This booklet is full of self-congratulations, and at the time it probably seemed well-deserved. The Pennsylvania Railroad was at one time not only the largest company in the world, it had a bigger budget and employed more people than the United States government. By 1946, it was still the largest railroad in the country and held the record for the longest string of annual dividend payments (a record it holds to this day).
Click image to download a 5.8-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.
According to this booklet, in the company’s first hundred years, it paid more than $1.2 billion in dividends, $1 billion in interest to bondholders, and $10 billion in wages to employees. More interesting to the traveling public, in 1946 it operated 1,340 trains a day. Many of these must have been commuter trains as the 48-page, 1946 timetable doesn’t have room to show that many trains.
Dang, that first drawing was little homoerotic for 1946. This is the kind of booklet that interest investors and detail men. For everyone else, it would induce sleep. Everyone in the country knew the Pennsy was a big business but, once you start getting numbers in the billions, people’s eyes start to glaze over. I suspect this is the kind of booklet management like because it showed what a good job they were doing, For everyone else, they just wanted more pictures of trains and scenery,
Regards, Jim