Having lost the speed race when UP and Santa Fe reduced the times of their premiere Chicago-Los Angeles trains to 39-3/4 hours, Southern Pacific/Rock Island’s Golden State was a distinctly third-rate train in the 1950s. So this six-panel welcome-aboard brochure from 1954 was a bit thinner than the eight-panel brochures handed out to passengers on the Santa Fe Chief and comparable trains in the 1960s.
Click image to download a 800-KB PDF of this brochure.
One panel of this brochure describes the amenities found aboard and available to coach passengers, including reclining seats and lounge cars. The Santa Fe brochures devote three panels to this, including photos showing how to use headrests, leg rests, and other features. Two panels of this brochure briefly describe 34 points along the way from Chicago to Los Angeles; three panels of the Santa Fe brochures describe 39 points along the way. The Santa Fe brochures also include the train’s eastbound and westbound timetables, something that is absent from the Golden State brochure.
This brochure advises coach passengers that they can relax in the lounge section of the coffee-shop lounge car and eat meals in the coffee shop section. “If you prefer to eat in the diner, it is situated further to the rear of the train,” it added. The Chief brochure invited coach passengers to relax in the Big Dome lounge car and eat in the dining car, both of which were in the center of the train. Apparently, as of 1963 (when my version of the Chief‘s welcome-aboard brochure was issued), the Chief did not have a coffee-shop car. But Santa Fe’s 1954 timetable lists both a full diner and a “lunch-counter car” on the Chief in that year.
The Golden State suffered by comparison with the Chief and the COLA, but it’s hardly fair to call it 3rd rate. In 1954 SP had not quite given up on passengers, and standards on the primary trains on all routes were maintained.
In 1954 Santa Fe added coaches to the Chief, which had previously been an all Pullman operation. The tradeoff was that the Big Dome lounge was added and the schedule reduced to 39-1/2 hours, allowing one-night service westbound (depart Chicago 9 AM, arrive Los Angeles 10:30 PM the next day). On most other railroads Nos. 19 & 20 would have been the flagship
I have an orange-colored version of this apparently from 1961 (it says “50M — 7.61” in the spot yours says “4-25-54”).
It’s nearly the same – same graphics and photos and a large bulk of the text (some stops are different). But interesting mine has a “If you smoke…” paragraph basically encouraging smokers to be considerate (“…smoking in chair cars has been the source of complaints.”). I wonder what pushed them over the edge to include that.