I previously wrote that reducing SP’s system timetable from 16 to 6 pages was the “penultimate indignity.” The final indignity came in 1968, when it was reduced to just four pages. This was made possible by the discontinuance of the Golden State, which had required a full page in previous timetables. The Lark was also discontinued, but it didn’t use as much space since it was on the same page as the Coast Daylight.
Click image to download a 1.4-MB PDF of this 4-panel timetable.
The resulting timetable has one page for the Sunset route, while the Overland, Shasta, and Coast routes get about two-thirds of a page each, and the San Joaquin continues to have half a page. There had been enough white space in the six-page versions that all of this was possible with very little compression. All of these routes had just one train a day except for the Coast route, which had a second train, the Del Monte, between San Francisco and Salinas.
Actually the Del Monte ran to Pacific Grove, not Salinas. SP tried to discontinue the Del Monte at least once, but resistance from the well-to-do patrons who lived on the Monterey Peninsula put the kibosh on that.
Bob Jochner didn’t have an easy job. He had to do what his bosses Russell and Biaggini told him to, but it was his name of the front of the timetable, so in the public’s mind he was the grinch that was taking away the trains.