Santa Fe 1949 Traveler’s Timetable

We’ve seen timetables like this one from the early 1960s. This one from 1949 came with the other materials saved by one of the Detroit knights attending the San Francisco mason’s convention.

Click image to download a 8.8-MB PDF of this 28-page timetable.

I would call this a condensed timetable, but Santa Fe calls it a “traveler’s edition.” It is certainly more conveniently arranged than most public timetables. Most pages have just one train so you can turn to the page for the train you are on and watch the towns go by. All schedules are read from top to bottom; there is no “read down for westbound; read up for eastbound.”

A few of the schedules are not for individual trains but for through Pullmans routed on several trains. Page 14 shows New Orleans to Los Angeles while page 15 shows Los Angeles to New Orleans; either one required six different trains but apparently had through Pullmans. The combined route was about 145 miles longer than Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited and, if I have calculated correctly, took about three hours more.

This 1949 edition is mostly schedules, plus a two-page map, a page listing Santa Fe agents, and two pages listing the equipment used on each train. Later editions were longer as they also included railroad and Pullman fares.


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