This booklet has the same purpose as the Eastward booklet presented here a few days ago: to entice easterners who visit California to return via the Northern Pacific, which would add at least a day to their journey. After World War I, the NP didn’t have the Great Northern Pacific steamships to get people from San Francisco to Oregon, so had to promote Southern Pacific’s Shasta and Cascade routes, the latter of which opened in 1926.

Click image to download a 9.7-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.

However, the booklet also mentions the Pacific Steamship company’s “splendid ship,” which could have referred to the former Great Northern, as it (under the name H.F. Alexander) often operated between San Francisco and Seattle. However, it more likely referred to other ships owned by the same company that operated on the Great Northern‘s former route between San Francisco and Astoria.

The booklet is undated, but based on the list of agents in the back seems to match that of a 1930 NP timetable but not one from 1928 or 1931. I don’t have access to a 1929 timetable, so it is possible that it is from that year.

Another clue is that the booklet mentions two trains a day from Seattle to St. Paul, the North Coast Limited and the Atlantic Express. The 1928 timetable has these two trains, but in 1930 they were augmented by a third, the Alaskan. Since this booklet doesn’t mention the Alaskan, I’m dating it to 1929. This booklet is courtesy of NPRHA — Lorenz Schrenk collection.