After several years of minimal ads, this edition has a full-page ad on the back cover. The railroad had room for this because of the number of pages showing schedules for branch-line trains dropped from 7 to 5. Apparently some local trains had been terminated.

Click image to download a 22.9-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.

One of the two pages was devoted to increasing the list of railroad agents from one to two pages. This frankly seems excessive as the one-page list used in previous timetables seems comprehensive enough.

The back cover ad is for Burlington Zephyrs and frankly was not very inspired. It was basically an expansion of a third-of-a-page ad that formerly appeared on one of the branch-line train pages. A headline in the ad says that the Zephyrs were Diesel-powered and stainless steel, which seems totally unnecessary: if after 16 years of marketing there was still someone who didn’t equate Zephyrs with Diesels and stainless steel, they probably wouldn’t be reading a Burlington timetable anyway.

The ad lists the ten different Zephyr trains that were running at that time one of which had the decidedly unevocative name of Zephyr 9902. Train 9902 was originally one of the Twin Zephyrs, but since it had been replaced by the vista-dome Twin Zephyr, Burlington put that train to work between Chicago and Hannibal, Missouri. The train operated by that name between 1949 and 1953.

Had Burlington’s marketing people simply run out of imagination and couldn’t think of a better name for the train? Hannibal, of course, was the childhood home of Mark Twain, but they already had Mark Twain Zephyr connecting Hannibal with St. Louis. They could have called the Chicago-Hannibal train the Samuel Clemens Zephyr or the Tom Sawyer Zephyr or any of a number of other evocative names. In effect, Burlington was telling the residents of Hannibal, “You live in such a boring place that we couldn’t think of two different train names, so we just named the second train after the number on the locomotive.”