The Western Pacific Railroad completed its line from Salt Lake City to Oakland in 1909, just two years after the Post Office allowed people to send postcards with messages written on the back. WP encouraged postcard companies to publish cards featuring the railroad. Today and for the next couple of days I’ll present some of those postcards from the pre-California Zephyr era.
Click image to download a 243-KB PDF of this postcard.
This card showing WP’s Oakland station is dated 1915. As the postmark notes, that was the year of the Panama-Pacific Exposition, the one for which Union Pacific built a life-size replica of Old Faithful Inn. The Oakland depot still exists. This postcard not only is not railroad issue, the back has the slogan, “On the road a a thousand wonders,” which was a Southern Pacific theme.
Click image to download a 250-KB PDF of this postcard.
Arch Rock is not far east of the entrance to Feather River Canyon. In 1937, the state built a tunnel under the rock for the Feather River highway. This card is postmarked 24 years before that.
Click image to download a 276-KB PDF of this postcard.
This card just says it is in the “Grand Canyon of the Feather River” (now just Feather River Canyon), which would put it not too far from the previous card. The card hasn’t been used but it is clearly of the same era, so around 1915.
Click image to download a 229-KB PDF of this postcard.
Another postcard featuring the railroad in the Grand Canyon of the Feather River. At least one tunnel on the Feather River route is open to hikers today as the railroad was rerouted in the early 1960s.
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Click image to download a 245-KB PDF of this postcard.
Belden is a community of about 20 people today and probably didn’t have more than that in 1914, when this postcard was issued. It was basically a post office and, most likely, a general store for people who lived in the Feather River Canyon. Today there is a small resort there. Another postcard shown on Wikipedia appears to use the same base black-and-white photo as this one, but the colorist added in a passenger train.
Click image to download a 209-KB PDF of this postcard.
Now we’re out of the canyon and into the lake country near the crest of the Sierra Nevada. The card doesn’t say, but I’m pretty sure that’s Gold Lake in the foreground and Long Lake in the background. Gold Lake was about 10 miles by road from the Western Pacific line.
Click image to download a 227-KB PDF of this postcard.
Here’s a closer view of Gold Lake. These two cards are sequentially numbered and so must have been issued at about the same time.
Click image to download a 231-KB PDF of this postcard.
Back down in the canyon, this is the only Kodachrome photograph among today’s postcards. The back says, “Streamliner on Western Pacific Railroad,” but the train isn’t streamlined and is probably the Exposition Flyer. The F-3 locomotives were delivered in 1947, two years before the California Zephyr was inaugurated, so this card must have been issued in about 1948. These are the Tobin Bridges. The railroad got to the canyon first, so the highway had to cross the river to the opposite side whenever the railroad crossed it. The highway bridge was built in 1936.