When the Pacific Limited was inaugurated on April 3, 1913, most of Union Pacific’s transcontinental trains connected to Chicago over the North Western line. For some trains, UP’s 1912 timetables also showed connections at Omaha with the Chicago Great Western, Illinois Central, and St. Paul roads, plus other connections to Minneapolis and St. Louis. In most cases these were just connections, meaning passengers had to change trains, but the St. Paul sent through cars from Chicago to Colorado and the West Coast on several different trains.

Click image to download a 27.3-MB PDF of this booklet.

For Pacific Limited, however, the primary road for the Chicago-Omaha portion of the was the St. Paul, not the North Western, at least for most of the early years that train ran. According to Wikipedia, the train went over St. Paul tracks from its inauguration in 1913 to the beginning of government control in mid-1918. For some reason the government routed the train over the C&NW, but when government control ended in November 1920, the train returned to the St. Paul. In September 1930, Depression-related issues returned it to the North Western where it stayed until it was discontinued in 1947.

Although the Pacific Limited was a secondary train that took several hours longer to get to the West Coast than the Overland Limited or Los Angeles Limited, this 1915 booklet emphasizes that it was still a comfortable train, with a library-observation car, dining car, sleeping cars, and tourist sleepers. While the St. Paul’s Olympian was an all-steel train, the booklet says the Pacific Limited was “steel equipped,” which means at least some of the cars were wood with steel sheathing.

The booklet’s front cover shows a domed building from the Panama-Pacific Exposition, which would take place in 1915. There were many domes at the expo, some of them near-duplicates of one another, but this one is probably either the Palace of Education, the Palace of Pure Foods, or the strangely named Palace of Varied Industries. The main exhibitor beneath the dome of the latter building was the Singer sewing machine company, which at the time was enough of an economic powerhouse to have built a headquarters that was briefly (1908-1909) the tallest building in the world.

While none of the other pages in this booklet are as colorful as the cover, many of them have green and red highlights. In addition to six full-page photos of train exteriors and interiors, many of the pages have small photos of both the San Francisco and San Diego Panama expositions.

This booklet is from the collection of Michael Sol, a Milwaukee Road historian who maintains a web site called Milwaukee Road Archives. While this booklet is downloadable from his web site, I’ve reduced it in size from 67 megabytes without significantly reducing the quality of the images and inserted a couple of blank pages to correct the page count. I appreciate Mr. Sol giving me permission to use it here.