City of San Francisco Goes Daily

Posted on by September 6, 2013
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The Pere Marquette and Empire Builder may have been the first brand-new streamliners after the war, but the Union Pacific already had streamliners throughout its system. Without buying any new equipment, it (with the help of partners Southern Pacific and Chicago & North Western) managed to scrounge together enough cars to increase the frequency of its City of San Francisco from twice a week to three times a week on October 1, 1946.

At least, the above ad, which says “Now! Three Times a Week,” is dated October 1st. Click the image to download a .8-MB PDF of this mailer, which the Southern Pacific sent to travel agents and other people who might be able to promote the train.

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Railway Age Reviews the Empire Builder

Posted on by July 31, 2022
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Railway Age, the rail industry’s magazine of record, described the “spectacular new equipment” that made up the Empire Builder in an eight-page feature article on April 12, 1947. Noting that the five twelve-car trains that made up the Empire Builder cost $7 million (more than $70 million in today’s money), the article listed some 80 different manufacturers (many of whom advertised in Railway Age) that contributed to the train.

Click the image to download a 9.1-MB PDF of an article and ads for the Empire Builder from the April 12, 1947 Railway Age.

A typical issue of Railway Age at that time included scores of pages of advertising, and for this issue many companies bragged about their contributions to the Empire Builder. I’ve included a couple of the ads with the article, one for Heywood-Wakefield and the other for Kaufman & Fabry (which the Railway Age article misspells Kaufman Kabry), the company that did the photo murals in the Empire Builder‘s dining and lounge cars. Continue reading →

Eating on the Empire Builder

Posted on by August 21, 2012
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After introducing the streamlined Empire Builder, the train’s menus featured paintings by Charles Russell, the cowboy artist who once lived in Great Falls on the Great Northern line. This is a breakfast menu offering meals from $1.00 to $1.35 (about $9.30 to $12.50 in today’s money).

Click image to download a 1.9-MB PDF of the front and back of this 1948 menu.
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The menu cover features a Russell painting called the Buffalo Hunt, and the back of the menu notes that “a larger reproduction of the painting appears in the lounge-observation car of this train.” I have several other Russell menus for the Western Star that I’ll post when I get to that train, and they make the same claim. Since photos indicate that there was only one Russell painting in each observation car, this suggests that the railroad made the effort to supply each dining car with menus that matched the paintings in the observation car that happened to be on the same train.

Great Northern menus of the 1930s featured portraits of Blackfoot Indians that were painted by Winold Reiss specifically for the menus, while some menus from the 1940s featured photos of Glacier National Park. I’ll post some of these menus when I cover the pre-streamlined Empire Builder.

Soap Leaves

Posted on by August 14, 2012
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Here is a curious item, and not just because “soap leaves” have been replaced in modern life by wet wipes.

Click the image to download a PDF of the front and back of this little packet of soap leaves.

The image of the locomotive on the cover of the soap leaves has obviously been taken from the publicity photo of the locomotive in its as-delivered paint scheme. The angle is exactly the same, and the image of the engineer in the window and the shadows in the top headlight are unmistakable.

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On Board the Empire Builder

Posted on by January 8, 2017
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Passengers in the observation lounge car were invited to send letters using stationery decorated with this colorful letterhead.

Click to download a PDF showing the entire first page of this four-page stationery. (The other three pages are blank.)

In addition to the postcard shown in a previous post, the railroad also happily gave out other postcards advertising its train.

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This one shows the Empire Builder between Seattle and Everett along the Puget Sound.

In this one, the train is further east, probably along the Columbia River in Washington state.

Advertising the Empire Builder

Posted on by December 13, 2013
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The Great Northern promoted the streamlined Empire Builder by placing ads in Look, Life, Saturday Evening Post, and other magazines. These ads contained many of the graphics found in the Through Your Car Window brochure. None of these ads are in my personal collection, but you can click on any of the images for a larger version.

