On November 15, 1952, Northern Pacific finally speeded up the North Coast Limited to times competitive with the Empire Builder and Olympian Hiawatha. At the same time, it replaced the heavyweight Alaskan with the partially streamlined Mainstreeter. A brochure about these two changes can be downloaded from Wx4. This timetable was issued two months later.
Click image to download a 2.3-MB PDF of this 4-page timetable.
Like the Alaskan, the Mainstreeter didn’t go between St. Paul and Chicago, but unlike the Alaskan both sleeping cars and coaches from the Mainstreeter went through to Chicago via Burlington’s Black Hawk. Also unlike the Alaskan, the Mainstreeter had a dining car, which was a significant upgrade in service.
The strange practice of alternating a St. Paul-Fargo sleeper between the Alaskan and Great Northern’s Dakotan every four months continued with the Mainstreeter. Unlike the Mainstreeter‘s Chicago-Seattle sleeping car or cars, which were streamlined, the St. Paul-Fargo car remained a heavyweight as did a St. Paul-Mandan sleeper.
The Mainstreeter had no through cars to Portland, so passengers to Portland had to change trains in Spokane. This put it at a competitive disadvantage to the Western Star, which — at least initially — had both a streamlined coach and a streamlined sleeper that went all the way between Chicago and Portland.
At 46-1/2 hours from Chicago to Seattle, the North Coast Limited was a lot faster than it had been before the speed up but still wasn’t as fast as the 45-hour Empire Builder or the 44-1/2-hour Olympian Hiawatha. When the Mainstreeter was introduced in November, it took 58-1/3 hours to get from Chicago to Seattle. By the time this timetable was issued, a half hour had been added to its schedule. Although it wasn’t combined with the North Coast Limited at Spokane as the Alaskan had been, the Mainstreeter arrived in Seattle just ten minutes before the North Coast Limited.
This timetable still shows the “pine tree” paint scheme (named after the shape of the stripes on the locomotive nose) on NP passenger trains. Although the first passenger locomotives appeared in the Raymond Loewy colors in 1953, and some passenger cars possibly even earlier, that color scheme wouldn’t appear on the covers of NP timetables until fall 1954.