The Santa Fe called the Phoenix area the Valley of the Sun in this 1950 booklet. Rock Island responded with this Kingdom of the Sun booklet in 1953, though Rock Island’s term extended to the entire Southwest region from El Paso to southern California.

Click image to download an 10.4-MB PDF of this 24-page booklet.

In the 1950s, trains on the Golden State route were not up to the standards of the City of Los Angeles or the Super Chief. The one advantage the Golden State route had was that it served Phoenix, while Santa Fe passengers had to change trains to get to Phoenix and Union Pacific didn’t come close. So it is a little bit of a surprise that this booklet doesn’t focus on Phoenix, but perhaps Rock Island had another brochure for that.

The westbound Golden State arrived in Phoenix at 11:30 pm while its secondary counterpart, the Imperial, arrived at 11:05 am. Eastbound, the Golden State arrived at 10:08 pm while the Imperial arrived at 10:50 am. Both trains had coaches, sleepers, a diner, and a lounge car, and the Golden State also had a coffee shop-lounge for coach passengers. For what it’s worth, Southern Pacific also offered a coach-only train between Los Angeles and Tucumcari that stopped in Phoenix at 5 pm westbound and 7:15 am eastbound.

Santa Fe in 1953 had five trains a day stop in Ash Fork, where its branch to Phoenix began. Just about any of these trains were equal to the Golden State (except the El Capitan and only because it didn’t have sleeping cars). The Super Chief wasn’t one of those trains as it zipped through Ash Fork without stopping. However, Santa Fe only ran one train a day between Ash Fork and Phoenix and it left Ash Fork at 2 am and returned at 11:30 pm. The only through car to Phoenix went from Los Angeles on the California Limited, so Phoenix-bound passengers from the east would be most likely to take the Golden State to save themselves the trouble of changing trains in the middle of the night.