Canadian Pacific timetables included schedules of its steamships as well as its trains. The company’s newest ship, the third Empress of Britain, is featured in a Chesley Bonestell painting on the inside front cover. Trans-Atlantic ocean liner schedules on page 59 show that it would go into service in April 1956, joining the Empress of France and Empress of Scotland and replacing the Empress of Australia.

Click image to download a 44.4-MB PDF of this 68-page timetable.

British Columbia coastal steamship services are shown on pages 48 and 49. Services to Skagway and Port Angeles, Washington were suspended for the winter, but CP still offered weekly service from Vancouver to Ketchikan. CP offered nine trips a day on the 41-mile trip between Vancouver and Nanaimo, but only two a day on the 83-mile trip between Vancouver and Victoria. The daylight trip to Victoria took 5-1/2 hours, but an overnight trip managed to fill seven hours.

Click image for a larger view. Photo by Walter E. Frost.

Three times a month (and weekly during the summer), a 277-foot ship called the Princess of Alberni threaded its way up the West Coast of Vancouver Island, taking more than three-and-one-half days to get from Victoria to Chamiss Bay, near the northern tip of the land. The West Coast of the island remains pretty inaccessible today, with some villages reachable by gravel roads and others only by ferry.

The Princess of Alberni was built in San Francisco in 1944 to be a freight & supply vessel for the U.S. Army. In 1948, the Army sold the ship to the South Seas Shipping Company which operated it out of Honolulu as the Pomare. Canadian Pacific bought it in 1953 to replace a 1913 ship, the Maquinna.

One web site says Canadian Pacific found the Princess of Alberni to be “unsuitable” and operated it for only one year, but it appears in timetables from September 1953 through October 1957. After that, CP halted its service to the West Coast of the island and sold the Alberni to Northland Shipping, which called it the Nootka Prince. However, Northland in turn sold it to Crown Zellerbach in 1959, which operated it as the Ocean Crown until 1985. In that year, it was bought by National Ltd. of the Cayman Islands, which planned to operate it in the Caribbean. However, it sank that same year off the coast of Columbia.

I am grateful to Streamliner Memories reader Ellery Goode for making scans of this timetable available. He has also provided scans of 45 other timetables from 38 different railroads, most of which I’ll present here in May and June.