Annoyingly, the inside front cover of this timetable says that the Eagles are the “smoothest way West-Southwest.” As I complained a few days ago, except for its line to Pueblo, Missouri Pacific didn’t serve the West or the Southwest, so I find this slogan puzzling.
Click image to download a 25.2-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.
Breaking from the city series in the timetables shown here in the last few days, this one dedicates the page before the centerfold map to Louisiana. As we know from timetables shown here previously, later editions covered Nebraska, Oklahoma, Mississippi, and no doubt several states in editions I haven’t seen yet.
The page after the map brags that Missouri Pacific was planning to lay “64,285 tons of new rail” in 1952. The inside back cover has freight schedules and the back cover notes that a new freight station was opening in St. Louis. Previously, the back cover of the May 1950 timetable that is posted on Wx4 had announced this freight station was being built.
Few rail passengers today would be interested in knowing about the construction and opening of freight stations. In 1952, however, the railroads still carried lots of less-than-carload freight. Knowing where the freight station was would have been as important then as knowing how to ship by UPS or FedEx today.
This is the last of the Missouri Pacific timetables I am presenting at this time. MP apparently published three timetables in some years and four in others, so I don’t know exactly how many I am missing, but I estimate I need about a dozen more in the 1946-1957 period when the full, 48-page magazine-style format was published. I’ll try to add them soon.
In the meantime, below is a table showing some of the distinctive features of the 30 Eagle-painting timetables (including the Wx4 one) I’ve seen so far. Column FC indicates the colors on the front cover (yellow/red, yellow/black, red/black); IFC lists the subject of the ad on the inside front cover; BCF and ACF describe the articles before and after the centerfold map; and IBC and BC describe the inside and outside back covers.
Numbers in parentheses in the BCF column indicate the number in the “states served by Missouri Pacific” series and the “historic landmark” series illustrated by John Mullan Keil. The first in the latter series, the Alamo, isn’t actually numbered but it is part of the series.