Burlington Escorted Tours 1938

By 1938, the Burlington Escorted Tours booklet had grown to 72 pages, plus the covers. I count 25 regular tours (including four Alaska tours that are now weekly through much of the summer), plus eight “bargain tours” (which provide tourist sleeper accommodations instead of full Pullmans), plus eight more “combination tours” that add a destination and a couple of days on one of the full tours. The means there are a grand total of 41 tours, more than four times as many as were in the 1927 booklet.


Click image to download a 37.6-MB PDF of this booklet.

By 1938, Burlington had introduced the Denver Zephyr and other streamlined trains. But all of the tours continued to rely on heavyweight trains. Tours routed between Chicago and Denver, for example, would go on the Aristocrat. This is partly because demand for the Zephyrs was so high that the Burlington didn’t want to fill up seats with people holding discounted tickets, but in the case of some tours, the railroads also put the tour guide and everyone on the tours into one or two cars that were added to the consists of regular trains. Since the articulated Zephyrs couldn’t easily add cars, they weren’t used for tours.


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