PRR’s 1950 timetable had a few more pages, but a few fewer trains, than the 1946 edition. New York-Washington service declined from 21 to 20 trains and New York-Chicago dropped from eleven to eight daily trains. No doubt there were modest cuts elsewhere in the system.
Click image to download a 37.0-MB PDF of this 56-page timetable.
Like the Central’s post-war timetables, PRR now advertised through sleeping cars to California on the Overland, Los Angeles Limited, Chief, Golden State, and California zephyr. The timetable also advertises trains with names like Penn Texas and Texas Eagle that supposedly ran through from New York to Dallas, San Antonio, and other Texas cities, though a close look reveals that only the sleeping cars went through St. Louis. However, the Southland and South Wind did go through from Chicago to Jacksonville and other Florida points.
The cover painting by Grif Teller, titled “Crossroads of Commerce,” shows a junction at Marysville, Pennsylvania, with the tracks on the left coming from Pittsburgh and Chicago, the ones on the right going to Washington (for freight only), while the tracks crossing the river divide on the other side with one branch going to Buffalo and the other mainline going to Philadelphia, Washington, and New York. The locomotive in the foreground is a powerful 2-10-4 “J1” built in 1943. The steam locomotive on the right is a 4-8-2 “M1” built in the 1920s; being older, this class of locomotive was often used on branch lines. The passenger train is pulled by the latest GMC E7s.