The front cover (the image below is the back cover) of this 103-year-old timetable advertises “Three Trains Chicago to Denver” and “Two Trains St. Louis to Denver,” most of which can make the journey in “one sleep.” From Chicago, the Denver Special took 28-1/2 hours; the Colorado Special took 31 hours; and the Colorado Express required 33-1/4 hours (taking two nights and a day). From St. Louis (via the Wabash), the Pacific Coast Limited took 30-1/5 hours and the Denver Express took 34 hours (taking two nights and a day).
Click image to download a 28.2-MB PDF of this timetable.
The ad doesn’t say so, but Pacific Coast Limited went on from Denver to Cheyenne and Green River, Wyoming, where it merged with the similarly named Pacific Limited, which went from Chicago to San Francisco and Portland. The ad does say that all of these trains included dining and observation cars except the Pacific Coast Limited, which only had an observation car west of Kansas City.
This timetable lists the Overland Limited as having two sections, one to San Francisco and one to Los Angeles. Both have identical schedules east of Ogden, which means they were probably operated 5 minutes apart, which was considered safe in those days. The equipment listing indicates that the Los Angeles section had a club-observation car while the San Francisco section had separate club and observation cars, all going all the way from or to Chicago, so they were clearly two separate trains.
This ad appeared in the December 8, 1920 issue of the Richmond Times-Dispatch, showing that UP restored the name Los Angeles Limited soon after this timetable was published. Click image for a larger view.
Strangely, the timetable never mentions the Los Angeles Limited, which is listed as trains 7 & 8 in the June 1921 Official Guide. Instead, 7 & 8 on this timetable are listed as the California-Oregon Express, with a section to Los Angeles and a section (called the Oregon Express west of Rock Springs) to Portland. This train didn’t go east of Omaha to serve either Chicago or St. Louis.
In the June 1921 Official Guide, the Los Angeles Limited leads the Overland Limited out of Chicago by 10 minutes and they leave Omaha just five minutes apart. Both the Los Angeles Limited in that timetable and the Los Angeles section of the Overland Limited in this timetable are exclusively first-class with no tourist sleepers or coaches. Apparently, some marketing genius in Omaha tried to cash in on the cache of the name Overland Limited while effectively tossing out whatever cache had been built up around the name Los Angeles Limited. It must not have worked.
Names like “Denver Express” and “Los Angeles Limited” are destination-oriented while names like “Columbine” and “Overland Limited” are truly evocative of the places they are going. Union Pacific apparently was never able to think of a name for its Los Angeles trains that was as evocative as “Golden State Limited” or “Chief.” But borrowing the name from the San Francisco train might have been considered insulting to southern Californians who, for the first time, outnumbered northern Californians in the 1920 census.
The scans for this timetable were generously provided by Streamliner Memories reader Tim Zukas, who has contributed 15 more Union Pacific timetables that I’ll present here in the next couple of weeks. Through no fault of Mr. Zukas, a half page is missing from this timetable. One side of the page is the back cover, which was easy to fix because the back cover had two identical images. The other side was part of the list of Union Pacific agents. This minor flaw is insignificant compared with the other valuable information that is included in the timetable. I am grateful to Mr. Zukas not only for this but also for nearly 200 of his Pennsylvania Railroad timetables posted on Railfan.net.