Tropical Trips in 1949

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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The 1949 Tropical Trips booklet has its name on both the front and back covers. While the front cover has flamingoes (which were also on the back cover of yesterday’s 1948 booklet), the back cover features flamingoes in the water and two Southern Belles sitting in the nearby grass.

Click image to download a 29.5-MB PDF of this 32-page booklet.

Inside, the 1948 and 1949 booklets share the same design but with some text updates and some new photos. The centerfold of both books is a map of Florida in eye-watering red (for land), blue (for water), and yellow (for the rail lines), with only a tiny bit of white (for steamship and Pan American Airline routes to Nassau, Caribbean islands, and South America).

Tropical Trips to the Sunny South

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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“Florida . . . and the Sunny South,” reads the front cover, but the real title of this booklet is on the back cover: Tropical Trips. The Atlantic Coast Line published an annual booklet of that name at least since 1904, which is the date on a similar booklet that is the University of Central Florida library.

Click image to download a 28.7-MB PDF of this 32-page booklet.

The 1904 booklet is only 20 pages long (and unfortunately two of them are missing from the UCF PDF), but it follows the same basic formula as this one from 1948: first is a description of major cities that people could visit in the sunny South followed by a list of hotels “along the Atlantic Coast Line.” The 1904 booklet gives the capacity of each hotel, the name of its manager, and daily and weekly rates; the 1948 edition has number of rooms and manager but nothing about rates. Continue reading →

New Haven September 1939 Timetable

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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Someone imperiously stamped “Official File Do Not Remove” on the front and back covers of this timetable. But since the New Haven Railroad is defunct, it got removed and somehow found its way into my hands.

Click image to download a 30.5-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

Even though the area served by the New Haven Railroad was smaller than West Virginia (which is the 40th-largest state), it ran a lot of passenger trains in that area and so has a very thick timetable. Seven of the 48 pages are devoted to full-page ads. The first advertises the Merchants Limited and Yankee Clipper, first-class trains on the Boston-New York route. These were “all-Pullman” trains in the sense that all they carried were parlor cars operated by Pullman. Continue reading →

B&O Employee Timetable for September 1949

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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I am mainly interested in passenger trains, so I have very few employee timetables in my collection since they aren’t something that passengers would normally encounter. However, Streamliner Memories reader Chris Taylor contributed this one, and I’m grateful to him for allowing me to present it here.

Click image to download a 15.7-MB PDF of this timetable.

Looking it over, I can see why people find employee timetables fascinating. For example, page 5 has a list of speed restrictions throughout the railroad. The main line had a top speed limit of 65 mph for passenger trains but only 40 for passenger trains pulled by freight locomotives and fast freight trains, and 30 for slow freight trains. Page 11 has weight limits and the largest classes of locomotives allowed on various portions of track. Page 13 describes, for areas that have more than one track, what each track was to be used for: eastward or westward, low speed or high speed. Continue reading →

Baltimore & Ohio August 1943 Timetable

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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A few days ago, I noted that the Burlington had eliminated all of its large ads from its timetable in 1944, possibly due to wartime paper shortages. Yet here is a B&O timetable issued in the midst of the war that contains a total of seven full-page ads.

Click image to download a 31.2-MB PDF of this 52-page timetable.

Most of the ads have wartime significance. Unlike the Burlington, which sensibly put its main cover on the front, B&O put its main cover on the back while the front cover was used to encourage people to be patient and courteous while enduring the stresses of wartime travel. Similarly, the ad on the inside front cover reminds people that B&O freight trains are, among other things, shipping food to America’s fighting men, and “food for fighters comes first” before passenger trains. Continue reading →

Why Is a Musketeer on This Booklet Cover?

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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We’ve previously seen a large (9-2/3″x13-1/2″) 1931 booklet encouraging people to take a seven-day tour of historic sites in Virginia and Washington DC. At 4-1/5″x7-2/3″, this undated booklet is more compact but covers the same ground. Perhaps falling into the deceptions of the Lost Cause school of thought, the C&O apparently regarded “history” as being mostly about the Civil War.

Click image to download a 10.8-MB PDF of this 24-page tabloid booklet.

But why does the cover of this booklet show someone who is dressed like one of the Three Musketeers? Some Jamestown colonists may have dressed a little like that, but Jamestown had no coaches-and-four similar to the one shown in the background. Continue reading →

Milwaukee Road On-Board Stationery

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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Here is some distinctive stationery used by a passenger who rode the Olympian Hiawatha in 1949. While the stationery itself is quite beautiful, the letter written on it makes clear that the writer was not, at the time, a passenger on the train.

Click image to download a 2.5-MB PDF of this letter.

The envelope was postmarked August 26, 1949 in Greenough, Montana (about 30 miles northeast of Missoula) and addressed to a Miss Martha Blankarn of Rumson, New Jersey. The letter itself (which must be read on page 1, then 4, then 2) tells a sad tale of a young woman who had been exiled by her family in the wilds of Montana to keep her away from a boyfriend who they “are not overwhelmingly thrilled with” in the hope that she would forget about him. As a result of being “stuck in the West,” she was unable to attend her friend Martha’s engagement party on September 3. Continue reading →

The Olympian

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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A few months ago I presented a 1912 booklet about the Olympian. This booklet is similar but, based on the list of agents in the back, I date it to 1913. It is worth noting that, in November, 1915, the railroad operated its first electrically powered locomotives between Three Forks and Deer Lodge, Montana, and since this booklet doesn’t mention that momentous event, it is clearly from before that date.


Click image to download a 27.2-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.

Like the 1912 booklet, today’s booklet illustrates the trains with several photographs, the first one of which shows the dining car of the Olympian. There are no people in this or any of the other interior photos, while the 1912 booklet shows dining car staff and the 1911 booklet presented here yesterday shows both staff and passengers. The presence of the passengers makes it seem much more inviting so I have to wonder why the photo in today’s booklet is so sterile by comparison. Continue reading →

The New Steel Trail

Posted on by November 9, 2023
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The brilliant cover of this booklet was designed to remind travelers that only the Chicago, Milwaukee and St. Paul offered all-steel trains between Chicago and the Pacific Northwest in 1911. At that time, the steel industry, though more than 50 years old, was a hot commodity. The ten-year-old U.S. Steel Corporation was the largest company in the world and controlled two-thirds of the American steel market, leading to the same debates over monopolies that we hear today about Google and other high-tech companies.

Click image to download a 10.6-MB PDF of this 36-page booklet. Click here to download a PDF of the front and back cover as shown above.

Steel, an alloy of iron and carbon, wasn’t as fast moving as the high-tech industry is today, but it was still transforming America in the early twentieth century. The first large-scale steelmaking, using the Bessemer process, could be traced back to the 1850s. The first railroad to experiment with steel rails was in England in 1857. Yet as late as 1880, more than 70 percent of American rails were still made of iron. By 1900, however, more than 90 percent were steel. Continue reading →

Burlington Route November 1959 Timetable

Posted on by October 15, 2023
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This timetable is quite a contrast from the one from 1939 shown here a few days ago. While that one had five full-page ads and two half-page ads, this one has no ads larger than a few tiny spots leftover after placing all the schedules. The 1939 ads promoted trains, tours, and destinations. The tiny ads in this one are limited to saying things like “Ship • Travel Burlington.”

Click image to download a 18.8-MB PDF of this 32-page timetable.

There are still plenty of trains in this timetable including eleven different zephyrs (counting the morning and afternoon Twin Zephyrs separately). But instead of advertising those trains, the inside front cover has general information and the inside and outside back covers list Burlington agents. Continue reading →