Similar is not the Same.

The picture on the post card below is very similar to about 15 other post cards in my collection.

There is a train headed across the trestle that makes up the Lucin Cut-off. There is a beautiful sunrise in the east and a bit of a mountain top just poking its head over the Great Salt Lake.

This particular train looks like it is passing another train at Mid-point Station. As they constructed the trestle, they built little towns right on the trestle as a place for the crews to live. When the construction was finished they left one of the "towns" in place, double tracked the section and added signals. They called it the Mid-point Station and the train would stop so that the passengers could get out and see the sights. This particular train is on its way with three people on the observation platform of the final car. I have several post cards in my collection with this picture on the front.

I am still blogging about the group of post cards that came in while I was focused on Pikes Peak several sets of postings ago. I received this one a couple of weeks ago.

I chose this set of cards to blog about because the are similar but NOT EXACTLY like the other 15 post cards with the same picture on the front, so it is a new one in my collection. The picture is exactly the same, in fact the quality of this picture is better than the others. But what makes it different is the title.

I have scanned three of the other post cards with the same picture AND the same beginning to the same title. However, you can see that there is a slight variance among the titles. So, in my collection this constitutes a new post card. You can see that the top post card is written with a script font; the middle one is all caps and doesn't spell out Southern Pacific; the bottom one is all caps and does spell out Southern Pacific.

You can see from the scan of the back of the post card that it spent some time in a collection using the little triangles to hold it in place. The back of this card tells us that it, like the post card from last week is an Edward H. Mitchell production. In fact, all three post cards are from Edward H. Mitchell of San Francisco. They were just different print runs. All three of them are also from the Divided Back Era (1907 - 1915).