In the late 1920s, the Rock Island started a Vacation Travel Service Bureau that attempted to compete with Union Pacific and Burlington’s escorted tours by offering unescorted tours whose transportation, accommodations, and meals were fully prepaid in advance. This booklet advertises this as something new, which makes me think it was issued in one of the first years of this program.

Click image to download an 5.9-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet. Click here to download an 889-KB PDF of the front- and back-cover of this booklet.

We’ve previously seen a 1932 booklet like this one. Unlike this one, the cover of the 1932 edition didn’t wrap around to both front and back. Instead, the front cover portion of the painting was replaced by a message from National Park Service director Horace Albright imploring Americans to visit the national parks.

Both booklets describe the same 12 tours, thought the prices are a little higher in the 1932 edition. The tours were given letter designations, similar to those of UP tours. Tour C, for example, visited Colorado Springs and Rocky Mountain National Park. Tours E, F, G, H, K, M, and N also focused on Colorado. Tours Y-1 through Y-4 visited Colorado and Yellowstone Park. Including rail fares, tours typically cost about $14 to $20 a day (about $250 to $360 a day in today’s money).

Unlike the escorted tours, which followed specific schedules, these unescorted tours could leave any time and easily be customized to add or delete specific destinations. For example, none of the tours in this booklet went to California, but I’m sure that the railroad’s Vacation Travel Service Bureau would have been glad to arrange a trip to the West Coast on similar terms.

While this booklet was almost certainly issued before the 1932 version, there isn’t any other indication of a date. The only real clue is that it notes that someone named D.M. Woottan was the manager of Rock Island’s Vacation Travel Service Bureau. Rock Island timetables from 1929 through 1938 all list Woottan as the manager of this service, but I don’t have timetables from earlier years in the 1920s. I am roughly dating this to 1929, but it could be from a year or two before or after.

The wraparound moonlit illustration on the cover of this version is more impressive (and less washed out) than the detail shown on the 1932 edition. The artist, Frank Joseph Forstneger (1897-1975), was born in Chicago and probably studied at the Art Institute. His name was originally Forstnegger, but for some reason one of the Gs was dropped. It is possible that his father dropped the G when he immigrated into the U.S. before Frank was born.