Vintage Western Pacific Railroad Stock Certificate 🚂 from the 1940s-50s

Remember the Western Pacific Railroad? 🚂 Three Certificates, One Storied Railroad

Size: 12" x 8" ~ little to no wear. They vary a little one to the next.

You get three different stock certificates from The Western Pacific Railroad Company, each one engraved by the Security Banknote Company with the same striking central image: a diesel streamliner locomotive framed in an oval, flanked by two classical allegorical figures. One is Preferred Stock, Series A (par value $100 a share), printed in rose-red. The other two are Common Stock with no par value, one in blue marked for under 100 shares and one in brown marked for a full 100 shares. Preferred shares stood first in line for dividends ahead of the common, so having both classes side by side is a nice way to see how the company was put together. Every sheet carries the company seal, facsimile signatures of the officers, a punch-hole cancellation, and the printed note that it's transferable in the City of New York or the City of San Francisco. The registrar, City Bank Farmers Trust Company, and the countersigning bank, Central Hanover Bank and Trust Company, are both named right on the sheet.

🗓️ What the Sheets Tell You About Their Age

The only year printed on the face of these is on the seal: incorporated in California, June 3, 1916. But the names around it do the dating for you. Central Hanover Bank and Trust was formed in May 1929 and merged into Manufacturers Hanover in September 1961. City Bank Farmers Trust was the trust arm National City Bank set up in 1929, and it was folded into First National City Bank in 1963. The Security Banknote Company of Philadelphia merged with the Columbian Bank Note Company in 1957 and printed as Security-Columbian after that. Then there's the diesel streamliner in the vignette. Western Pacific was one of the first buyers of General Motors' FT road diesels in the early 1940s, and it became the first large western railroad to retire steam completely. Look close at the diesel in the vignette and you can read 901 on its nose. Number 901 was the very first set of FT diesels Western Pacific owned, delivered at the end of 1941. Put that together and these sheets belong to the 1940s and 1950s, the railroad's streamliner years.

⛰️ The Feather River Route

The Western Pacific was built to give Oakland and San Francisco a second line east to Salt Lake City, in competition with the Southern Pacific's Overland Route. The name wasn't new, though. An earlier Western Pacific, started in 1862, built the Sacramento-to-Oakland end of the first transcontinental railroad and was swallowed up by the Central Pacific in 1870. The one on these sheets is a different company that came along later under the same name. It got its start in 1903 as a way to break the near-monopoly the Southern Pacific had on rail service into northern California, and the two roads fought over the traffic between Oakland and Salt Lake City for nearly 80 years. Its secret was grade. Instead of climbing over Donner Pass, it followed the Feather River Canyon to Beckwourth Pass, the lowest pass through the Sierra Nevada, for a ruling grade of 1 percent, half as steep as the Southern Pacific's. The line needed 41 steel bridges and 44 tunnels to do it. The last spike went in on November 1, 1909, at Keddie, California, home of the Keddie Wye, a three-legged bridge junction over a canyon that railfans still come to see. The original Western Pacific Railway went broke paying for all that. The company whose name is on these certificates is its 1916 reorganization, and it went through bankruptcy again in the Depression, filing in August 1935 and coming out of receivership on December 29, 1944. That second reorganization is where these sheets come from. The old stockholders were wiped out, and the plan created two new stocks, a 5% Preferred Series A at $100 par and a Common with no par value, the very two classes printed on these. Nearly all of the new preferred, and most of the new common, went to the folks holding the railroad's old first mortgage bonds, and the rest went to its other creditors, the federal Reconstruction Finance Corporation among them. In other words, the people Western Pacific owed money got paid in the railroad itself. Flip the preferred over and its terms are spelled out in fine print on the back, right down to the Crocker First National Bank of San Francisco and the Chase National Bank of the City of New York as trustees for the railroad's mortgage bonds.

🌄 The California Zephyr

This is the part people remember. On March 20, 1949, Western Pacific, the Denver & Rio Grande Western and the Chicago, Burlington & Quincy launched the California Zephyr between Chicago and Oakland. It was the first long-distance train to carry dome cars in regular service, five Vista-Domes to a train, and it was scheduled to run the most spectacular scenery on the route in daylight. It took the place of the Exposition Flyer, which the same three railroads started running between Chicago and Oakland on June 10, 1939, to carry folks out to the Golden Gate International Exposition on Treasure Island. That one was only meant to be temporary, and it ran ten years. Western Pacific's own Zephyrette ran alongside the Zephyr between Oakland and Salt Lake City from 1950 to 1960. Over the years Western Pacific and the Rio Grande also ran the Scenic Limited and the Royal Gorge, linking Oakland with Denver by way of Pueblo. Hank Williams even wrote a song called "California Zephyr" and sang it on his radio show in early 1950, and MGM put it out as a single in 1956, a few years after he was gone. The train's last westbound run left Chicago on March 22, 1970. You can still see its last surviving dining car, and Western Pacific 805-A, the last of the railroad's passenger diesels, at the Western Pacific Railroad Museum in Portola, right up in the Feather River country.

🔚 Where It Ended Up

Western Pacific kept its own name until Union Pacific bought it. The purchase became official on December 22, 1982, and the line was folded into the Union Pacific system along with the Missouri Pacific. Union Pacific still runs a Western Pacific heritage locomotive, WP 1983, painted in the old colors. So these three certificates are the paper side of a railroad that's still out there in spirit, every time a train climbs the Feather River Canyon.