The train traveled between Grand Central Terminal in New York City and LaSalle Street Station in Chicago, Illinois, along the railroad's "Water Level Route".

NYC inaugurated the 20th Century Limited as competition to the Pennsylvania Railroad, aimed at upper-class and business travelers.

It was described in The New York Times as having been "[...] known to railroad buffs for 65 years as the world's greatest train",[2] and its style was described as "spectacularly understated".

The phrase "red-carpet treatment" is derived from passengers' walking to the train on a specially-designed crimson carpet.

[1] The New York Times' report [4][5] stressed the routine nature of the trip, with no special procedures being followed and no extra efforts being made to break records.

"[1] The schedule cut two more hours off the run in June 1905, and, on the 21st of that month, the train was intentionally derailed on the Lake Shore & Michigan Southern Railway line at Mentor, Ohio, killing 21 passengers.

[9] The eastbound train left La Salle Street Station in Chicago at 15:00 and arrived at Grand Central Terminal the following morning at 08:00.

[11] The mails received by, postmarked, processed, sorted and dispatched from the 20th Century Limited's RPOs were either canceled or backstamped (as appropriate) during the trip by hand-applied circular date stamps (CDS) reading "N.Y. & CHI.

One of the five stamps features an image of a streamlined J-3a steam locomotive leading the 20th Century Limited out of the Chicago railyards on its way to New York, with the Board of Trade Building in the background.

[3] Passengers walked to the train in New York and Chicago on a specially designed crimson carpet, giving rise to the phrase "the red-carpet treatment".

[23] "Transportation historians", said the writers of The Art of the Streamliner, "consistently rate the 1938 edition of the Century to be the world's ultimate passenger conveyance—at least on the ground".

[25] On 15 October 1942 after a meeting in Chicago on the Manhattan Project General Leslie Groves invited J. Robert Oppenheimer to join himself, James C. Marshall and Kenneth Nichols on their return trip to New York.

[26] Regular passengers included Theodore Roosevelt, William Jennings Bryan, Lillian Russell, "Diamond Jim" Brady, J. P. Morgan, Enrico Caruso and Nellie Melba.

Madeline Kahn and John Cullum starred in the award-winning production (five Tony Awards out of nine nominations), whose spectacular production design featured both the lavish Art Deco details of the time period as well innovative staging to open up what could be cramped quarters inside a train car.

The musical was based on the 1932 Ben Hecht-Charles MacArthur stage play of the same subject, which in 1934 they adapted as a film entitled Twentieth Century, directed by Howard Hawks, with Carole Lombard and John Barrymore in the lead roles.

The Wrecker (Clive Cussler with Justin Scott) is the second in the long-running series and has Bell with other Van Dorn detectives riding the 20th Century Limited often as they pursue a train-wrecking villain.