This timetable makes significant use of color that is absent from most railroad timetables. The four-color cover is one we have seen before and was used on MP timetables from about 1946 through 1960, which is even longer than Frisco used its colorful cover.
Click image to download a 26.8-MB PDF of this timetable contributed by Ellery Goode.
The inside and outside back covers also have four-color illustrations, while the inside front cover uses red, yellow, and cyan as tints. But, unlike almost every other timetable I’ve seen, the colors don’t stop there.
Pages 11 through 14 and 36 through 39 use either yellow or green tints. More stunning, page 23 has a brilliant four-color full-page description of the Pony Express, which is described as one of the “historic landmarks in the MoPac empire.” Page 26 has a four-color ad for Nebraska as a location for “lower-cost, trouble free” industrial operations. In between is a brilliant, four-color centerfold map.
The Pony Express illustration on page 23 is signed Keil. That could mean John Mullan Keil (1922-2017), who was a New York artist and advertising executive. Among others, his clients included Kellogg’s and Toyota, but I don’t know if they included Missouri Pacific. The timetable says this is “no. 4 in a series devoted to historic landmarks in Missouri Pacific’s Western, Southwestern Empire.” I’ll have to see if I can find the others.
You’re right…and to boot, this timetable is chock full of features…certainly more variety than a normal railway timetable of the period!
A full-page article on how to read a timetable (it doesn’t usually get a full page); a word game based on city and town names in the tables; a feature on town name origins; more than the usual assortment of articles about mail, regulation, industry, etc.; a full-page, full-colour freight schedule; and the gorgeous items you mentioned, like the system map and article on the Pony Express.
Lots of reading material for bored travellers in waiting rooms or spending hours on the train! (Some of it being intended to sell another ticket or two, of course….)