By Catherine Cyr, WPAMC Class of 2022
Overview
Figure 1. Astonishing Yellowstone. Northern Pacific Railway, 1938. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 113105
During the interwar years in America, railroad companies created and marketed hundreds of publications that advertised their routes and services in the Western half of the United States. The railroad companies created multi-page guidebooks with stunning illustrations, photographs, and descriptive text that aimed to convince travelers to choose their companies to assist with and host their next vacations. The guidebooks stressed that traveling by rail could provide luxury and comfort, as well as a ticket to adventure, in the middle of an untamed wilderness. In essence, as Peter Blodgett writes, guidebooks “conjured up the most attractive visions possible to catch the potential traveler’s eye.” As a result, railroad companies effectively created an idealized and romantic image of the West for tourists that had a lasting effect on the area and the nation as a whole.
Railroad guidebooks were largely made to be ephemeral. They were a mass media product that Carolyn Kitch notes were “easily and cheaply available to the public, who could pick them up in train stations and hotels or receive them by mail order.” They were developed to help inspire people to travel by rail. While they were relatively comprehensive, the guidebooks were likely used as aids by individuals to inspire and develop itineraries given their wealth of information on attractions and amenities as opposed to a resource for someone to turn to during a vacation.
Figure 2. Western Wonderlands. Union Pacific Railroad, 1931. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107104.
Railroad companies produced these guidebooks as a means to increase ridership in a time when companies desperately needed more individuals traveling by rail. According to Blodgett, the railroad industry was hit hard when leisure travel declined during World War I and the industry was under federal control. They struggled again with the economic collapse of the 1930s and the rise of personal automobile travel. In order to incentivize travelers and increase ridership, railroad companies spent large amounts of money producing guidebooks to convince individuals to travel West on Pullman cars that could bring them straight to gorgeous landscapes and an endless amount of adventure with the utmost comfort and luxury. The western half of the United States was both a desirable destination for tourists, due in large part to the development of notable national parks, and a lucrative area of business for railroad companies to capitalize on. A vacation by rail, companies promised, was an easy, exciting, and highly enjoyable experience.
The guidebooks produced and printed by railroad companies during the interwar period most often appear in booklet form. The cover is typically made of cardstock or glossy paper. The covers display an image of a location along the route that the guidebook is advertising, as well as the railroad company’s name and/or logo (Figures 1 and 2). The cover images are illustrations, usually printed in color, of landscapes aimed to project a sense of beauty, wonder, and adventure. Most often the booklets present images of mountains and water features, rarely depicting humans in the scenes. The booklets are saddle stick bound with staples and though not necessarily universal in size, are often 23 by 22 centimeters, ranging from around twenty pages to over sixty pages in length. In some cases, guidebooks are also presented in the shape of a brochure where individuals fold out the interior pages as opposed to flipping through the pages of a booklet (Figure 3).
Figure 3. Scenic Colorado and Utah: Burlington Route brochure. Chicago, Burlington and Quincy Railroad, ca. 1930. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 103825.
The content inside the guidebooks varies based on the location and route the specific railroad companies are promoting, but it generally follows a relatively premeditated format. The guidebook starts with a description of the area and then provides details about specific locations, tourist attractions, and amenities available to travelers. Sometimes guidebooks will list pre-established itineraries available for travelers to choose from and enjoy along with the prices associated with each vacation package. Featured heavily amongst the text are photographs and illustrations of the incredible and awe-inspiring scenery individuals could explore as well as images of people enjoying the various attractions accessible along the route (Figure 4). These photographs are most often printed in black and white though “natural color photographs” do appear in some guidebooks. Maps are also always included in the guidebooks to provide a visual representation of the proposed route, its stops, and their proximity to key sights and attractions (Figure 5). At the end of all of the guidebooks is a section providing the contact information for the railroad companies’ travel agents, who individuals could contact to book a trip via rail or request more travel guidebooks (Figure 6). Some guidebooks even include a reservation coupon or application form (Figure 7). These forms and coupons allowed individuals to contact railroad companies directly to inquiry about and book tours. For Union Pacific Railroad Company guidebooks, there is almost always a page towards the end of the booklet that insinuates that the locations described are best reached, with the most ease and comfort, through their services (Figure 8). This page provides a laundry list of the benefits individuals could enjoy while traveling with the company as a way to strengthen their case as tourism brokers and the case for leisure railroad travel in general.
