As I noted a few days ago, I was particularly interested in reviewing Burlington timetables from 1947 through the early 1960s to see if Burlington operated Great Northern’s secondary trains, the Oriental Limited until 1951 and the Western Star after, together with or separate from the Black Hawk between St. Paul and Chicago. This timetable shows that, as of mid-1948, the Oriental Limited ran 15 minutes after the Black Hawk westbound and 30 minutes after eastbound. Curiously, in this timetable, the Black Hawk was combined with the North Coast Limited in both directions.

Click image to download a 23.8-MB PDF of this 36-page timetable.

We’ve previously seen the December 1947 Burlington timetable, at which time the North Coast Limited left Chicago 90 minutes after the Black Hawk and the Oriental Limited left 15 minutes after that. Eastbound, the Black Hawk left St. Paul 15 minutes after the North Coast Limited and the Oriental Limited left 45 minutes after that.

A 1944 timetable shows that Burlington once operated trains as close as 4 minutes apart. In particular, the Exposition Flyer was scheduled to run just 4 minutes after the Advance Flyer, which was sort of a coach-only version of the Expo Flyer.

That practice ended when the two trains crashed in April 1946, killing 45 people, after which Burlington vowed to always schedule trains at least 15 minutes apart. Actually, in the 1947 timetable, unnamed train 45 left Chicago just 5 minutes after the Morning Zephyr, but the latter train was so much faster that #45 had fallen 19 minutes behind it by Aurora, just 38 miles outside of Chicago.

In today’s timetable, Burlington had six trains a day between Chicago and the Twin Cities, four of them leaving Chicago or St. Paul in the late afternoon or evening. This left a gap in the mid-morning hours in both directions; you’d think there be some demand for, say, a 10 am departure from people who wanted to sleep in a little and still arrive at the other terminus by 5 pm. Apparently, Burlington didn’t think so.