I usually think of Lewis & Clark as traveling through Northern Pacific territory, but this edition of Missouri Pacific’s “magazine-like” timetables makes the explorers “No. 2 in a series devoted to historic landmarks in Missouri Pacific’s Western, Southwestern Empire.” Of course, Lewis & Clark started their journey from St. Louis and went up the Missouri River, the first few hundred miles of which were in MoPac territory. The images illustrating the landmark page, which appears before the centerfold map, are signed “Keil.”

Click image to download a 30.5-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.

The page after the centerfold map describes “new Louisiana” as the “focal point of the industrial South.” The state offered energy, resources, skilled and unskilled (translation: low-cost) labor, ideal year-round climate, and “governmental cooperation.” Even today, these things remain important, although the industries considering a location in the Sunbelt are quite different than they were in the 1950s.

The inside front cover advertises that the Eagles are “finer, faster, at no extra fare,” a clear reference to Santa Fe’s slogan of “finer, faster, extra fare.” One promised affordability while the other guaranteed exclusivity.

The inside back cover was the usual list of freight schedules, but the back cover promised low family fares: regular round-trip fare for the head of the family, a one-way fare for a round-trip ride for the spouse and children over 12, half the one-way fare for children 5 through 12, and children under 5 rode for free.

Beyond the colorful, full-page articles and ads, this edition contains several interesting half-page articles. One asserts that dining car prices are not too high since the railroads collectively spent $106 million on dining services in 1953 but received only $77 million in dining revenues — to which an economist might respond that the fact that railroad dining car services were inefficient doesn’t mean the prices weren’t at the same time too high.

Another is a word jumble that presents words like “rustic” and the reader is supposed to figure out what town on the Missouri Pacific is an anagram of that word — in this case, Curtis, Arkansas. The puzzle gives a clue in the form of the number of the table in which that town name appears.