Union Pacific’s escorted tour booklets in the 1930s and 1950s are so beautiful they are almost works of art. But in the 1960s these booklets became almost boring. We’ve seen booklets like this one for 1962, 1964, and 1968, and except for the background colors on the covers they are almost indistinguishable from one another. The color photos are more realistic than the lithographs of the 1930s, but they are so small that don’t make as much of an impression.
Click image to download a 14.5-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.
The booklet describes 11 tours, one of which was also covered in the California-Las Vegas Tour brochure posted here a couple of days ago. The tours range from eight- and nine-day trips to Rocky Mountain or Yellowstone parks to twenty-day trips visiting the southern Utah Parks as well as LA-Yosemite-San Francisco. Two more tours have itineraries identical to two of the others but are “bargain tours,” meaning coach instead of a sleeping car en route and different hotels at some destinations.
While the shorter tours tended to be less expensive, they also spent a higher percentage of time on board trains or buses. For $207 ($1,600 today) coach, the eight-day Rocky Mountain Park tour spent only one day and two nights at Rocky Mountain National Park and only about three more days in Colorado Springs or other destinations. As noted the other day, the $534 ($4,200 today) 16-day tour to California and Las Vegas spent about ten days at destinations. The 20-day tours spent about 14.5 days at destinations and actually cost less than the 16-day tour for people going coach: $515 (about $4,000 today), though the non-bargain version cost $684 ($5,300 today) in a roomette vs. $630 for the 16-day tour.