Denver’s unimaginatively named City Park dates back to 1880 and is 330 acres in size. It includes the Denver Zoo and the Museum of Nature and Science (which has dioramas painted by the painter whose work was also featured on … Continue reading
This menu from the City of Denver shows the Denver City & County Building. Though Denver supposedly has a consolidated city/county government, in fact Arapahoe County, of which Denver was the seat, was split from Denver in 1902 and Denver … Continue reading
This postcard illustrates a very unusual car. In 1953, Union Pacific replaced the pre-war City of Denver with modern equipment. Most of the new cars were conventional, with coaches and sleepers easily exchangeable with nearly identical cars on other City … Continue reading
The City of Denver and Denver Zephyr each took 16 hours to go from Chicago to Denver. But the Chicago & North Western/Union Pacific route was 14 miles longer, so technically, the City of Denver was the faster train, average … Continue reading
Union Pacific handed out this eight-page “souvenir album” to passengers on the last runs of its daily trains before Amtrak took over, April 30, 1971. A letter from UP CEO J.C. Kenefick offers a “reluctant goodbye to that small but … Continue reading
In 1959, Union Pacific combined the City of Portland with the City of Denver, which pushed the former’s travel time up to 42-3/4 hours, three hours more than the train required between Chicago and Portland when it was inaugurated in … Continue reading
If, as I speculated a couple of days ago, differences between City of San Francisco and other City train menus in the late 1950s were due to differences between the Southern Pacific and Union Pacific commissaries, those differences did not … Continue reading
Even though they were overnight trains, the vista-dome Denver Zephyr must have eaten into the ridership of Union Pacific’s City of Denver. UP responded by borrowing two super domes from its new partner, the Milwaukee Road. These super domes began … Continue reading
When the City of St. Louis was a mere streamliner, it had its own on-board stationery. By the mid-1960s, however, after the Norfolk & Western had taken over the Wabash, the Union Pacific printed just one set of stationery for … Continue reading
A consulting firm named Coverdale and Colpitts (now part of URS) once did a variety of economic analyses for the rail industry. In 1935, the firm published a report on the Burlington Zephyrs, followed by reports in 1938, 1939, 1941, … Continue reading
