Tacoma for the Sightseer

Tacoma was the “lumber capital of the world” when this brochure was published. That’s no longer true, but it still has a reputation of being more of an industrial city as opposed to Seattle’s high-tech economic base. Tacoma is also the gateway to Mount Rainier, as the Northern Pacific was fond of emphasizing since Tacoma was technically NP’s terminus and for many years the NP tried to get people to call Rainier Mount Tacoma instead.

Click image to download a 1.5-MB PDF of this brochure.

To compete with NP, the Great Northern continued its heavyweight Empire Builder to Tacoma after it arrived in Seattle. When it introduced the streamlined Empire Builder in 1947 and covered that service with just five trainsets, it was unable to send the train to Tacoma, much to the distress of that city’s newspapers.

In fact, GN didn’t actually have tracks to Tacoma. The map accompanying this brochure lists some tracks as GN tracks, but in one case parenthetically adds “Northern Pacific.” GN, NP, and UP all operated Portland-Seattle trains on those NP tracks.


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