When the St. Paul went bankrupt, the receivers asked Coverdale and Colpitts — the company that later wrote a series of reports on streamline trains — to prepare an evaluation of the railway. The report concluded that the railroad’s infrastructure was in fair shape, the locomotives were in “first class condition,” and freight cars were old and deficient in both condition and number.

Click any image to download a 916-KB PDF of this luggage sticker.

While the passenger cars were in “fair condition,” due to uncertainties about ridership (which was declining on all railroads), “it is not proposed that additional purchases of passenger cars be made.” Yet the receivers ignored this and ordered new equipment for the railroad’s flagship Olympian.

This luggage sticker shows a ten-car Olympian being led by bipolar electric locomotives through the Cascade Mountains. According to yesterday’s booklet, the train’s consist included a baggage car with an electric dynamo for powering lights in the train; a smoking car; a coach; a tourist sleeper; a diner; one 10 section, 1 compartment, 1 drawing room sleeper; two 8-section, 2-compartments, 1-drawing room sleepers; and a “luxury observation-club car.” That’s just nine cars.

I’d say the illustrator was using an “artistic license,” but the images of the train on the 1927 color booklet have 11 cars. Both the images in that booklet and the one on this sticker show two baggage cars, so one must have been carried as a mail or express car. Also, in the mountains the train carried an open-air viewing car, which might have been the eleventh car on the train in some of these images.