We’ve previously seen a summer, 1937 Great Northern timetable. This one is from three years later, and there are only minor differences. The schedules of the Empire Builder appear to have been left completely unchanged. Minor trains have slightly different schedules, but differences are small.
Click image to download a 20.9-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.
Although GN’s secondary transcontinental, the Oriental Limited, was taken off the timetable in the early part of the Depression, GN still operated trains 3 and 4, but they only went as far west as Williston, North Dakota. Another St. Paul-Seattle train was available, however, the Fast Mail. In fact, it was even faster than the Empire Builder.
The Fast Mail left St. Paul five minutes before the Empire Builder, and soon left the premiere train in its dust. This was partly because the Fast Mail at the time took the Surrey Cutoff from Fargo to Minot while the Empire Builder took the longer route through Grand Forks. As a result, the Fast Mail left Minot 3-1/2 hours before the Builder. The mail train gained even more by they time it reached Havre, Montana, being 4-2/3 hours ahead of the Builder. It lost a little time after that, but still arrived in Seattle three hours ahead of GN’s premiere train.
Passengers who wanted a quicker trip than the Empire Builder, however, were out of luck. The Fast Mail carried a coach from St. Paul to Spokane and it even carried a sleeping car from Wenatchee to Seattle. However, the timetable warns, the train carries “no passenger equipment between Spokane and Wenatchee.”
The Milwaukee Road had the mail contract between Chicago and St. Paul, while the GN took over from there. These contracts were lucrative enough for the railroads that they made an even greater effort to keep the mail trains on time than their limited trains like the Empire Builder. Both Milwaukee and Northern Pacific would have been happy to take the contract off of GN’s hands if GN failed to keep the post office happy, so the company kept the mail train going as fast as it could, while passengers were only secondary.