This timetable is quite a contrast from the one from 1939 shown here a few days ago. While that one had five full-page ads and two half-page ads, this one has no ads larger than a few tiny spots leftover after placing all the schedules. The 1939 ads promoted trains, tours, and destinations. The tiny ads in this one are limited to saying things like “Ship • Travel Burlington.”
Click image to download a 18.8-MB PDF of this 32-page timetable.
There are still plenty of trains in this timetable including eleven different zephyrs (counting the morning and afternoon Twin Zephyrs separately). But instead of advertising those trains, the inside front cover has general information and the inside and outside back covers list Burlington agents.
By all accounts, Burlington was still pro-passenger and would be as long as Harry Murphy — who learned the business at the feet of Ralph Budd — remained president, meaning 1965. But advertisements for trains, tours, and destinations seem to have disappeared from Burlington timetables after WWII.
Harry Murphy was indeed a pro-passenger RR president when those were becoming fewer and fewer, but it was Henry Wallace that was the Q’s real passenger train advocate. He scoured the country for second hand cars to add to the Burlington fleet, and organized all kinds of weekend tours out of Chicago using equipment that would otherwise have sat idle, not to mention some creative accounting to sell it to the bean counters.
Unfortunately, Wallace died young and his vision died with him, as by then Lew Menk became Q’s president and his priorities were (a) getting the BN merger to the finish line, and (b) getting rid of passenger trains.