“Relax in the most interesting railroad car you’ve ever seen!” says the back of this timetable. “It’s the new Raymond Loewy-designed Lewis and Clark Traveller’s Rest buffet-lounge on the Vista-Dome North Coast Limited.” A picture shows the interior but the picture doesn’t really show the murals that made this car so interesting nor are they described or even mentioned in the text.
Click image to download a 24.6-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.
The photo used was a black-and-white version of the one below, but most of the mural behind the woman on the far right was cropped out of the photo. Thus, the only hints of the murals on the timetable were near the ceiling, and since the photo wasn’t in color most people probably regarded them as an abstract design if they saw them at all.
That’s too bad, because Traveller’s Rest really was one of the most interesting railway passenger cars ever used in America, rivaled only by some of the Union Pacific lounge cars such as the Frontier Shack and Little Nugget — cars that were no longer in use by 1956. Great Northern’s Ranch Car was interesting, but it didn’t tell the detailed story that could be read by following the murals depicting the Lewis & Clark Expedition in the Traveller’s Rest car.
NP would have been better off using a photo like the one above, which makes the murals the focus of the photo as they were described by the stewardess. Even better was the one below, but that photo was taken a few years later.
Click image to download a PDF of this postcard.