Back in the late 1980's, Santa Fe's employee timetables became rather thick as regional timetables were adopted instead of the previous division timetables. This was prior to going to a system employee timetable. My old boss, Chief Dispatcher Dan R. Munday, had a bunch of the regional timetables spiral bound as an experiment. It was as simple as pulling off the cover, which left a pile of pages. The spine was then cut off the cover, leaving a front and back cover. Then holes were drilled/cut into the pile of pages and covers. Finally a plastic spiral binding was applied by a copy shop, such as can be accomplished by FedEx Kinkos.

For your stapled Altamont Press timetables removing the staples, then cutting right down the spine, through all the pages and cover, will make the timetable ready for spiral binding. It might require a small amount of edge trimming with a paper cutter, but will look just fine.

As a historical note, with the booklet style Santa Fe Valley Division employee timetables, Dan Munday and others experimented with reducing the timetables on a copy machine to a pocket size, which ended up being a little less than half of actual size of the published timetable. It worked well, although it made some of the type really small. It was fine for people who could look at it in normal light. But train and engine crews would have found it difficult to read in low light, or on moving trains. Kind of like the UP system timetables of the era, where the type was reduced just to get it all under one cover. Although those system timetables were certainly nice to have the whole railroad in one cover, especially for those of us outside the UP looking in.

Rob Carlson, and of late, David Curlee, have certainly provided us all with an excellent product though the Altamont Press timetables. So sorry to see it end.

Glen Icanberry
Redlands, CA