Here’s a companion to yesterday’s brochure covering the route between the Pacific Northwest and the San Francisco Bay Area. It actually starts in Vancouver, BC, meaning trains of the Great Northern to Seattle and Great Northern, Northern Pacific, or Union Pacific from Seattle to Portland. From Portland to Oakland the Shasta Route uses the Southern Pacific, but this 1946 brochure doesn’t mention any specific trains.
Click image to download a 3.5-MB PDF of this four-page brochure.
It does have a photo of a heavyweight, Pullman-green, air-conditioned train next to Odell Lake in the Oregon Cascade Mountains. This was probably a train called the Klamath, as it passed the lake in daylight in both directions, but it could have been the Oregonian, which passed the lake in daylight going northbound. The latter was the classier train, as it had a full observation-lounge car while the Klamath just had a small lounge in a Pullman observation sleeper.
LOL! Your train speeding past model townships separated by miles of neat green fields. I think most people that have been to the west side of the Sacramento Valley between Woodland and Red Bluff would be surprised to find those words were supposed to describe that part of the Valley. My parents lived in Willows, a place that wouldn’t be a winner in the “model township” category. I don’t know if it was all hype, or if adults then just looked at things a lot differently than today. Whatever the reason, they sure didn’t want to go into much detail. It was one sentence of dashing through the fertile fields that covered the entire distance between Red Bluff and Oakland. Maybe Oakland was more a model township back then too.
Jim