The Western Pacific Railroad completed its line from Salt Lake City to Oakland in 1909, just two years after the Post Office allowed people to send postcards with messages written on the back. WP encouraged postcard companies to publish cards … Continue reading
Railroads like to write their own histories so they can leave out all the scandals, swindles, bankruptcies, and other messy details. But this one — a reprint from Western Pacific‘s employee magazine — is pretty honest. George Gould, who controlled … Continue reading
This Western Pacific menu was used on a 1951 Prairie Farmer tour. I suspect that, like some Great Northern menus, this menu cover was specifically used for tour groups and wasn’t used for ordinary dining car passengers. Given the date, … Continue reading
The back of this menu claims that San Francisco is the “flower capital of the world.” Union Pacific featured photos of two different flower stands, including one from the 1950s and one from the 1960s. This 1948 menu shows that … Continue reading
Rocky Mountain Views covered sights all over Colorado because the Rio Grande had lines extending all over Colorado. But Western Pacific — which was financed by and once owned by the Rio Grande — was basically a single line from … Continue reading
These menus are from the California Railroad Museum, which posted them at archive.org as individual pages. All I’ve done is assemble them into PDFs. Those that are dated range from 1915 to 1927, but some probably fall outside that range. … Continue reading
I’ve shown this menu cover before in a post about the Exposition Flyer. But that was a low-resolution scan taken from another web site. This one is higher resolution and, unlike the other menu, it was never used so it … Continue reading
The back cover of this menu describes the lands between Salt Lake City and the Sierra Nevada as “the Western Garden of Allah.” Whether this was inspired by the Rock Island Railroad’s Garden of Allah book, or the 1936 movie … Continue reading
Here’s the 1965 edition of yesterday’s timetable. Except for the cover date, six of the eight pages in the two timetables are identical in almost every respect. The page listing Western Pacific agents is different as some of the agent … Continue reading
Of the three railroads that shared the California Zephyr, Western Pacific was the only one that, after 1960, published a timetable exclusively for that train. This was for the very good reason that, while both Burlington and Rio Grande operated … Continue reading
