The Golden State Limited was still an all-Pullman train when this timetable was issued, a status it would soon lose due to the Depression. In 1932, Southern Pacific would add a chair car between Los Angeles and Phoenix. By 1934, coaches went all the way between Chicago and Los Angeles.

Click image to download a 29.6-MB PDF of this 40-page timetable.

SP-RI continued to operate a secondary train, the Apache, between Chicago and Los Angeles through the 1930s. A third train, the Californian, had disappeared from Chicago but continued to operate (in name only) as the Memphis-Californian from Memphis to Tucumcari, where it connected with the Apache.

This timetable also promotes “the Colorado way to California,” which consisted of a through sleeping car via Rock Island’s Colorado Express to Colorado Springs, Rio Grande’s Scenic Limited to Ogden, and Southern Pacific’s Overland Limited to Oakland. Rock Island’s premiere Colorado train, the Rocky Mountain Limited, connected with the Rio Grande and Western Pacific westbound but not the Western Pacific eastbound and had no through cars to California.

A full-page ad on the front cover (as the above cover is on the back) announces trains to Excelsior Springs, Missouri, where people could receive treatments from a “famous sanitarium” at “America’s haven of health.” Quack treatments associated with hot springs were at one time so popular that America’s first national park was not Yellowstone, as often stated, but Hot Springs, Arkansas, which Congress designated a federal “reservation” in 1832 and which was officially proclaimed a national park in 1921.

The back cover (shown above) of this timetable has a 1910-vintage map showing Rock Island lines as the apparent center of the world. The centerfold map, meanwhile, indicates that even though this was in the Depression, Rock Island had ambitions to build another rail line, this one from a town named Jacksboro north of Fort Worth through Wichita Falls to Shamrock, Texas, on its Memphis-California line.

As it would turn out, the only major line on this map that got built in the 1930s was the Dotsero cutoff allowing the Rio Grande to run trains from Denverthrough the Moffat Tunnel to Grand Junction and Salt Lake City. This would not bode well for the Rock Island, as it would give the Burlington an advantage in the competition for traffic on the “Colorado way to California.”