Here’s another railroad that put their main timetable covers (as shown below) on the back. The front cover on this timetable is an ad with a larger four-color photo of “L&N’s Country Ham Breakfast,” which consisted of salt-cured ham, red gravy, hominy grits, and fresh eggs “cooked to your taste.” Served with hot bread, “this is a breakfast you won’t forget!”

Click image to download a 16.0-MB PDF of this 32-page timetable.

“Equally famous is the L&N Seafood Platter,” the ad continues. Served on New Orleans trains, this include soft shell crab, oysters, jumbo shrimp, and fried trout or broiled mackerel “fresh from Gulf Coast waters.” It sounds delicious but probably wasn’t as colorful as the red ham, yellow egg yolks, and green parsley of the country ham breakfast.

The New Orleans trains that offered the seafood platter certainly included the Pan-American and Humming Bird, which went between Cincinnati and New Orleans entirely on L&N rails. A section of the Humming Bird went to St. Louis and continued to Chicago via the Chicago & Eastern Illinois.

The Country Ham Breakfast.

The china shown in the photo is a beautiful pattern known as Regent, which was used on the Pan American; the Humming Bird had its own pattern. Unlike some railroad china, Regent was a stock pattern offered by Syracuse China Company and was not exclusive to the railroad.

The seafood platter was probably also available on the New York-New Orleans Crescent and Piedmont Limited, though these trains were on L&N rails only between Montgomery and New Orleans. Another New Orleans train, the Gulf Wind, went on L&N rails to Chattahoochee, Florida, continuing on the Seaboard to Jacksonville.

Trains that may have offered the country ham breakfast but not the seafood platter included the Southland, Flamingo, and South Wind, all of which used L&N rails for parts of their journeys between Chicago and Florida; and the Georgian, Dixie Flyer, and Dixieland, which used L&N rails part of the way between Chicago and Atlanta.

Other than trains on the Cincinnati-New Orleans and Cincinnati-Memphis routes, none of the trains in this timetable spent their entire journeys on L&N rails. In addition to the Pan-American and Humming Bird, trains on these routes included the unnamed #1 & #4 between Cincinnati and New Orleans, which didn’t include diners, and #3 & #2, which only went between Cincinnati and Montgomery and also didn’t include diners.