Welcome to Streamliner Memories, now in its thirteenth year of daily posts of historic railroad documents and memorabilia. I’ve collected such memorabilia since 1983, when Amtrak replaced the Rio Grande Zephyr with Superliners, thus ending the last vestiges of the Silver Age of passenger trains in the United States. I now have thousands of different items, nearly all of them stored in an acid-free environment. In order to study these items without damaging them, as well as make them available to others, I decided to scan them and put them in PDFs that are as close as possible to the original documents.

That means that large brochures and maps are presented as if they were unfolded and laid out flat, even if that means some of the text is upside down. I’ve noticed that some other people present individual panels of brochures, all upside up, making them easy to read but providing no clue as to how the brochure looked originally. I’ve tried to show brochures, booklets, and menus as they appeared to the travelers who picked them up in train stations or on board the trains. To read booklets and menus as they originally appeared, you may need to adjust your PDF viewer to see pages side-by-side.

Thanks to my friend, Benn Coifman, for his great rail fonts, which I used to make the headers to this web site. Most of the photos and drawings in the headers are from postcards or other memorabilia. In general, each post contains at least one downloadable PDF of an item in my collection, while JPGs are images that I found somewhere on the web.

I do not claim a copyright for any of the documents posted here, and as far as I am concerned people may freely distribute the PDFs of memorabilia that I’ve scanned for non-commercial purposes. If you want to use them for commercial purposes, please contact me; I’ll probably ask you to make a donation to an appropriate historical society or museum. The railroads that made those documents might have a copyright claim, but advertisements are rarely copyrighted.

Photos are a different story. If I can trace the owner of a photo who claims a copyright, I’ll only post with their permission. I also put a few of my own photos here which people can use for non-commercial purposes. Other photos are either in the public domain or their photographer is unknown. If you find I’ve posted your photo without permission, let me know and I’ll give you credit or take it down as you prefer.

If you find any broken links, please send me an email for quickest response. I hope you find this site useful.