As a kid, I wrote to railroads and asked them to send me pictures of their trains. This came from B&O, along with an interior shot of a coach with snack bar, a system map, and other less interesting, more child-oriented stuff.

Note the low-profile Strata-dome car, a dome lounge on the Columbia. Until the 1960s, when the every-other-day Chicago-Florida City of Miami and South Wind began carrying domes from Northern Pacific and Great Northern, B&O was the only railroad in the East to operate dome cars.

Few trains in the East or West carried dome cars in the late 1940s, yet at that time you could cross the country on trains with domes by taking B&O’s Capital Limited or Columbian to Chicago, and from Chicago the Super Chief to LA, California Zephyr to the Bay Area, or Olympian Hiawatha to Seattle.