This packet of sixteen color photos is similar to photo sets we’ve seen before of San Francisco, California, and the West. There was also one for the Overland Route which I’ll post tomorrow and one for the California Coast and Valley routes which I’ll post the day after that. All of the ones published in 1948 or before were issued for Southern Pacific by a San Francisco company called National Color Press and sold in stations and on board SP trains.

Click image to download a 17.8-MB PDF of this folio of photographs.

Although the cover has a drawing of a streamlined train, this packet was issued in 1948, the year before Southern Pacific inaugurated its streamlined Shasta Daylight. A few of the photos show SP tracks or were taken from very close to the tracks, but none show actual trains, probably because SP didn’t want to feature obsolete equipment.

Not included with the above packet.

I have seen one edition of this set that contained the above photo. Although it too was dated 1948, it must have been issued the next year and National Color Press merely substituted the above photo for one of the others in the package.

The Bay Bridge is grey, but this photo — which is included in the above packet — makes it look magenta.

Although Kodachrome had been available for more than a dozen years before this folio was printed, these aren’t color photos but colored photos, meaning they were hand-colored black-and-white photos. The colors in most of the photos look wrong, with too much magenta, not enough cyan, and perhaps too little yellow. This may be due to age, but I suspect it is mostly due to the artist or artists.