I’ve previously noted that, for the sake of anniversaries, Burlington once considered its birth year to be 1850, the year the first train operated between Chicago and Aurora. But in 1949 the railroad changed that to 1849, the year Burlington’s earliest predecessor received its charter. This was done, I suspect, so that the railroad could hold its centennial before the retirement of Ralph Budd, one of the most respected railroad presidents in the industry.

Click image to download a 22.5-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.

This 1949 timetable celebrates that anniversary with banners on the cover. However, shorn of almost all advertising space, the timetable otherwise makes no mention of the birthday.

Yesterday’s 1948 timetable showed the North Coast Limited combined with the Black Hawk and the Oriental Limited running 15 minutes later westbound and 30 minutes later eastbound. This timetable shows the reverse: the Oriental Limited was combined with the Black Hawk between St. Paul and Chicago and the North Coast Limited ran 15 minutes earlier westbound and 30 minutes earlier eastbound.

Because Northern Pacific had not yet speeded up its schedule to match the Empire Builder, the North Coast Limited left Chicago 10 hours sooner and left St. Paul 8-1/2 hours sooner than its Great Northern counterpart. In both directions, the NCL was an overnight train between St. Paul and Chicago while the Builder was a day train. Unlike the Oriental Limited, NP’s secondary train, the Alaskan, still had no guaranteed connection, much less any through cars, to Chicago.