Having lost the speed race when UP and Santa Fe reduced the times of their premiere Chicago-Los Angeles trains to 39-3/4 hours, Southern Pacific/Rock Island’s Golden State was a distinctly third-rate train in the 1950s. So this six-panel welcome-aboard brochure … Continue reading
Instead of trying to cram both French and English into one brochure, Canadian Pacific published two: one in English and one in French. It appears that the French wore the same ridiculous clothes as hair styles in the 1970s as … Continue reading
This three-panel brochure is undated, but the hair and clothing styles are obviously (and embarrassingly) from the 1970s. VIA took over Canadian Pacific passenger operations in 1978, so the brochure is from sometime before that. Click image to download a … Continue reading
The North Coast Limited still had its observation car when this guide was issued, although it is only mentioned in the guide as a place where beverages were served. This is far different from the heavyweight observation car described in … Continue reading
The train to Gaspé is one of the few routes I did not take in 1978, so when I was in Montreal in 1996, I took a few days to ride this train, which was supposed to be one of … Continue reading
This brochure is dated 1986, but was distributed in the same sealed plastic wrapper as an Empire Builder route map, quite possibly the same one shown here a few days ago even though that one was dated 1984. This brochure … Continue reading
Amtrak’s Superliners were more reliable than the worn-out long-distance cars Amtrak inherited from the private railroads, but that’s about all the good I can say about them. Amtrak selected the wrong builder–Pullman instead of Budd–which delivered the cars late and … Continue reading
Beginning in 1975, Amtrak began using French Turboliners on the Chicago-Detroit Blue Water Limtied. The first new trains purchased by Amtrak, the French called them Rame à Turbine à Gaz (RTG), for “gas turbine train.” This brochure refers to the … Continue reading
In 1970, Southern discontinued the Crescent through Montgomery while keeping the Southerner through Birmingham. Probably because the Crescent name had more prestige, it renamed the Southerner the Southern Crescent. This appeared to combine the names of the two trains but … Continue reading
Here are two more welcome-aboard brochures for the San Francisco Chief. We’ve previously seen a 1963 edition; here are two later versions. Click image to download a 2.7-MB PDF of this brochure. By coincidence, they are from the same dates … Continue reading
