A full-page ad on the inside back cover of this timetable celebrates Rock Island Line, which became a hit song in 1955. According to Wikipedia, the first version of this song was written in 1929 and performed by members of the Rock Island Colored Booster Quartet, a groups of Rock Island employees in Little Rock. The song was first recorded being performed by inmates at an Arkansas prison in 1934 and was later covered by Lead Belly and Odetta, among others.

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All of the above performers were black, and as was typical of the times the song didn’t become a hit until it was recorded by a white, specifically a Scottish musician named Lonnie Donegan. This timetable ad pictures a 45 record with Donegan’s name.

According to Wikipedia, “the song tells the story of a train operator who smuggles pig iron through a toll gate by claiming all he had on board was livestock.” That was Donegan’s version of the song, but trains in real life don’t have to deal with toll gates.

Two decades before, some of Lead Belly’s recordings told the story of an engineer of a train carrying pig iron who wanted to get home sooner, but livestock and other trains normally had priority over trains carrying inert freight. So the engineer signaled (via whistles) to a “depot agent” that his train was carrying livestock and so was granted priority over other trains. As the train went by the depot, the engineer whistled “I fooled you! I fooled you! I’ve got all pig iron.”

Donegan was apparently unaware that railroads routinely gave some trains priority over others, so he added the toll gate to his version, a mistake carried over into covers of the song by Johnny Cash and other artists. Also, the train in Lead Belly’s version was coming from “Mule-een,” which Donegan interpreted to mean “New Orleans.” Rock Island didn’t go to New Orleans, but it did go to Moline, Illinois, which is probably what Lead Belly meant.

Of course, none of this was mentioned in the ad in this timetable.