This post-war booklet briefly describes 22 escorted tours and 36 independent tours people could take of the West. Most of the tours used more than one railroad but so long as they used the Northern Pacific for part of their distance they were included on the list. Burlington Escorted Tours, which published annual booklets of tours before the war, was apparently no longer in business, but the escorted tours listed in this booklet were “under able management and leadership of responsible, long-established tour companies recommended by Northern Pacific Railway.”
Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this 8-page booklet.
The booklet claims that it offers “your choice of 157 escorted tours,” but only describes 22. Each of the tours departed Chicago about once a week, so 157 represented 22 tours departing between 7 and 8 times per summer. Nearly all tours went to Yellowstone with many also going to Alaska, California, the Canadian Rockies (Banff or Jasper), Colorado, or the Pacific Northwest.
On average, the 22 escorted tours cost $26.68 per day (about $325 per day in today’s money). Independent tours that went by sleeping car, stayed at hotels, and ate at similar restaurants cost an average of $24.77 per day (about $300 per day today). The difference could have been the cost of the escort, but it might have also been due to slightly less expensive meals and accommodations off the trains.
A few of the independent tours were horseback rides or visits to dude ranches, and they were considerably less expensive. The horseback trips, in Yellowstone, the northern Rockies, the Cascades, or the Olympics, cost an average of $16.67 per day (about $205 today). The dude ranch vacations were about the same.
The lowest price of all was two weeks in Paradise Valley, Montana’s Chico Hot Springs Resort, which cost less than $135 (about $1,650 today) for the train trip each way plus 14 days at the resort, for an average of less than $8.50 per day (about $105 a day in today’s money). But was for coach travel and didn’t include meals on the train, and probably didn’t include meals at the resort. Nor would it have included side trips to nearby Yellowstone.