The map inside of this timetable folder has a thick red line showing the route of the California Zephyr from Oakland to Chicago. The same style of line shows Western Pacific branches to Bieber, Loyalton, Moy, and San Jose, California; … Continue reading
Category Archives: Western Pacific
Competition between Chicago and San Francisco was much less intense than in the Los Angeles corridor mainly because the Overland Route was by far the shortest route. In 1911, when Western Pacific began serving this corridor, the Overland Route was … Continue reading
Today our postcard journey on the Western Pacific takes us east of the Sierra Nevada and back in time to the era of lithographic postcards. Click image to download a 175-KB PDF of this postcard. This card says “near Pilot, … Continue reading
All but one of yesterday’s postcards were lithographically printed based on black-and-white photos. Today’s cards are black-and-white photos themselves. I usually prefer color, but after studying the often muddy and sometimes heavily retouched pictures from yesterday there’s something refreshing and … Continue reading
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