This brochure has eight panels printed on both sides, yet other than the cover shown below, only one panel discusses the 1939 San Francisco World’s Fair. Surprisingly, the brochure never calls the fair by its real name, the Golden Gate International Exposition. What the brochure really is, of course, is an advertisement for C&NW passenger trains.

Click image to download a 11.5-MB PDF of this brochure from the David Rumsey Collection.

Those trains included what the brochure calls “super trains,” namely the City of San Francisco and other city streamliners. Other trains to San Francisco are also mentioned including the Challenger, Overland Limited, Forty Niner, and Pacific Limited. The brochure also lists trains to Denver, Los Angeles, and the Northwest plus, of course, C&NW’s own 400.

One of the Northwest trains listed is the Mountaineer. This referred not to a Union Pacific train but to the Soo Line train to Vancouver, BC. The train used C&NW tracks between Chicago and St. Paul.

Half of one side of this brochure describes “Chicago and North Western’s Vacation Empire,” a grandiose name for a lot of places that weren’t actually on the C&NW but on its partner railroads. Naturally, these include Colorado, California, the Northwest, and the Canadian Rockies. A color illustration of Colorado’s Garden of the Gods is set beneath a black-and-white photo of a mountain and the caption implies both are in Colorado. In fact, the mountain is Oregon’s Mount Hood.

All in all, this is a pretty brochure, but the cover claiming it is “a memory of the world’s fair” is deceptive. C&NW probably handed out the brochure at the fair to people dazzled by the expo’s exhibits and hoping to take home a free memento and instead all they got was an ad.