We’ve seen Southern Pacific portfolios of photographs for the Overland Route, Shasta Route, and Valley & Coast Routes, so it stands to reason that there would be portfolios for the Sunset and Golden State routes. This is the first one I have seen, and it covers both routes, probably because they both follow more or less the same tracks west of El Paso, where most of the scenery is located.

Curiously, the streamliner on the portfolio cover is in early Union Pacific streamliner colors (yellow & brown), even though UP trains didn’t use the Golden State/Sunset routes. Click image to download a 7.9-MB PDF of this portfolio.

In fact, there is only one photo east of El Paso in the portfolio (which I have sorted in roughly east-to-west order), and that is of Canal Street in New Orleans, which the caption calls “America’s Widest Business Street.” On the far left of the photo is the Southern Railway Terminal, which until 1954 served passengers going to Cincinnati, St. Louis, Washington, and Florida, among other places.

Although this portfolio was published in 1948, by which time Kodachrome color film was more than a decade old, the photographs are colorized versions of black-and-white photos. We have seen some beautiful colorized lithographs whose colors are pretty realistic and other lithographs whose colors are not very realistic but nonetheless beautiful. However, these photos are both unrealistic and ugly, as if the colorizer not only had never been to these places but simply didn’t care to do a good job.

The Canal Street photo, for example, appears to have used only five colors: blue, pink, yellow, orange, and green, which the colorist seems to have applied almost at random. The Southern Railway Terminal, for example, was really grey, not orange; the Audubon and Maison Blanche buildings in the background were tan, not yellow and pink.

The skies in this and other photographs add to the unrealism as they are shown in a uniform medium blue rather than a gradient from light to dark blue as the eye moves up. The pavement surrounding a Palm Springs swimming pool (which is at the Palm Springs Tennis Club) is shown in bright yellow and orange when in fact (as this 1940 National Geographic photo shows) it was white and tan. Carrizo Gorge is shown in yellows, pinks, and purples when we know it was really mainly grey. The faces of people on the Yuma train station platform are uncolored, as the colorist must have realized that none of the colors in the limited palette looked like skin.

This and other 1948 portfolios were printed by the National Color Press in San Francisco. Southern Pacific issued a new series of portfolios in 1950 that were printed by Alex Dulfer Lithographic Co., also of San Francisco, that used the four-color printing process based on real (presumably Kodachrome) color photos. These are much more realistic in appearance.

In addition to the routes listed above, Southern Pacific issued portfolios for the West, California, San Francisco, and Los Angeles. I’ve noted before that there is a lot of overlap between these portfolios: many of the photographs in the San Francisco and Los Angeles packages, for example, also appeared in the California and West portfolios. In this case, at least seven photos in the Golden State/Sunset portfolio are also in other portfolios: Mission San Gabriel, which is also in the Los Angeles portfolio; the Palm Springs swimming pool, Carlsbad Caverns, and Arizona cactuses, which are in the Scenic West and Scenic Grandeur portfolios; cliff dwellings and Roosevelt Dam, which are in the Scenic Grandeur portfolio; and Los Angeles Union Passenger Terminal, which appears in at least three other portfolios.