The railroad that became the Quanah, Acme & Pacific once had ambitions to spread across the width of Texas, but only made it about 117 miles. One early investor was Harry Koch, a newspaper publisher and grandfather of today’s Koch brothers, who was just as libertarian then as they are today. But in 1911, the railroad was taken over by the St. Louis-San Francisco, which is why I’ve listed this as Frisco memorabilia even though the Frisco operated the QA&P as an independent railroad.
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QA&P survived until Frisco’s merger with BN in 1981 by acting as a bridge road connecting the Frisco’s line from St. Louis with Santa Fe’s line to California. The role it played as “the transcontinental cutoff” is emphasized on these advertising blotters.
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The not-very-funny comics on these blotters emphasize QA&P’s service to its customers and, in one case, how little time cars spend in the railroad’s terminals. This would be important because cars going from St. Louis to California via the QA&P would have to change railroads twice, while cars going via a presumably longer route direct from Frisco to the Santa Fe would only have to change railroads once.
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Scans of these blotters were generously donated by a Streamliner Memories reader. In one of the quirks of Adobe InDesign, two of the PDFs are under half a megabyte in size while the other two are almost ten times larger.
Click image to download a 4.0-MB PDF of this blotter.