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Figure 4. Interior spread of Astonishing Yellowstone. Northern Pacific Railway, 1938. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 113105.
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Figure 5. Map of routes and tourist attractions in Colorado Mountain Playgrounds. Union Pacific Railroad, 1925. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107102.
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Figure 6. List of travel agents in Colorado Mountain Playgrounds. Union Pacific Railroad, 1925. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107102.
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Figure 7. Reservation coupon in Western Wonderlands. Union Pacific Railroad, 1931. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107104.
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Figure 8. Advertisement from Colorado Mountain Playgrounds. Union Pacific Railroad, 1925. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107102.
The guidebooks are easy to read and digest thanks to the use of uncomplicated, classic fonts and single or double column text in paragraph form. Occasionally, guidebooks will have text placed in the page margins to provide testimonials from past passengers or to create signposts indicating an important theme or subject matter for individuals casually flipping through the booklet (Figure 9). Italic text is used throughout many guidebooks to emphasize words and phrases in the text as well as to create headings or image captions. Color ink is rarely used for the text inside the guidebooks and is often reserved only for the cover. The typography found on the guidebook covers differs widely between each booklet. Guidebook titles tend to be fully capitalized and sometimes feature a different font than what is used for the main body of text inside the booklet. As with the printed image on the cover, the title’s font and color are intended to help catch people’s eyes and draw them towards the guidebook.
Figure 9. Feature article on key attractions from Western Wonderlands. Union Pacific Railroad, 1931. Winterthur Library Collection, ZZ 107104.
Existing scholarship on guidebooks created and produced by railroad companies has focused mainly on content, both visual and textual. Multiple scholars have looked at how these guidebooks helped create an appetite for tourism through an accessible visual medium, while one, in particular, has explored how the guidebooks helped to establish and promote national parks. Other scholars have discussed how guidebooks helped railroad companies capitalize on the growing middle class, who had developed economic means and a desire for leisure travel.
Scholars have also explored the work of identifiable painters and writers whose compositions fill booklets. Overall, many scholars suggest that the railroad guidebooks created an idealized image of the American landscape, most notably that of the West, which changed how people understood and socially engaged with their environment, both physically through tourism and conceptually through a sense of nationalism.
Libraries, archives, museums, and historical societies appear to be some of the largest collectors of railroad guidebooks. Tom D. Kilton suggests that these types of institutions possess large amounts of railroad literature and marketing materials because they often became the repository for archives of defunct railroad companies. However, there also appears to be an active community around the world that collects railroadiana, including guidebooks. This is quite apparent on sites like eBay where various railroad guidebooks are currently for sale. There are books published on the topic to help guide individuals interested in collecting railroad artifacts such as Railroad Timetables, Travel Brochures & Posters: A History and Guide for Collectors (1995) by Brad S. Lomazzi and The Collector’s Book of Railroadiana (1976) by Stanley L. Baker and Virginia Brainard Kunz. These books, particularly Lomazzi’s, appear to stress condition and rarity as important factors for collectors to consider when purchasing items.
Diagram of a Railroad Guidebook
Glossary of Terms
Annotated Bibliography
Peter Blodgett begins his article by exploring the role of American railroad companies in the establishment of national parks in the western half of the United States. He then uses much of the article to discusses how various forms of print advertisements, produced and bankrolled by railroad companies themselves during the interwar years, aimed to increase passenger travel and create an idealized and inspirational vision adventure out West. He demonstrates that these forms of advertisements called out the romantic western landscapes and ‘grandeur’ that awaited tourists in the country’s new national parks through stunning photographs, illustrations, and descriptive text. He argues that railroads produced their own tailored vision and identity for the new national parks as a means to increase passenger traffic in an age dominated by personal automobile traffic. As a result, these advertisements largely influenced and dominated how Americans viewed national parks and their meaning to American society in the first half of the twentieth century.
Full Citation: Blodgett, Peter. “Defining Uncle Sam’s Playgrounds: Railroad Advertising and the National Parks, 1917-1941.” Historical Geography 35 (2007): 80-113. https://ejournals.unm.edu/index.php/historicalgeography/article/view/2905.
Landscape in American Guides and View Books: Visual History of Touring and Travel is considered to be one of the first texts to study ephemera connected to the American tourism industry. Herbert Gottfried discusses the role of guidebooks in creating a visual culture for Americans to consume, which in turn, developed and established an appetite for tourism. He analyzes the visual and textual content, particularly the use of landscape imagery and the move towards utilizing photography, to suggest that there was a cultural change in how people understood and socially engaged with their environment.
