The inside front cover of this timetable has nice silhouettes of ten sets of MP passenger Diesels and the first car of passenger trains representing the various members of the Eagle “flock.” That includes the St. Louis-Texas Texas Eagle, St. Louis-Pueblo Colorado Eagle, St. Louis-Omaha Missouri River Eagle, Memphis-Tallullah Delta Eagle, and Houston-Brownsville Valley Eagle.

Click image to download a 25.7-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The page before the centerfold map celebrates “colorful Colorado,” “no. 3 in a series of color pages featuring the states served by Missouri Pacific lines.” “With Pueblo as its western terminus, the Missouri Pacific is one of Colorado’s major transportation systems to and from the east and southeast,” the article pompously brags. In fact, Missouri Pacific was arguable the least important, or at best the second-least important, of five different railroads connecting Colorado with the east and southeast.

The page after the map advertises “speedboxes,” small containers on wheels that shippers can fill with less-than-carload sized merchandise so it can easily be moved by MP trucks and trains. This is the idea of shipping containers that MP would adopt in 1956 but in miniature.

The back cover brags that 124 new Diesels are bringing “More Power” to Missouri Pacific. By the summer of 1951, the ad predicted, all of the railroad’s principal passenger trains and two-thirds of its freight will be hauled by Diesel. The accompanying illustration shows rows of Diesels evenly divided between passenger and freight colors.

The inside back cover is, boringly, freight schedules. But other articles in the timetable deal with such issues and railroad-labor relations; modernization of train stations; train radio systems; MP bus lines; damage to highways caused by trucks; freight rates; and steamship lines from New Orleans and Galveston. Obviously many of these are self-serving, but if they educated passengers while relieving them from boredom, so much the better.