The inside front cover of this timetable advertises that the Texas Eagles go between St. Louis and Texas “overnight,” allowing for morning arrivals in St. Louis and reasonable arrivals at “most of the principal cities of Texas.” If the principal cities of Texas are Austin, Dallas, Houston, and San Antonio, then the train served all of them, but it didn’t reach some less-important cities such as El Paso.

Click image to download a 25.3-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The page before the centerfold map is about El Dorado, the “oil capital of Arkansas.” I had never heard of this city before. Its population peaked in 1960 and has declined by more than 30 percent since then, so the oil boom must be over. I can’t help but think that MP’s articles about cities and states are more to promote their industrial potential than their tourist potential.

The page after the centerfold map tells the story of “the West’s first ‘iron horse,'” which was delivered to St. Louis by steamboat in 1852. A 4-4-0 at a time when 4-4-0s were the latest technology, the locomotive was for some reason assigned the number 3 rather than 1.

This is a natural follow-on to the article on the back cover of the December 1947 timetable. Like that article, this one has a painting the original of which was displayed in Missouri Pacific’s history museum. Like the other article’s painting, this one shows black laborers struggling to haul the locomotive up a steamboat landing under the watchful eye of a well-dressed white man who was probably a railroad official.

The inside back cover is freight schedules while the outside back cover describes the installation of centralized traffic control (CTC) on the Missouri Pacific. CTC, claims the ad, was “pioneered by Missouri Pacific” and saved money by “provid[ing] double-track performance” on a single-track mainline.