The economy was recovering from the Great Depression, so Santa Fe increased the size of its system timetables from 48 pages in 1936 to 64 pages in 1937. Much of the added space is devoted to ads.
Click image to download a 44.8-MB PDF of this 64-page timetable.
Pages 6 and 8 include a page-and-a-half of ads for Santa Fe-Fred Harvey meal service; yesterday’s 1936 timetable only had a half page. The other half of page 8 shows the profile of Santa Fe routes over the mountains.
Page 10 is a full-page add for the Scout, which unlike in 1936 now had a dining car. This allowed the Santa Fe to reduce the time required to go from Chicago to Los Angeles from just under 61 hours in 1936 to just over 48 hours in 1937.
The back cover advertises that fares for side trips to the Grand Canyon had been reduced to $7 ($140 in today’s dollar) for Pullman passengers, $5 ($100 today) for tourist car passengers, and $3 ($60 today) for coach passengers. This would have covered transportation from Williams to the Grand Canyon; meals and lodging would have been extra.
These ads account for only part of the 16 pages added to the timetable. The 1937 timetable follows the same format as 1936 in that the first several pages show abbreviated timetables for major trains, followed by maps, then detailed timetables. However, in the first part of 1936 many trains were shown two to a page, such as the Super Chief and Chief, while in 1937 each transcontinental train gets its own page. The 1937 timetable also adds six pages of maps to the two pages found in the 1936 timetable.