If Burlington hadn’t thought of it first, some other railroad, probably the Santa Fe, would have combined Diesel power with stainless steel to make a streamliner that was so different from all previous passenger trains that it woke up America. Still, in 1933 such ideas were inconceivable, and it took a creative engineer like Ralph Budd to put together Diesels, stainless steel, air conditioning, and everything else that made the Zephyrs special, even including the name Zephyr, which Budd thought of when reading Canterbury Tales.

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

Budd retired from the Burlington in 1949 and it seems like all that creativity went with him. The Burlington was still gung ho for passenger trains and its Zephyrs, but you wouldn’t know it reading this timetable.

Like the timetable shown yesterday, this one has a full-page add on the back cover. In fact, the ad is almost exactly like the one on yesterday’s timetable. The only difference is that some grey tones on yesterday’s ad were replaced with red. Otherwise, the text and graphics are identical.

Maybe the railroad had decided to invest its creativity is advertising other than its timetables, but why did it take them so long to figure out that, since they were already using red on the front cover (which is printed at the same time as the back cover), they could highlight the back cover ad with red at no extra cost? Something like this would be my first thought when planning a print job. But it apparently took Burlington people a few months to figure this out.