Riverside is about 11 miles west of Chicago Union Station and a third of the way to Aurora, where Burlington had its main shops and the terminus of Burlington’s commuter-rail line. Harlem Avenue is about a mile short of Riverside. Today’s commuter timetables show five stops between Union Station and Harlem Avenue, but this timetable was apparently prepared for trains that stopped only at Harlem Avenue and Riverside. Or perhaps the other stops simply aren’t shown: the trains in this timetable were only 1 to 2 minutes faster than today’s trains that make the five intermediate stops.

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Riverside was designed in 1869 by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designers of New York City’s Central Park. It is known today as the first planned residential suburb and is probably only the second neighborhood in the U.S. to be planned with protective covenants to give buyers assurance that their property values would not be reduced by incompatible uses next door. Today it would be called a master-planned community as it came with parks, a public square, and various community buildings. Since the covenants required half-acre minimum lot sizes, only the wealthy lived there, so Burlington might have felt they were deserving of exclusive trains, or at least an exclusive timetable.

If Burlington hadn’t thought of it first, some other railroad, probably the Santa Fe, would have combined Diesel power with stainless steel to make a streamliner that was so different from all previous passenger trains that it woke up America. Still, in 1933 such ideas were inconceivable, and it took a creative engineer like Ralph Budd to put together Diesels, stainless steel, air conditioning, and everything else that made the Zephyrs special, even including the name Zephyr, which Budd thought of when reading Canterbury Tales.

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Budd retired from the Burlington in 1949 and it seems like all that creativity went with him. The Burlington was still gung ho for passenger trains and its Zephyrs, but you wouldn’t know it reading this timetable. Continue reading →

Like the timetables presented here in the last couple of days, this one is practically ad-free. There are several small ads, the largest of which fills half a page and in total they probably would fill a little more than two pages. But most appear to be thrown in wherever a gap would otherwise be in the timetables and were not a part of any coordinated campaign.

Click image to download a 22.9-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.

The timetable shows that Burlington offered six trains a day between Chicago and the Twin Cities. The Oriental Limited‘s schedule is identical to the Black Hawk‘s as far west as St. Paul, then it takes a little longer to get to Minneapolis. That must mean they detached the Oriental‘s cars at St. Paul and added a Great Northern diner and observation-lounge car. Since passengers on the Oriental were in no rush to go to Minneapolis, that train left later. Continue reading →

It seemed rather a slap in the face of its parent company for the Burlington to combine the North Coast Limited, Northern Pacific’s premiere train, with the Black Hawk, as it did in yesterday’s timetable. So it is no surprise that in today’s timetable (scans for which were provided by Bryan Howell), issued four months later, the North Coast Limited was once again operated as a separate train between St. Paul and Chicago and it is the Oriental Limited that was combined with the Black Hawk.

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In 1948, both the Black Hawk and Oriental Limited were heavyweight trains. Northern Pacific advertised the North Coast Limited as streamlined, but that was only partially true: it still carried heavyweight tourist sleepers as well as head-end cars. Perhaps Burlington thought it could get away with the indignity of combining the NCL with the Black Hawk because most of the journey would be in the dark. Whether Northern Pacific complained or for some other reason, that combination only lasted for the summer of 1948.

In the four years since yesterday’s timetable, Burlington reduced the number of pages in its system timetables by four, which meant giving up the full-page ads on the inside and outside back covers. The other two pages were saved by condensing some of the condensed timetables.

Click image to download a 22.4-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.

For example, the 1942 timetable devoted a full page to a condensed timetable for the Adventureland, Burlington’s train to Billings with through cars that went from Chicago, Omaha, and Cody to Glacier Park on the Great Northern. A train by that name was still on the 1946 timetable but it no longer had through cars west of Billings. A condensed schedule for the train was on the same page as condensed schedules for other trains between St. Louis/Kansas City and Lincoln/Denver. Continue reading →