Canadian National’s streamlined Super Continental was inaugurated on April 24, 1955, which just happened to be the day this timetable went into effect. The back cover ad brags that the train was “Dieselized all the way” and that it provided “faster service,” taking 70-3/4 hours from Toronto to Vancouver and 73-1/3 hours from Montreal to Vancouver. Meanwhile, its predecessor, the Continental, “will continue to operate on an improved schedule.”

Click image to download a 56.2-MB PDF of this 88-page timetable.

The ad didn’t say so, but the Super Continental saved more than 12 hours on the Toronto-Vancouver route and more than 14 hours between Montreal and Vancouver. As shown in yesterday’s timetable, the 1954 Continental was really two completely separate trains: trains 1 & 2 went between Montreal and Vancouver while 3 & 4 did the Toronto-Vancouver route, running about an hour earlier westbound and an hour later eastbound.

Today’s timetable assigns the 1 & 2 numbers to the Super and 3 & 4 to the old Continental. Both trains have a section from Montreal that joins the Toronto section at Capreol, Ontario. This “improves” the Montreal-Vancouver time of the Continental because the train arrives in Vancouver 1-3/4 hours earlier than before, but the Toronto-Vancouver schedule is left unchanged.

This timetable replaces the blue that had dominated CN timetable covers since at least 1941 with green, which was clearly in honor of the new paint scheme of the Super Continental and CN’s passenger Diesels. While the green is brighter than the Pullman green used on heavyweights, the paint scheme as a whole was pretty drab, featuring a large black stripe below the windows, yellow pinstripes, and a yellow nose on the Diesels.

Being late to the Diesel game, CN was able to buy General Motors’ most powerful cab units, the 1,750-horsepower FP9s. The 43 A units were numbered 6500 (shown on the back cover) through 6542 while 38 B units were numbered 6600 through 6637. The inside back cover advertisement for the Ocean pictures an FP9 numbered 9600, but according to the Canadian National Railway Historical Association, that number was used on a GP40.

It may be that a drawback to being late to the Diesel game was that the artists who designed such classic paint schemes as the Santa Fe Warbonnet or Great Northern’s orange-and-green were either no longer working for General Motors or were so bored that they had lost their creativity. Alternatively, CN’s locomotives were made in GM’s London, Ontario plant rather than in Illinois, and it may be that London didn’t have the creative stylists who were working in La Grange.

Whatever the explanation, CN’s green passenger trains were totally dull in comparison to Canadian Pacific’s stainless steel (with one red stripe) Canadian, which was inaugurated the same day as the Super Continental. The fact that the Canadian (and secondary Dominion) had dome cars, more comfortable coach seats, attractively decorated lounges, and other amenities not found on the Super Continental pretty much diminished CN’s proud claim to have made the largest purchase of streamlined passenger cars in history.

Northern Pacific, whose 1949 streamlined North Coast Limited also had a drab green-and-black color scheme, hired Raymond Loewy to think up a much better one in 1953. Canadian National also replaced its green-and-black scheme in 1961, but did so with a black-and-white scheme that to me was even worse than green-and-black, especially since the white quickly deteriorated into a dingy grey. The red noses on the revised locomotive scheme hardly made up for this, especially when compared with Canadian Pacific’s passenger locomotives that were almost entirely red (with a grey stripe).

In any case, the front cover of this timetable pictures an artist’s impression of what the newly painted Super Continental would look like passing through the Rocky Mountains. Note that the green on the locomotive exactly matches the green on the rest of the front cover.

Also note that the picture gives an impression of speed by leaning the locomotive forward, as if the artist’s paintbrush were a focal plane shutter recording the top parts of the picture a moment after the bottom parts. In reality, most of the time saved by the Super Continental was not by running the train at higher speeds but by reducing the number of intermediate stops.