The Californian was the local counterpart to the Golden State Limited on the Rock Island-Southern Pacific route between Chicago and Los Angeles. It began operating in 1910, was cancelled in 1930 due to the Depression, then was revived in 1937 to compete with the Challenger and El Capitan. Like the Challenger, it had both coaches and tourist sleepers.
Click image to download a 5.9-MB PDF of this brochure.
I thought this issue of West would have new content, but it turns out be an almost word-for-word and picture-for-picture duplicate, albeit in a larger format, of a 1940 brochure. Both admit that “Southern Pacific’s twin economy trains to California — the Californian (Chicago-Los Angeles) and San Francisco Challenger (Chicago-San Francisco)” are “more popular than the streamliners and the limiteds,” mainly because they cost less.
One slight difference between the two brochures is the caption to a photo of a new, stainless-steel fluted chair car. The smaller brochure says the photo was taken in Oklahoma, while this one says it was taken “near Tucson.” The exact same photo was used in an issue of West that was about the Beaver, SP’s economy train between Portland and Oakland. It seems more likely the photo was taken in Oakland or Sacramento, as a photographer riding the train wouldn’t have had time to get off and take a picture at one of the tiny towns where the train briefly stopped in Oklahoma or “near Tucson.”
Elsewhere, I suggested that the car was painted Pullman green to match the heavyweight equipment that was used in these trains. This and other cars in the series were built by Pullman and there are some Otto Perry photos of these cars that, though black-and-white, are described as being in “Challenger green.” I wonder why SP paid for the flutes if they were going to be painted and what the railroad thought when it had to remove the flutes because of corrosion behind them.