Railfan.net has more than 1,000 Pennsylvania Railroad timetables, but one not found there is the October 1955 edition. Fortunately, Ellery Goode has contributed scans of that timetable to Streamliner Memories.
Click image to download a 30.7-MB PDF of this timetable.
As with all Pennsylvania complete timetables from at least 1927 through 1967, the cover shown above is actually the back cover. The front cover of this edition urges people to take the Pennsy on their winter vacations “to lands of ski and snow,” meaning New England or other ski resorts; “sun and fun,” meaning Florida and the Gulf Coast; or to “cities large and gay,” which has a different meaning today than it would have had in 1955.
Despite supposedly offering more passenger trains than any other U.S. railroad, this timetable is only 52 pages long, down from 56 pages from 1946 through 1954. The difference was that the 1946-1954 timetables included four full-page ads (such as the ones shown here) in addition to the ads on the covers.
The timetable would shrink again to 48 pages in 1958, partly due to the elimination of pages describing coast-to-coast through sleeping car service via Pennsy along with Santa Fe, Union Pacific, and the California Zephyr as well as New York to Texas sleeping cars via Pennsy with Frisco, M-K-T, and Missouri Pacific. As previously described, the Pennsylvania initiated coast-to-coast cars in 1946, but by 1958 the railroads involved had given up.
The black-and-white photo on the cover is also notable. In 1940, Pennsylvania started using color illustrations on the covers of its timetables, including many of the paintings by Grif Teller that PRR also used on its calendars. But in 1955 it started using black-and-white photos or, in at least one case, a black-and-white version of a Teller painting. These were not anywhere near as eye-catching as the color illustrations and paintings.
In 1958, it regressed even further when it replaced the photos with PRR’s keystone logo or simple drawings of PRR trains. The timetables also shrank to 48 pages in that year, and then to 40 pages in 1961 and 32 pages in 1966.