After graduating at nineteen from Des Moines' Highland Park College, he began railway service as a draftsman in the Chicago Great Western’s divisional engineering office.

Stevens' was already well known for his location of the Great Northern Railway's line across Montana's Marias Pass, and would soon go on to plan the Panama Canal at the behest of Theodore Roosevelt.

This route, composed of the Spokane, Portland and Seattle, the Oregon Trunk Railway, the Western Pacific Railroad, and the Atchison, Topeka and Santa Fe, was finally pieced together in the 1930s.

This ultimately resulted in failure, when the Interstate Commerce Commission agreed to the merger, but only if the Hill Lines let go of their vital link to Chicago—the Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad.

The Budd Company built the Pioneer Zephyr for Burlington, and the train's "dawn-to-dusk" run from Denver, Colorado, to Chicago, Illinois, on May 26, 1934, in an unprecedented thirteen hours and five minutes, helped usher in the railroad streamliner era.

The story begins with pilgrims setting out on a journey, inspired by the budding springtime and by Zephyrus, the gentle and nurturing west wind.

By 1945, Budd had become intrigued with Electro-Motive Diesel’s Cyrus R. Osborne’s idea of a dome passenger car, and built the first experimental one in the Burlington's Aurora Shops.

In 1940 and again in 1949, Budd sponsored two elaborate historical pageants on the Burlington and was one of the moving spirits behind the extremely successful Railroad Fair held on Chicago’s lakefront in 1948-49.

Though he supported many publication which chronicled the history of the Burlington, Budd himself turned down a professorship at Northwestern University, claiming his lack of qualifications.