For Christmas in 1924, friends and customers of the Great Northern Railway received an elegant little book about the first American clipper ship to serve the China trade. Although the book doesn’t say so, The Oriental and Captain Palmer was … Continue reading
Here are some pretty blotters that GN used to advertise the Oriental Limited in 1925. Green blotters show the interior of a section sleeper while tan blotters show the train’s dining car. Otherwise, the blotters have different text and some … Continue reading
After the introduction of the Empire Builder in 1929, the Oriental Limited became the Great Northern’s secondary transcontinental train. Until then, the secondary train was called the Glacier Park Limited. This 1924 blotter (an identical one was issued in 1925) … Continue reading
The 1924 Oriental Limited left Chicago at 11 pm and arrived in Seattle or Portland at 7 pm. This blotter doesn’t say how many days the journey required, but travelers departing Monday night wouldn’t arrive until Thursday evening, meaning the … Continue reading
These 1924 blotters all advertise the new Oriental Limited as a route to California. The first is aimed at Chicago residents, who would only take the GN on their way to California–a route that would add one to two full … Continue reading
Most of these blotters are from the Minnesota History Center where they are carefully filed by date in the Great Northern Advertising and Publicity Department‘s files. Those files go back as far as 1924, which also happened to be when … Continue reading
This postcard depicts the Spokane’s Great Northern train station, which was also used by the Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway. The water in the foreground is the Spokane River, as the train station was on Havermale Island. Click image to … Continue reading
This timetable doesn’t say “condensed,” but like so many others in the late 1960s it has shrunk to a fold-out brochure rather than a stapled booklet. Instead of being three eight-inch panels wide, however, it is three-and-one-half (or, put another … Continue reading
Great Northern never managed to get more than a minority of its rolling stock painted Big Sky Blue before the merger into Burlington Northern. But it did redesign ticket envelopes and other stationery using the new color. Here’s a ticket … Continue reading
This is the condensed version of the 28-page timetable shown yesterday. Tables for all ten of GN’s trains, from the Empire Builder and Western Star to the Portland pool train and the Havre-Great Falls branch line train, fit on the … Continue reading
