Missouri Pacific November 1948 Timetable

For November, Missouri Pacific made a small change to the front cover. Instead of red and black, the strip on the bottom of the cover is printed in yellow and black. This is a lot easier to read.

Click image to download a 26.8-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

As usual, the inside front cover is a full-color ad for a train, in this case the St. Louis-Galveston Texas Eagle, which MP had introduced on August 15. I’m sure it was no coincidence that Santa Fe had introduced its Chicago-Galveston Texas Chief earlier in the year on April 8. Continue reading

Missouri Pacific May 1948 Timetable

Full page, four-color articles in this issue describe America’s wheat belt (which only slightly overlapped with Missouri Pacific routes), San Francisco, the Royal Gorge route to California, and outdoor music concerts in St. Louis. The inside front cover announces that Missouri Pacific will introduce four streamlined Texas Eagles “by the end of this summer.”

Click image to download a 27.5-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

Page 6 has a black-and-white photo of a curve-glass dome car built by Budd for the Colorado Eagle. While Burlington called its Budd domes “Vista-Domes,” in this ad Missouri Pacific introduced the term “Planetarium coaches.” Continue reading

Missouri Pacific September 1947 Timetable

Missouri Pacific issued four timetables a year, so April 1947 was probably the second magazine-style timetable issued by the railroad and this was the third. While the April issue had full-page, four-color articles about Denver and St. Louis, this one has similar articles about Little Rock, New Orleans, and San Antonio. It also has half-page articles, with one color used for tints, about Hot Springs, Pueblo, and Texarkana.

Click image to download a 28.0-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The back cover is a four-color article encouraging people to visit the St. Louis Historical Society Museum. Oddly, considering how much creativity went into the rest of the timetable, the inside front cover of both this one and the previous one are similar but not quite identical advertisements for through cars between Texas and New York or Washington. Continue reading

Missouri Pacific March 1948 Timetable

This edition of MP’s magazine-style timetables had color photographs accompanying full-page articles about Omaha, Dallas, Salt Lake City, and (on the back cover) Mexico. Another article includes recipes for oyster bisque, creole potatoes, and pumpkin pie “recommended” by Missouri Pacific chefs.

Click image to download a 28.8-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

In addition to the full-color pages, some pages are tinted in green and yellow. Articles on these pages briefly describe Louisiana, Natchez, Fort Smith Arkansas, and Hutchinson, Kansas. Continue reading

Missouri Pacific April 1947 Timetable

Over the next several months I am going to present around 150 timetables, including more than 50 from the Burlington Route, more than 30 from the Rock Island, and more than 50 from a variety of other railroads. But first I have several of the Missouri Pacific timetables that featured this image of an Eagle streamliner on the cover.

Click image to download a 28.5-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

I’ve noted previously that Missouri Pacific timetables from 1947 through mid-1957 were unusual in their extravagant use of color. These were preceded by quite ordinary timetables including one we’ve seen from February 1946 and a similar one I’ve seen dated July 1946. The first that I’ve seen that has the same Eagle cover shown here was dated November 1946. Continue reading

The Land Where the World Stays Young

Today’s booklet, which is marked 1929, is clearly a different edition of the one posted here yesterday. Some of the photos are different, the layout is different, the back cover image (shown below) is different, but much of the text is the same in the two booklets.

Click image to download a 12.3-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

As in yesterday’s booklet, the cover image only covers two-thirds of the 9″x12″ publication, with the other third used to list White Pass officials and agents. Unlike yesterday’s image, this one has a full range of colors and is signed Segesman. We’ve previously seen three other booklets and a brochure from the White Pass Route whose covers were illustrated by John Segesman (1899-1985), a Spokane native who studied art in Seattle. Continue reading

Alaska, Atlin and the Yukon

I’ve presented this booklet before from an edition on archive.org. Whoever scanned it for archive.org cut the cover image in half. I tried to restore it, with less-than-perfect success, then compounded the problem by putting the back cover on the front. Today, I’m rectifying these problems by posting one that I recently acquired.

Click image to download a 10.4-MB PDF of this 16-page booklet.

I had dated the archive.org one to 1923, but I have no idea where I got that since archive.org dated it to 1910. That’s obviously wrong because the booklet refers to 1918 in the past tense, but I can’t find any reason to pin it down to 1923. Tomorrow, I’ll post a different version that is clearly marked 1929, and to be conservative I am tentatively dating this one to 1928. Continue reading

Jasper Lodge 1967 Dinner Menu

The photo on the cover of this menu is reminiscent of the image on the 1937 menu presented here a couple of weeks ago. The difference is that the original lodge was shown on the earlier menu while this one has the new lodge that had been built in 1953 after the fire destroyed the original one on July 15, 1952.


Click image to download a 2.0-MB PDF of this menu.

Although most of the Jasper Lodge menus shown here have been cards, this one is not only a folder, it is especially elaborate in that the menu itself is printed on a separate piece of paper that is inserted into the folder. This makes the entire document 8 pages long, although the outside pages of the menu are blank. The menu page is also a little smaller than the cover, so bits of the inside covers are visible when the menu is open. Continue reading

Trinidad 1952 Dinner Menu

The cover painting on this menu reminds me of what I call the region series of menus because there is one for the Atlantic provinces, Ontario, the prairie provinces, the Rockies, and British Columbia. The region series menus I’ve seen are dated 1948 and 1949 while this menu is from 1952. At 6″x9″, this steamship menu is also a little smaller than the 6-3/4″x10″ dining car menus of the region series, but I suspect they were all painted by the same in-house artist.

Click image to download a 938-KB PDF of this menu.

Dated November 19, the menu was probably used on a winter cruise rather than a regularly scheduled voyage. The left inner page is a programme of mainly classical music (probably recorded). The dinner menu on the right included a choice of four appetizers, three soups, two fish, three entrées, two vegetables, browned or mashed potatoes, a joint course of prime rib, salad, dessert, cheese and fruit, and demitasse. Continue reading

Jasper National Park 1948 Brochure

Intensely decorated with red and yellow on one side, but only yellow on the other, this brochure also has an image of Jasper Park Lodge that resembles, but is not identical to, the one on a 1937 menu shown here a few days ago. With advances in color photography between 1937 and 1948, it is more likely that this is an actual color photo while the 1937 image was probably a colorized black-and-white photo.

Click image to download an 2.2-MB PDF of this brochure.

The brochure lists a sampling of many of the activities popular in Jasper Park, including motor drives, saddle trips, hiking, and mountain climbing. It notes that people could also buy one- to four-day all-expense tours that included meals, lodging, and motor drives. Saddle trips were $5 a day; lodging on the American plan (meals included) was $20 a day for two without a bath and $26 with. Multiply prices by ten to approximate today’s U.S. dollars.