These blotters from the Dale Hastin collection were all issued by the Southern Railway. PDFs of the blotters are all 400 to 500 KB in size.
This blotter must date to around 1934 or 1935, when railroads were hastily adding air conditioning to as many cars as they could. As the blotter indicates, the priority was to air condition Pullman and dining cars. Most of the trains are listed by name, the two exceptions being “Trains Thirty-Seven and Thirty-Eight” and “Trains 29 and 30.” Trains 29 and 30 were known as the Peach Queen after 1947, but had no name before then. But Numbers 37 and 38 were called the Crescent Limited when this blotter was published, so it is strange that name wasn’t used on the blotter.
The Royal Palm began operating in 1913 between Cincinnati and Jacksonville in competition with L&N’s “Dixie Route” shown on some previous blotters. The New Royal Palm was an entirely different train that operated in the winters only starting in 1949. The heavyweight Royal Palm continued to operate, but the observation car and some other cars on the streamlined New Royal Palm continued to Detroit while through sleepers on the New York Central also came from or went to Buffalo, Chicago, and Cleveland. The train continued on to Miami over the Florida East Coast. Among other amenities, the train also had on-board hostesses.
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These colorful “freight in ’58” blotters are identical except one is directed to shippers and the other has an extra message directed to Southern Railway salesmen.
