This 1946 brochure purports to show the northbound trip from Los Angeles to San Francisco, but is really an advertisement for the route than an along-the-way brochure for on-board passengers. The front cover shows a Daylight locomotive pulling 19 cars–the … Continue reading
Here’s another 1943 portfolio, like yesterday’s, from National Color Press. We’ve also seen a third one, Scenic Grandeur of the West, that was also dated 1943. Click image to download a 17.7-MB PDF of this folio. It seems surprising that … Continue reading
In 1943, a company called National Color Press put out a series of folios of photos taken along Southern Pacific lines. The photos are all hand-tinted from black-and-white originals; the photo shown below, for example, is from the same black-and-white … Continue reading
Here is an elegant blotter that uses the same logo and typeface as a piece of on-board stationery that I posted here more than two years ago. As I noted then, they show the Golden Gate before the construction of … Continue reading
After seeing the breakfast and lunch menus for a Powers around America Tour, here’s the dinner menu. It offers a choice of sea bass or chicken fricassee with soup, salad, bread, beverage, and peach ice cream & cake for dessert. … Continue reading
Here’s a lunch menu from what is probably the same Powers around America Tour as yesterday’s. This one features “the mountain that swallowed itself,” also known as Crater Lake. Taking a photo of the entire lake requires a very wide-angled … Continue reading
This wrap-around, black-and-white menu is undated but is from the same series as yesterday’s, so it likely to be from around 1939. The photo caption implies that the view in the photo is “seen from the train,” but it is … Continue reading
In the late 1930s, Southern Pacific had a series of wrap-around black-and-white photo menus that perhaps inspired Union Pacific/Southern Pacific’s post-war wrap-around color photo menus. This one shows Yosemite Valley, “off our San Joaquin Valley Route in California.” Unlike the … Continue reading
Here’s a luggage sticker advertising the Southern Pacific/Rock Island Californian. As described in the brochure for that train, the Californian was a budget service designed to compete with the Union Pacific Challenger. The sticker was probably issued about the same … Continue reading
Inaugurated in 1937, the Rock Island-Southern Pacific Californian was an attempt to compete with the Union Pacific Challenger in the Chicago-Los Angeles market. In other words, it was a low-cost train with tourist sleepers rather than Pullmans and low-cost meals … Continue reading
