Railway Age, the rail industry’s magazine of record, described the “spectacular new equipment” that made up the Empire Builder in an eight-page feature article on April 12, 1947. Noting that the five twelve-car trains that made up the Empire Builder cost $7 million (more than $70 million in today’s money), the article listed some 80 different manufacturers (many of whom advertised in Railway Age) that contributed to the train.

A typical issue of Railway Age at that time included scores of pages of advertising, and for this issue many companies bragged about their contributions to the Empire Builder. I’ve included a couple of the ads with the article, one for Heywood-Wakefield and the other for Kaufman & Fabry (which the Railway Age article misspells Kaufman Kabry), the company that did the photo murals in the Empire Builder‘s dining and lounge cars.

I’ve also included two ads from the Great Northern itself, which were printed back-to-back in the issue but which I’ve laid out facing each other. (I previously showed these ads, which appeared in magazines other than Railway Age, but the scans in this PDF are higher resolution and, I think, have better color accuracy.)

Note: After posting this article in 2012, I became concerned about whether it was violating any copyright laws, so I took it down. Since then, Google has posted many issues of Railway Age on line, including most of this one (but not the ads). So I am reposting this.