Tom D. Kilton discusses the role railroad companies played as publishers, booksellers, and librarians in this article, specifically in regards to the publications the companies created for travelers and disseminated to railroad employees over a one-hundred-year period. He explores the evolution and changes in promotional materials, such as travel guidebooks and newspapers, which were created to provide information about train routes as well as literature about specific destinations and amenities available for tourists. He also investigates how railroad companies provided information to their employees through various trade publications and reference texts via libraries on train cars or in brick-and-mortar reading room. In producing and provide such texts, Kilton states that American railroad companies should be considered key contributors to increasing the “spread of reading and learning” in the country.
Full Citation: Kilton, Tom D. “The American Railroad as Publisher, Bookseller, and Librarian.” The Journal of Library History (1974-1987) 17, no. 1 (Winter 1982): 39-64. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/25541236.
In this article, Carolyn Kitch discusses the marking campaign of the Pennsylvania Railroad, which created brochures around the turn of the twentieth century to specifically attract female travelers from the east coast to destinations such as California and the Grand Canyon. Kitch notes that this campaign aimed to convince women that vacations through the Pennsylvania Railroad were safe and desirable, while also indicating that these types of vacations were the luxurious experiences middle class families were craving to bolster their social status. She also investigates the societal shift in the notion of travel and consumption in America, especially for women.
Full Citation: Kitch, Carolyn, " 'A Piazza From Which the View is Constantly Changing:’ The Promise of Class and Gender Mobility on the Pennsylvania Railroad’s Cross-Country Tours.” Pennsylvania History: A Journal of Mid-Atlantic Studies 72, no. 4 (Autumn 2005): 505-527. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/27778705.
Carlos A. Schwantes uses the lives of two prominent railroad publicists, Robert Strahorn and William Bittle Wells, to discuss how railroad companies operating in the Pacific Northwest created publications to market and transform the area. Schwantes argues that the primary purpose of these publications, which were heavily shaped and influenced by Strahorn and Wells, was to show how beautiful and modern the Pacific Northwest was and to convince people to live and vacation there.
Full Citation: Schwantes, Carlos A. “Landscapes of Opportunity: Phases of Railroad Promotion of the Pacific Northwest.” Montana: The Magazine of Western History 43, no. 2 (Spring 1993): 38-51. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/4519573.
Marguerite S. Shaffer discusses the coincided rise of tourism, transportation, and an economically prosperous middle class in See America First: Tourism and National Identity, 1880-1940. She analyzes print media, including guidebooks, to demonstrate how a proliferation of printed media produced by railroad companies, the National Parks Service, and others in the tourism industry helped to promote tourism as an important ritual for Americans. Through such content, Shaffer argues that guidebooks and other media capitalized on the notion that the idealized American landscape presented to travelers outlined and promoted a sense of nationalism and national identity.
The chapter, “Guidebooks: The Liturgy of Travel,” in William W. Stowe’s book, Going Abroad, provides an overview of the history of guidebooks and tourist literature from 1838 to 1900. He focuses on guidebooks published in Europe that were used by American tourists, but he also investigates guidebooks published in America. Stowe analyzes the content of guidebooks to describe the evolution of American tourism over the second half of the nineteenth century. He also uses the guidebooks to suggest that their content provided American travelers with the opportunity to create an identity that allowed them to be seen as important contributors to international affairs and economies.
Full Citation: Stowe, William W. “Guidebooks: The Liturgy of Travel.” In Going Abroad, 29-54. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 2017. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/j.ctt1m3nzrr.7.
Michael E. Zega examines the illustrated advertisements produced by the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway from 1892 to the onset of World War I and their specific use of Native American and Southwest imagery, which in turn, largely shaped society’s perception of the Southwest region. Zega argues that the Atchison, Topeka & Santa Fe Railway was the only company that made Native Americans imagery the explicit focus of their visual content, and ultimately the appeal of the Southwest and travel in the region, whereas other companies focused on scenery and attractions. In doing so, he highlights specific writers and artists who envisioned and prompted this type of imagery to great marking success for the railroad company.
Full Citation: Zega , Michael E. “Advertising the Southwest.” Journal of the Southwest 43, no. 3 (Autumn 2001): 281-315. JSTOR, https://www.jstor.org/stable/40170222.
