Dated 1940 (but first issued, with a different color cover, at least a couple of years earlier), this brochure is an update of The Scenic Northwest. Alas, in the intervening decade, the Great Northern either forgot about its historical expeditions … Continue reading
Like the William Crooks booklet, this brochure is undated but must have been published in about 1929 because the cover picture shows locomotive 2552, a 4-8-4 that was delivered that year. If the booklet had been published a year or … Continue reading
To mark the opening of the railway’s Cascade Tunnel, on June 11, 1929, the Great Northern inaugurated a new train, the Empire Builder, named for the railway’s founder, James J. Hill. This brochure describes it as a “companion train” for … Continue reading
Even as Ralph Budd was leading the Upper Missouri and Columbia River Historical Expeditions, the Great Northern Railway was planning and building the new 7.9-mile-long Cascade Tunnel, the longest railway tunnel in the United States. Construction began at the end … Continue reading
This letter was posted on May 14, 1929, from “Mother” to “Master Peter Gantenbein” of Portland, Oregon. As she was writing the previous day, Mother and Dad were riding the Oriental Limited by Glacier Park less than a month before … Continue reading
This little (2-3/4″x4-1/4″) booklet was given to passengers aboard the train that Grace Flandrau had described in relatively florid prose. By later standards, the 1924 Oriental Limited was fairly simple: baggage cars, coaches, tourist sleeping cars, a diner, first-class sleeping … Continue reading
Here is your one-stop source for all historical expedition documents and downloads. My collection is still missing a few important documents, and I’ll add them to this page as I find them. Click image to download an 9.1-MB PDF of … Continue reading
Seven Sunsets was the only non-historical essay Grace Flandrau wrote for the Great Northern. Ostensibly a travelogue, it was in fact a 46-page advertisement for the Oriental Limited, which the railway had completely re-equipped in 1924. The source of the … Continue reading
The Columbia River Historical Expedition yielded much positive publicity for the Great Northern. The Morning Oregonian, for example, followed the expedition with articles almost every day of the trip, five of them on the front page. Other major newspapers along … Continue reading
On July 23, after the overnight ride from Astoria, the expedition returned to Spokane to dedicate another monument and attend another Indian Congress. The monument was inspired by the Great Northern monuments built for the Upper Missouri and Columbia River … Continue reading
