After five years of the magazine-style timetable format, Missouri Pacific was becoming a bit repetitious. The inside front cover advertised generic Eagles trains. The first full-color article (the page before the centerfold map) was on Nebraska, with a note saying this was “No. 8 in a series of color pages featuring the states served by Missouri pacific Lines.” But Nebraska had also been covered in an article in the May 1948 edition.

Click image to download a 26.6-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The page after the centerfold map described a Diesel shop that MP had built in Kansas City. While this was new territory for the four-color pages, it also would have a limited audience among rail passengers.

Worst of all, the inside back cover was now dedicated to “condensed freight schedules,” which seems like a waste of four-color space in a passenger timetable. Another web site has an April 1950 timetable that also has freight schedules on the inside back cover, and it seems this space was used for such schedules for most of the rest of the years this style of timetables were produced.

The back cover was also an ad for freight service. Fortunately, something would prod MP to be a little more creative again, but not for another year or so after this timetable was issued.