The 1911 entry into this series of booklets has different photos than the 1909 edition, but much of the text by Olin Wheeler remains. Unlike the 1909 edition, however, this one doesn’t credit Wheeler by name, probably because he retired from NP in 1908.
Click image to download an 18.5-MB PDF of this 32-page booklet.
Among the photos is a beautiful one on page 29 of the “world famous North Coast Limited.” The train is led by 4-6-2 locomotive #2162, which had 69″ drivers and produced about 31,000 pounds of tractive effort. Built in 1909, it would be superheated in 1914, several years after this photo was taken.
The train itself has two head-end cars and five passenger cars including a diner, three sleepers, and an observation car. From mid-1909 through 1911, the North Coast Limited was briefly an all-Pullman train, though it sometimes carried tourist sleepers and sometimes a parlor car between Seattle and Spokane.
The booklet claimed that NP “operates four daily through electric-lighted transcontinental passenger trains, including a daily through train between Portland, Puget Sound and Chicago, and one between the North Pacific Coast and St. Louis.” The train to Chicago, of course, was the North Coast Limited, trains 1 & 2. Two other Seattle-Twin Cities trains were train 3, the Northern Pacific Express westbound, and 4, the Atlantic Express eastbound; and train 5, the Pacific Coast Express westbound and 6, the Twin City Express eastbound.
The other “transcontinental train,” numbers 7 & 8, called the Western and Eastern expresses, wasn’t really transcontinental. It only went 666 miles between St. Paul and Glendive, Montana, meaning it didn’t even reach Billings or Yellowstone, much less the Pacific Northwest. In 1911, the NP-Burlington train to St. Louis was called the Puget Sound Limited westbound and the Mississippi Valley Limited eastbound.
This booklet is unusual for a Northern Pacific publication in that the main cover, shown above, is the back cover, a design more common on Rock Island and some other railroad publications. The left side of the cover shows the Cape Horn Tunnel, the longest on the recently completed Spokane, Portland & Seattle Railway, which was half owned by the NP. The right side shows an eastbound train pulling into the Livingston, Montana station, where passengers would transfer to trains to Gardiner and Yellowstone Park.
The scans for this publication are from archive.org, which for some reason often scans the main cover in two pieces and then presents them as if one is the front cover and one is the back cover. I’ve reassembled them into the correct order. Archive.org also has a 1913 edition that is nearly identical to this one except that it opens with a full page about Yellowstone Park. The 1913 edition also says that NP by that year was operating two daily through trains between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest.