The red background cover on earlier timetables has been replaced by orange, also known as Grande Gold, to match the color of Rio Grande’s passenger locomotives and some of its passenger cars. This timetable cover also uses a new photo of the Royal Gorge with locomotives in this color scheme. However, the photo of the California Zephyr continues to show Alco locomotives in orange and grey, perhaps the shortest-lived color scheme ever used by the Rio Grande.
Click image to download an 12.1-MB PDF of this timetable.
Sadly, the 1950s saw the disappearance of several trains from the Rio Grande timetable. By 1959, the route from Denver to Craig had just one train a day instead of two. The trains from Denver to Alamosa and Alamosa to Durango are completely gone. The train from Durango to Silverton remains, and its one-hour layover in Silverton has been extended to two hours to allow tourists to spend more of their dollars in that mountain town.