Spokane, Portland and Seattle’s logo was red and white, and the logos of its parents Great Northern and Northern Pacific were red, white, and black making it easy to print them on the cover of SP&S timetables (since the timetables also had black lettering). But then in 1967 Great Northern changed its main color to Big Sky Blue. I wonder if anyone at SP&S grumbled about having to pay extra money just to print two little blue logos on its timetable covers.
Click image to download a 5.7-MB PDF of this 12-page timetable.
This timetable lavishes a whole page to Northern Pacific’s two transcontinental trains, the North Coast Limited and Mainstreeter and SP&S’s connections to those trains. It devotes another whole page to Great Northern’s two transcontinental trains, the Empire Builder and Western Star and SP&S’s connections to those trains. But the connections are the same: the SP&S train that connected with the Empire Builder at Spokane also connected with the North Coast Limited at Pasco, and likewise for the Western Star and Mainstreeter.
However, the train were not equal. The Empire Builder and North Coast Limited both had through coaches and sleepers that went from Chicago to Portland, but the Western Star and Mainstreeter did not, so passengers on those trains had to change trains in Spokane or Pasco. This would have been especially an annoyance for eastbound Mainstreeter passengers, who had a three-hour, late-night layover in Pasco, and westbound Western Star passengers who had a seven-hour layover in Spokane that was at least partly in daylight hours.
When Great Northern began operating the post-war Oriental Limited in 1947, it did have a through Chicago-Portland sleeper, a through coach, and close connections at Spokane. That continued when the Western Star replaced the Oriental Limited in 1951. The Chicago-Portland sleeper continued through the summer of 1965 but the through coach was dropped in 1955.
The Western Star‘s westbound layover in Spokane first became onerous in 1960. Apparently, Great Northern cut some hours out of the Star‘s schedule so it could arrive in Seattle on the evening of its second day rather than the morning of its third day. SP&S didn’t revise the schedule of its connecting train, possibly because doing so would cause it to miss the Mainstreeter connection in Pasco.
I don’t believe the Mainstreeter ever had any through cars to Portland. Except perhaps for the first couple of years of the Mainstreeter‘s existence, Portland passengers wanting to go eastbound on that train always had a moderately long layover in Pasco.
Although this timetable is 12 pages long, the only other SP&S passenger train it lists is a mixed train between Wishram and Bend. The equipment note for this train says that it has “no leg rest” and is “non air conditioned.”
It also was a night train, operating from 1 am to 7 am southbound and 11 pm to 5 am northbound. Such late night hours might make sense if needed to connect with SP&S’s mainline trains to Portland or Spokane, but the train’s arrival in Wishram connected with no train, as the trains to Portland and Spokane had left a few hours before except one train to Spokane that left the exact minute the train from Bend was arriving, with the timetable explicitly saying that no connection was possible.