“Custom-built for pleasant, faster travel,” says this ad, adding that the Empire Builders are “modern trains designed for the modern traveler.”

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Through Your Car Window

Posted on by August 14, 2012
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This is a colorful, 24-page brochure the Great Northern made available to passengers and potential passengers of its streamlined Empire Builder. This particular one is dated May 1949, but I suspect there were earlier editions.

Click to download an 18.5-MB PDF of this 24-page brochure.
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The outside and inside covers are printed in four colors while the remaining pages use two: black and orange. The back cover has a beautiful painting of the streamlined Empire Builder along an imaginary creek or river, perhaps–judging from the ponderosa pines in the background–the Flathead River in Montana or Tumwater Canyon in Washington. The inside covers have color graphics showing train interiors: coaches; duplex-roomettes; the coffee-shop car in Hudson Bay blanket colors; double bedrooms; the dining car; and the observation lounge, decorated with Hudson Bay blanket-colored draperies.

Nine of the remaining pages present enough highlights and photos of the trip, from west to east, to keep people entertained. There are also individual pages for trains from Portland to Seattle; Seattle to Vancouver; Twin Cities to Duluth; Twin Cities to Winnipeg; Twin Cities to Grand Forks (for the Oriental Limited, which used a slightly different route from the Empire Builder); and–strangely, because Great Northern passenger trains did not go there–Portland to Los Angeles.

The Locomotive on This Train Is a Diesel

Posted on by August 14, 2012
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When the Great Northern introduced the 1947 Empire Builder with much fanfare, General Motors helped with its own orange-and-green brochure advertising the locomotives used on the train. “On America’s crack trains, together with newly developed streamlined passenger cars,” the GM Diesel “brings an entirely new concept of high-speed operation over today’s modern routes of travel,” said the brochure.


Click image to download a PDF of this brochure.

General Motors got into the locomotive business in a fairly roundabout way. It all started when a GM executive, Charles Kettering, needed a motor for his yacht that was larger than anything GM made. He was so impressed by the engines made by a Cleveland company called Winton that he persuaded GM to buy Winton in 1930.

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The New Empire Builder

Posted on by November 9, 2023
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The Great Northern produced this brightly colored four-page brochure to advertise its new Empire Builder and no doubt handed out thousands of copies to people visiting the train when it was on display in cities throughout the Northwest. Unlike some railroads, which substituted post-war streamlined cars for heavyweights as they arrived, the Great Northern waited until it had all five entire trainsets in hand before it replaced the heavyweight Empire Builder with the streamlined version. (The exceptions were the locomotives, which were used to haul passenger trains when they arrived two years before rest of the train.)

Click to download a PDF of this four-page brochure.

The inside pages of this brochure have drawings of some of the features of the new train: reclining seat coaches, colorful lounges, and Diesel power. Some of these drawings will appear in four-color versions of later brochures as well, which raises a question: Since the GN had to use three colors to print this brochure (green, orange, and black), why didn’t it spring for a fourth color so it could have a full range of colors? Perhaps four-color printing in 1947 was a lot more expensive, relative to three-color printing, than it is today.

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The Post-War Empire Builder

Posted on by June 22, 2024
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The first overnight streamliner after the war was the Great Northern Empire Builder, which started service on February 7, 1947. The train’s bright orange and green colors have come to be known as the Empire Builder color scheme, yet it was actually developed by General Motors for the Great Northern’s first Diesel freight locomotives, which the GN purchased in 1941.

Click to download a PDF of this postcard.

The goal was not to have an award-winning color scheme for passenger trains but to maximize safety and visibility. Orange happens to be the most visible color of the spectrum in a wide variety of weather conditions, which is why it played a prominent role in the streamlined colors of so many railroads: Milwaukee Road, Rio Grande, Southern Pacific Daylights, and Western Pacific, to name a few. For even more visibility, the green and orange stripes were separated by thin gold (later Scotchlite) bands, and the lowest stripe of each carbody was a thin, silvery-white band.

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