Yesterday, I noted that the 1948 Santa Fe timetable eliminated 12 pages of condensed schedules that had been in earlier editions. In their place, Santa Fe published this “traveler’s edition” that consisted of individual timetables for each of 23 different trains. These included all the big-name trains as well as shorter routes such as Kansas City-Denver and Clovis-Carlsbad.
Click image to download a 9.6-MB PDF of this 28-page timetable.
Some of the pages show routes, not trains. The most complicated may be the New Orleans-California route, which has through Pullman cars operating on six different trains (one of which was a Missouri Pacific train between New Orleans and Houston) in each direction. In 1949, Southern Pacific’s Sunset Limited was still a heavyweight train that took 48 hours westbound and 49-1/4 hours eastbound between New Orleans and Los Angeles. The Santa Fe-Missouri Pacific alternative required an uncompetitive 60 to 61 hours each way.
According to yesterday’s 1948 timetable, this hodge-podge of a route was named the California Special westbound and the Texan eastbound, which was strange because many of the individual trains had their own names. Also, the 1948 edition did not indicate any through cars between Missouri Pacific and Santa Fe. Today’s 1949 timetable does not name the trains, but it does show a Pullman leaving New Orleans going through to California, although it went to Oakland rather than Los Angeles.