Today, we have a real treat: a romantic novel (or, really, short story) written to promote Union Pacific’s Los Angeles Limited. We’ve previously seen an 1889 brochure that told a fictional story of a romance in wonderland to advertise Northern Pacific trains. Today’s item is a hardbound book that tells a story of a romance on board the Los Angeles Limited.
Click image to download a 4.9-MB PDF of this 38-page booklet.
In the story, a 23-year-old “Boy” (the capitals are in the story) falls for a 22-year-old “Girl” on a trip from Chicago to Los Angeles. Sadly for him, he discovers near the end of the trip that she is married and has a baby daughter. The story concludes with him asking her to raise the baby to be “as nearly like you as possible” because “I’m going to wait for her.” This may have sounded romantic when this was published but today would be considered creepy.
Despite the hard covers, the story is only 3,800-words long, filling 17 pages of text accompanied by seven full-page color illustrations showing the people in the story enjoying the lush interiors of the train. The title page lists no copyright or publisher, but the booklet’s true nature is hinted at by the subtitle, “An Overland Affair on the Finest Train That Is.”
According to the February 9, 1909 Railway Age Gazette, this booklet was a “publication of the Union Pacific that very uniquely calls attention to its through service to the Pacific coast.” This suggests it was issued in late 1908 or early 1909, around three years after the Los Angeles Limited made its inaugural run in December 1905.
Although the illustrations are unsigned, the text was written by James French Dorrance (1879-1961). Born in Ohio, Dorrance’s family migrated to California when he was young. He graduated from Cornell in 1903 and worked for several years as a journalist and then began writing fiction.
In the early 1910s, he wrote stories for pulp fiction magazines. In the late 1910s, he contributed to several silent movies. In the 1920s and 1930s, he penned numerous romance novels featuring the Old West or Canadian Mounties. Some of his books were co-authored by his wife, Ethel Arnold Smith Dorrance, who wrote several novels on her own.
All of these works were published well after today’s booklet, which Union Pacific apparently commissioned when Dorrance was about 29 years old. In between the imagined romance, the short story frequently alludes to the luxuries on board the train, including cut-glass finger bowls in the diner, the cafe car with “leaded glass windows and panels of polished English oak,” and the train’s speed of “fifty-five miles per hour.”
The story contrasts the train with a trans-Atlantic liner “with its rich or cabin class; its miserable, poverty stricken steerage, and the great middle class in the second cabin.” The Los Angeles Limited is “happier” because “it is all cabin,” i.e., first class, while steerage and other lower classes ride slower and less luxurious trains.
Both ocean voyages and long-distance trains are “likely place[s] for affairs of the heart,” promises the booklet, since they “invite the exchanges of confidences.” I can confirm this is true as I was riding a train from Chicago to the West Coast nearly 50 years ago when I met the woman who became the love of my life. I wouldn’t be surprised if Union Pacific sold many tickets to young people who were hoping, among other things, to find romance on its trains.