Some railroads published along-the-way guides for each major route. This massive, 44-page brochure is meant to work for any and all Santa Fe passenger trains. This edition dates from 1945, but the brochure was republished many times over the years.
Click image to download a 39-MB PDF of this 44-page brochure.
The front cover features General Motors’ elegant E1 locomotive pulling a shiny, stainless-steel train, probably the Super Chief as the El Capitan of that time had fewer cars. A 1949 edition has an F-3 locomotive leading a train in the Albuquerque station. An earlier edition doesn’t have a train on the cover; just a monochrome adobe mission on the front and the Grand Canyon on the back, while the earliest edition I have has a picture of tourists on the rear platform of a train apparently looking at the horrifically huge face of a Native American.
Click image for a larger version of this photo.
The Kansas Historical Society web site has the original photo on which the cover of this booklet was based. Besides flipping the image, a graphics artist provided more interesting clouds in the background.
The clouds were actually added to the photo, as the above version reveals.
Then they colorized it and turned into a postcard as well as the cover of the Along Your Way booklet. The Kansas Historical Society suspects that the original photo was taken just outside of Chicago.
The back cover of this edition features the Grand Canyon. The inside back cover has Carlsbad Cavern while the inside front cover has a map and description of the old Santa Fe Trail. The interior pages are black-and-white with many photos and a centerfold relief map of the states and routes served by the Santa Fe Railroad.
Someone else reports that their 1946 edition has the above color photo on the inside front cover. Note that the clouds in the photo are identical to the ones added to the Super Chief photo above. My 1945 edition has the above photo in black-and-white on page 4 (where the 1946 edition has a black-and-white reproduction of a painting of a wagon train). It is possible that the railroad made minor changes to the booklet almost every year.
