As with the Shasta Daylight and Golden State, the Southern Pacific sent out a mailer to travel agents and others in the industry featuring the ad below. The ad itself was placed in Saturday Evening Post, Time, Holiday, and National Geographic magazines. The mailer mentioned SP’s other recent streamliners and bragged that it had “America’s most modern trains.”

Click to download a 3.5-MB PDF of a mailer that Southern Pacific sent to travel agents that featured this ad announcing the streamlined Sunset Limited.

Over the next few years, the railroad placed a steady series of ads in such magazines as National Geographic and Holiday. The later ads tended to be black-and-white and most focused on the SP’s assumption that most of the magazines’ audiences were on the East Coast, and thus encouraged them to go via New Orleans instead of Chicago on their next “Western trip.”

Click to see a larger version of this ad from the April, 1954, issue of National Geographic.

Click to see a larger version of this ad from the November, 1954, issue of National Geographic.