We’ve seen the Rock Island’s booklet about the Golden State. Here is Southern Pacific’s brochure about the same train. Perhaps it is a brochure rather than a 16-page booklet because SP was less enthusiastic about running the train.
Click image to download a 3.4-MB PDF of this brochure.
Although Rock Island’s booklet was issued in 1953, five years after the train was introduced, it was filled with illustrations, not photos, of interiors of the train. This SP brochure at least has an excuse, as it was issued in 1948, but its interior portraits include two color photos as well as two color illustrations.
The interior of the dining car El Comador (Spanish for dining room) as illustrated in the Southern Pacific brochure. Click image for a larger view.
The problem with depicting interiors on the Golden State was that the train required five train sets and, unlike trains like the Empire Builder that were all ordered at once, SP/Rock Island ordered them at separate times and no more than two of the five were alike. The El Comador, shown above, was ordered for the Golden State Rocket, a train that never ran, and was probably very different from the diners used on the other four trains.
The interior of La Mirada, the observation car depicted in Rock Island’s booklet about the train. Click image for a larger view.
The same is true for the illustration (obviously by a different artist) of the interior of the observation car shown in the Rock Island’s Golden State booklet. This car, La Mirada, had extra tall windows in the lounge end. Two of the train sets had observation cars with standard-sized windows and the other two didn’t have observation cars at all, instead providing a mid-train lounge for Pullman passengers.
The interior of the Fiesta lounge car as illustrated in the Southern Pacific brochure. Click image for a larger view.
The Golden State Rocket also had a mid-train coffee shop car called El Cafe. I suspect this is the car described (and shown here in a black-and-white photo) as the Fiesta Car in Southern Pacific’s brochure, which means the other four coffee shop cars were probably plainer. The other interior pictures in the brochure show generic coaches and sleeping rooms that could be from just about any Southern Pacific streamlined train.
