FORTY YEARS AGO.

A new Amtrak timetable took effect in mid-November 1971.  Although Amtrak might have been conceived to execute the mission of winding down some of the passenger trains in order to wind all of them down, commencing with that timetable the carrier began the reassignment throughout the country of the stock it had bought, to the distress of coach-yard superintendents and mechanical departments, but to the delight of the photographers who later referred to this time as the rainbow era.  There might be opportunity to post some slides from the early days of that rainbow era, taken in Milwaukee, which for a short time had two daily passenger trains to St. Louis (via Chicago), and two daily passenger trains to the Twin Cities, on approximately the schedules if not the timings of the old Hiawathas, with through service to the Pacific Northwest.  Clunky equipment, with some imagination in the scheduling, and lots of dome cars and parlor cars.  After a quarter-century of retrenchment, it was heady stuff.