This post-war booklet briefly describes 22 escorted tours and 36 independent tours people could take of the West. Most of the tours used more than one railroad but so long as they used the Northern Pacific for part of their distance they were included on the list. Burlington Escorted Tours, which published annual booklets of tours before the war, was apparently no longer in business, but the escorted tours listed in this booklet were “under able management and leadership of responsible, long-established tour companies recommended by Northern Pacific Railway.”

Click image to download a 3.2-MB PDF of this 8-page booklet.

The booklet claims that it offers “your choice of 157 escorted tours,” but only describes 22. Each of the tours departed Chicago about once a week, so 157 represented 22 tours departing between 7 and 8 times per summer. Nearly all tours went to Yellowstone with many also going to Alaska, California, the Canadian Rockies (Banff or Jasper), Colorado, or the Pacific Northwest. Continue reading →

Printed in green ink with red highlights, this booklet describes the “West” as it might be defined by someone from Chicago: everything west of the Wisconsin-Minnesota line. Mostly it is the Northwest, meaning the northern tier of states west of and including Minnesota. But it also includes a page on “California via the Pacific Northwest.”

Click image to download a 10.1-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.

The booklet prominently mentions the streamlined North Coast Limited, which was introduced in 1948. The interior pictures of the train are all drawings, not photographs, suggesting the booklet may have come out around the time that train was introduced, before the NP was able to take its own interior photos. There is one exterior photo of the entire train, but several of the cars in the photo are clearly heavyweights, so it was probably taken before 1948. So, while it could be from a year or three later, I’ll date it to 1948.