One of the theses that I am exploring since November 20th is that competition stimulated railroads to develop and improve limited trains. The Golden Gate Special, which was probably the first named train to reach the West Coast, is an example of this. It operated for just five months in the winter of 1888 through the spring of 1889, but it is probably no coincidence that Union Pacific and Southern Pacific started it right after Santa Fe rails reached both Los Angeles and the San Francisco Bay Area.
Click image to download a 5.2-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.
The train ran just once a week between Omaha and Oakland using a single consist of a baggage car, a diner, two sleepers, and a sleeper-observation. The sleepers had 12 sections and a drawing room for a total of 27 beds each, while the observation car had 6 sections or 12 beds, meaning the entire train had room for just 66 passengers.
Lucius Beebe described the Golden Gate Special in his book, The Overland Limited, as a predecessor to the latter train. He probably got much of his information about this train from this booklet, which was scanned by archive.org from a copy in the UC Berkeley Library. Unfortunately, when the library bound it for shelving, it didn’t use acid-free paper. It did put a relatively acid-free nameplate on the inside front cover facing the front of the booklet, with the result that the front cover is badly darkened except where it was touching the nameplate. I’ve cleaned this and several other pages of the document for posting here.
The Golden Gate Special wasn’t the first all-Pullman train to reach the West Coast. The booklet notes that Union Pacific began operating a weekly all-Pullman train from Council Bluffs to Oakland almost as soon as the First Transcontinental Railroad was linked up in 1869. The story goes that this train didn’t last long because it was so heavy that it damaged the tracks, which the booklet calls “an absurd fallacy.” In fact, said the booklet without any hint of tongue in cheek, the problem wasn’t that the train was too heavy but that the tracks were too light, something that had been rectified by 1888 through the use of 70-pound rail.
Although not the first all-Pullman train to Oakland, the Golden Gate Special may have been the first named train to the West Coast. In 1887, Union Pacific named a train the Overland Flyer, but Southern Pacific did not use that name so the Flyer did not reach the West Coast.
Regardless, the Golden Gate Special was the first to the West Coast with electric lights, vestibules between cars, a library with more than 200 books, a barber, a ladies maid, and a bathtub, features that would all become standard on the Overland Limited. Though that train began operating in 1895, it initially used that name only over the Union Pacific and C&NW portions of the route. It wasn’t until 1899 that Southern Pacific agreed to operate a through train by that name to Oakland. Perhaps if SP had more competition on the Ogden-Oakland corridor it would have been more enthused about a limited train.