Train Travel Art

I recently bought a used book and inside was a 3x5-inch yellow and green envelope which held two reservation tickets for a passenger who traveled by train in early March 1954. The drawings on the front and the reverse of the envelope are terrific. The front shows a lineup of trains in North Western's 400 Streamliner Fleet.

The reverse shows a map of the Chicago and North Western System. If you enlarge the map, you can see things like the carvings on Mount Rushmore, the geyser of Old Faithful at Yellowstone, and a dairy cow in Madison, Wisconsin. (These two photos are both of the reverse of the envelope, but the second one is a little bit more of a closeup and is in black and blue instead of yellow and green.) 

I love how the railroad took such care to reproduce these clever drawings on something which it probably expected people to throw away once they finished their travels.

The reservations show the passenger went from Martinsburg, West Virginia to Chicago, Illinois, on the B&O Railroad, and from Chicago to Ames, Iowa on the North Western Railroad.

The book also contained a Police Traffic Bureau Warning issued to the train passenger in Des Moines Iowa in September 1954, for being parked at 4:13 p.m. in a place which didn't allow parking between 4:00 and 6:00 p.m. The warning said it was not a summons to appear in court.  Rather, it "is extended to you as a COURTESY and also gives us an opportunity to say HELLO and WELCOME." The capital letters are in the original.