Here’s a full, “ticket agent edition” timetable issued a few months after yesterday’s, so the schedules are pretty much the same. The ad on the back cover indicates that Santa Fe was finally offering dining car service for the full length of all of its long-distance trains. The last Santa Fe train that required passengers to eat at dining stations — and perhaps the last train in the country to do so — was the California Limited, which (as noted yesterday) made its last run in June 1954.
Click image to download a 34.0-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.
As the back cover of the 1951 timetable indicated, the California Limited had a dining car as far west as La Junta. West of La Junta, the timetable notes, “meals are served at dining stations.” West of La Junta, these stations included Albuquerque, Winslow, Williams, and Los Angeles.
Westbound passengers would have from 7:30 am to 8:30 am to eat breakfast at Albuquerque. The train had a 10-minute stop in Winslow at 2:50 pm, which doesn’t sound like enough time to do more than buy a pre-prepared sandwich. But it stopped for 45 minutes in Williams from 5:30 to 6:15 pm, allowing for a quick dinner. It arrived in Los Angeles at 7 am so hungry passengers could eat at Fred Harvey’s restaurant there.
Eastbound, the train left Los Angeles at 6:15 pm, so passengers probably got an early dinner before departure. The train didn’t stop long enough for breakfast in Williams but it had a 45-minute stop at 12:30 pm in Winslow for lunch. In Albuquerque the train allowed for a comfortable hour and a quarter for dinner between 6:45 and 8:00 pm.
This was quite a come-down for a train that was once Santa Fe’s finest and that had a diner for the entire distance from Chicago to Los Angeles at least as late as 1949. When Santa Fe purchased its first dining car, it was sued by Fred Harvey, which claimed it had a contractural monopoly on food service for Santa Fe trains. The compromise was that Fred Harvey was allowed to operate Santa Fe dining cars. But I wonder if Santa Fe dropped the La Junta-Los Angeles portion of the California Limited‘s diners to placate Fred Harvey by giving it some customers for its far western restaurants.