Burlington Northern 1978 Calendar

For most of the 1960s, Great Northern and Northern Pacific issued annual calendars that had all months on one sheet topped by a large photo or painting. Some were about 20’x26″, but the big ones were about 26″x42″. Burlington Northern followed this tradition for several years after the railroads merged.


Click image to download a 35.0-MB PDF of this calendar.

Then, for 1978 the railroad changed its format. In a starling display of unoriginality, the new format was almost exactly like Union Pacific’s: each page was 12-1/2″ by 23″, printed on 46″ paper folded in half. Like UP calendars of the 1970s, this one has twelve pages, one for each month. Like UP calendars, the back of January wasn’t February but July (but I’ve resorted the pages in the correct date order).

Lacking Union Pacific’s photography department, BN relied on outside photographers. Every single photo in this calendar either shows a part of BN’s railroad or the forests it owned that were later spun off as Plum Creek Timber Company. As such, it is more blatantly an advertisement for the railroad than the UP calendars, most of which had trains in only a minority of photos. At least there seems to be representation of all of BN’s major constituent railroads: GN, NP, CB&Q, and SP&S.


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