Last year, I presented a 1956 Kansas City Southern timetable that was a fold-out brochure with the equivalent of eight pages. This one from three years before is a more standard booklet-style timetable but still only eight pages, glued not stapled. It does have a much prettier cover.

Click image to download a 4.1-MB PDF of this 8-page timetable.

The railroad’s mainline from Kansas City to Shreveport, Louisiana had three trains a day. Two of them, the Southern Belle (train 1 & 2) and the unnamed train 9 & 10, went beyond Shreveport to New Orleans. A third train, the Flying Crow (train 15 & 16), went from Kansas City only as far as Shreveport. The northbound Flying Crow connected at Texarkana with the Missouri Pacific, sending a sleeping car from Shreveport to St. Louis while the southbound St. Louis-Shreveport connection was made at Hope, Arkansas.

Hope was the terminus of the railroad’s second main line that that intersected with the first at Shreveport. A train known as the Shreveporter went between Hope, Arkansas to Port Arthur, Texas, home of the nation’s largest oil refinery, via Shreveport. A second train between Shreveport and Port Arthur was numbered 101 and 102 but was really a branch of the Southern Belle.

All of these schedules fit on two pages, so it is easy to see why need only eight were needed for the entire timetable. The 1956 timetable actually had a little more space than this one because the cover image filled only half a page instead of a whole one. It used that space to note that KCS tickets were accepted by some bus companies and to list some freight schedules.