THERE'S A PROTOTYPE FOR EVERYTHING.

The Center for Railroad Photography and Art has its own "Fifty Years of Amtrak" photo gallery.  It does not include the following Ronald C. Hill photograph, indexed as Hill-11-04-19, which your Superintendent scanned from the latest issue of Railroad Heritage.

That's a Burlington Northern passenger F unit, still in Great Northern paint, leading a pair of recently delivered SDP40F diesels that could be sold off for freight service once Amtrak failed, on an eastbound Empire Builder in Montana.  By the summer of 1973, although some coaching stock had been repainted into Amtrak colors, that train still has the Burlington Northern look about it, which anticipated Amtrak's "Rainbow Era."  I prefer to think of the Rainbow Era as beginning when the coaching stock Amtrak purchased started making its way around the country.  Burlington Northern, by contrast, was only repainting cars that came in for maintenance in the year leading up to Amtrak.