What a difference a few years makes! Since yesterday’s 1931 timetable, whose cover was a throw-back from 1910, the Rock Island had entered the streamlined era, leading to a complete makeover of the railroad and its advertising. The orange cover (perhaps a reference to the Golden State) on yesterday’s timetable has been replaced by a bright red cover (on the back of course). This change was made with the introduction of Rock Island’s fleet of streamlined rockets in September 1937.

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The front cover still advertises the “de luxe” Golden State Limited as well as the “luxury-economy” Californian, the latter being the newish name (not really new as it was used in the 1920s) for the Apache since a few month earlier in 1938. The Golden State is no longer the real news at Rock Island, however, as it still takes more than 60 hours to get from Chicago to Los Angeles while both UP and Santa Fe are running trains over the same route in less than 40 hours.

In 1938, however, the truly exciting Rock Island trains were the streamlined rockets. Like most of the zephyrs, these were day trains that used articulated train sets but, unlike the zephyrs, were pulled by independent locomotives. As of this timetable, there were the twice-daily Peoria Rocket, the Des Moines Rocket, the Kansas City Rocket (which went to Minneapolis), the Texas Rocket from Fort Worth to Houston, and the plain old Rocket from Kansas City to Fort Worth and Dallas.

The overnight Chicago-Denver Rocky Mountain Rocket would appear in about a year, making its inaugural run on November 12, 1939. It would be slower to Denver than either the Denver Zephyr or City of Denver but still competitive to Colorado Springs.