardinal, which connects New York, Washington and Chicago by way of Cincinnati.

But then came the recession and Amtrak's mounting woes, which in the last year have led the federally backed passenger line to cancel about 20 percent of its trains. The Broadway, with the weakest passenger loadings of the four New York-to-Chicago trains, is the first of the quartet to die.