This 12-page booklet provides a city-by-city description of the Portland-San Francisco route used by Southern Pacific trains in 1950. By this time, all trains went on the West Side line through the Sacramento Valley (meaning they skipped Sacramento itself). There’s … Continue reading
Here’s a 1962 menu for the Sunset Limited. While the front cover shows a cowboy lassoing Texas longhorn cattle, the back has a six-paragraph biography of John James Audubon. The incongruity is lessened by the fact that the streamlined Sunset … Continue reading
This drab brochure was intended more for travel agents than travelers themselves. “SALES TIP,” says the brochure; “Suggest to your clients that they return via San Francisco and see the spectacular Golden Gate International Exposition on San Francisco Bay. It … Continue reading
Published just a year-and-a-half after yesterday’s general timetable, this one shows some significant changes in the Shasta Route service. First, for 1938 SP increased the service between Portland and San Francisco over the Cascade line from three to four trains … Continue reading
Like many railroad maps, the map is on one side while the other side advertises the railroad’s trains. This 1938 map advertises the railroad’s Four Great Routes, but also maps and pictures steamships from New Orleans to New York as … Continue reading
This 56-page timetable includes several pages each on SP’s “four great routes”: Sunset, Golden State, Overland, and Shasta, plus two or more pages each on the Coast line, the San Joaquin line, San Francisco-San Jose, and San Francisco-Sacramento. There is … Continue reading
This is a 1930 eight-panel brochure (printed both sides) that has ten black-and-white photos of the northern California coast plus a brilliant color cover painting by Maurice Logan. Southern Pacific used a portion of this same painting on a matching … Continue reading
The Arizona Limited was a kind of semi-train: semi-streamlined, semi-daily, operated only half the year (actually just three-and-one-half months), and by two railroads using two train sets for only two years. Each Pullman-only train set consisted of a heavyweight Rock … Continue reading
We’ve seen Maurice Logan’s paintings for the Southern Pacific in the form of posters. SP also issued some postcards with his paintings that are good examples of Logan’s impressionistic style of illustrating. The first shows “Lake Apache on the Apache … Continue reading
Southern Pacific had a line entering San Francisco from the south, but trains from Portland and Ogden terminated at Oakland. While passengers to Oakland and other East Bay communities got off at Oakland’s 16th Street Station, until 1958, passengers to … Continue reading
