From 1940 to 1996, Union Pacific produced an annual calendar that featured photos of beautiful scenery along Union Pacific lines and some passenger and freight trains. With images on top and the monthly calendars on the bottom of large, white pages, the calendars were instantly recognizable. The format changed after 1996 to a more mundane 14″ by 11″ format with photos printed on the back of each calendar page.
Union Pacific also issued calendars before 1940, but they were formatted differently and most did not show trains or scenery. The 1938 calendar, one page of which is shown with the post for the 1940 calendar, featured maudlin scenes focusing on safety in the home and in the workplace.
For most of the years after 1940, UP calendars were 12-1/2″x22-3/4″. However, my 1942-1944, and 1947-1948 calendars are 10″x18″. This may have been a concession to wartime paper shortages, but I have both sizes for 1949 (shown below) and 1950 (not shown), so it is possible UP published both sizes until 1950, after which it used only the larger size.
The 1946 and 1969 calendars consist of paintings. Union Pacific celebrated the end of World War II by asking the Willmarth brothers to make a “Your America” series of paintings, including one for each state served by Union Pacific. For 1969, the centennial of the Last Spike, UP commissioned Howard Fogg — the most famous railroad painter of his time — to paint sixteen historical scenes, and this calendar was extra large at 18″ by 24″.
Other than 1946 and 1969, all of the calendars between 1940 and 1989 used photographs taken by Union Pacific’s staff of professional photographers, none of whom are identified by name. The 1990 and 1991 calendar photos were taken by UP employees. From 1992 through 1996, railfans were invited to submit photos for the calendar. See Utah Rails for more information about calendar history.
From 1940 to 1946 or 1947, each calendar had 12 or 14 pages. Starting in 1947 or 1948, Union Pacific increased this to 16 pages so it could include a December calendar from the year before, an annual calendar for the current year and one for the following year, and a page of photo descriptions or, after 1960, listing UP agents. In 1971, it went back to twelve-page calendars.
From 1960 through 1966, Union Pacific put out two slightly different calendars that shared the same photos for most months but one version included a few eastern photos, such as Washington DC monuments or New England fall colors, for some months while the other had western scenes for those months. My collection includes both the eastern and western versions for each of these years; if UP had separate versions for 1967, 1968, or any other year, I only have one.
I have calendars for every year from 1940 through 1996. Some photos were so appealing (or calendar designers were so forgetful) that the photos were used on two different calendars spaced a few years apart as well as on menus and in other Union Pacific advertising. Of the 458 unique photos and 28 paintings used on UP calendars between 1940 and 1970, at least 87 photos and six paintings were also used on Union Pacific menus.
Although UP operated passenger trains for the first four months of 1971, the 1971 calendar makes no mention of passenger service, no doubt because UP was moving out of the passenger business since Congress had created Amtrak in 1970. No passenger train photos appeared in 1971 and few appeared in 1972 through 1996.
Most of the calendar PDFs are between 10 and 36 megabytes, though the 1969 Fogg calendar is 43 megabytes. As usual, click on the image to download the PDF of the calendar and click on the short description below the image to read the post about that calendar.
