NP 1949 Timetable

Northern Pacific advertised the streamlined North Coast Limited, but this timetable offered far fewer trains than were on the 1926 schedule. Gone was the Yellowstone Comet. Gone were most of the local trains between Fargo and Spokane. Gone was the Kansas City-Seattle train, replaced by connections at Billings with the Alaskan (the new name for NP’s secondary trains 3 and 4) westbound (after a three-hour layover) and the North Coast Limited eastbound (after a seven-hour overnight layover) and no through cars. Thus, NP cities once served by four trains each way per day by 1949 had only two.


Click image to download a 26.6-MB PDF of this timetable. Click here to download a non-OCRed version.

Despite being streamlined, the North Coast Limited took nearly 60 hours to get from Chicago to Seattle, compared with 45 hours on Great Northern’s Empire Builder. Unlike GN’s secondary train, the Oriental Limited, the Alaskan didn’t even go through to Chicago; westbound passengers would not have been much reassured to learn that “CB&Q train no. 49, when on time, connects at Minneapolis with NP train no. 3.”


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