According to the inside back cover, Tracks magazine won a 1952 “Award of Excellence” from the International Council of Industrial Editors (now the International Council of Business Communicators). Magazines such as this were published by the railroads to give their thousands of employees the feeling of being in a family, so the magazine offered updates on individuals (promotions, retirements, etc.), short stories, and insider views of the company.
Click image to download a 26.3-MB PDF of this 84-page magazine.
This one has some cartoons that seem rather lame to me. One shows a wooden passenger car with a cupola on top with someone saying, “Observation dome? Ridiculous. People won’t go for it.” Of course, Canadian Pacific had just such an observation dome in the wooden car days.
There are also two pages of lame jokes submitted by readers for a $5 payment. The best one is from a man who says his little girl saw a box car with the Great Northern logo and said, “Look! Bock beer!” To understand that, you have to know that Bock beer used a big-horn sheep as its logo, though it is hard to confuse big-horn sheep with mountain goats.
Since there is not much passenger content, I normally wouldn’t be interested in this. But the back page has an ad for “1953 Chessie Tours” to “inspiring Washington, ever vibrant New York, Virginia’s Atlantic seashore and Blue Ridge mountains, Restored Williamsburg, historic Richmond, [and] Charlottesville.” In the next four days, I’ll present C&O tour booklets for four of these destinations: Charlottesville, the Virginia shore, Washington, and Williamsburg.