Missouri Pacific issued four timetables a year, so April 1947 was probably the second magazine-style timetable issued by the railroad and this was the third. While the April issue had full-page, four-color articles about Denver and St. Louis, this one has similar articles about Little Rock, New Orleans, and San Antonio. It also has half-page articles, with one color used for tints, about Hot Springs, Pueblo, and Texarkana.
Click image to download a 28.0-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.
The back cover is a four-color article encouraging people to visit the St. Louis Historical Society Museum. Oddly, considering how much creativity went into the rest of the timetable, the inside front cover of both this one and the previous one are similar but not quite identical advertisements for through cars between Texas and New York or Washington.
A number of other articles are scattered throughout the booklet. Page 9 (panel 16) says that “specially equipped fire-fighting locomotives mare important contributions to public safety and property protection.” This is accompanied by a drawing showing firemen standing on a locomotive pilot directing streams of water on a fire. I’ve never heard of such a thing before. Page 22 (panel 42) encourages people to “watch for” the General Motors Train of Tomorrow, which was “on an exhibition tour of the principle cities of the West and Southwest.”
I’ve previously noted with some dismay how many railroads, including Rock Island and Southern Pacific, put the main covers on the backs of their timetables rather than the fronts. Missouri Pacific didn’t do that, but it did use an odd page numbering system in which each panel gets a separate number with two panels per page. I’ve seen other railroads do that and think it would be more confusing than helpful, especially when some pages (18 through 21 in this case) have text that is rotated 90 degrees from the rest.
Someone has stamped “Not to be removed from the Chicago Club” on the front cover. The Chicago Club was and is an exclusive club that was considered to be “center of power in Chicago.” No doubt Ralph Budd and other presidents of railroads headquartered in Chicago were members, but most other people would not have been invited to join.