I recently purchased several dozen timetables from various railroads despite the dealer warning that all were damaged in some way. In fact, most were in pretty condition, but this is an exception. It looks like it was completely soaked with water at one time or another. Still, it is perfectly readable.
Click image to download a 28.5-MB PDF of this 44-page timetable.
The back cover advertises the reintroduction of the Challenger between Chicago and Los Angeles. Originally introduced as an economy heavyweight train in 1936, the train had been discontinued in 1947 when the City of Los Angeles and other streamliners went daily. As other heavyweight trains such as the Los Angeles Limited were discontinued, UP and C&NW needed a companion to the City of Los Angeles, so the streamlined Challenger was inaugurated on January 10, 1954.
This timetable shows that the 1954 Challenger wasn’t an all-coach train like the El Capitan an neither was the City of Los Angeles and all-Pullman train like the Super Chief. Instead, the two trains had complementary schedules, with the Challenger leaving Chicago at 9:00 am, 10-1/4 hours before the City, which left at 7:15 pm. Both trains were scheduled to take less than 40 hours to Los Angeles.
The timetable show two other trains scheduled between Chicago and Los Angeles, the most important of which was the heavyweight Gold Coast, which also had cars going to Oakland and Portland and which took close to 60 hours to get between Chicago and the West Coast. The timetable also shows an unnamed train numbered 13-11-9 westbound and 10-28 eastbound, but a close examination reveals that this was really multiple trains (as indicated by the numbers) requiring both coach and Pullman passengers to change in Ogden and possibly Omaha.
Also on January 10, the ad notes, a new City of Denver entered service to replace the old M-10005 and M-10006. The introduction of new equipment drew passengers away from the Denver Zephyr, which persuaded the Burlington to buy a new vista-dome Denver Zephyr, the last complete U.S. intercity passenger train purchased in the pre-Amtrak era.
Although Union Pacific ran perfectly respectable trains, the Challenger was certainly not in the same class as the Chief, which ran on roughly the same schedule westbound. Depending on the year, the eastbound Chief sometimes had a late evening Los Angeles departure, while at other times it left at around noon, which became the norm once the Super Chief and El Capitan were combined.
CNW would no longer host the western cities streamliners after October of 1955. UP had complaints about CNW’s poor track maintenance and resulting rough ride, and CNW had run up a car utilization deficit of over $1,000,000 which it could not pay back. So even though Milwaukee missed some of the larger population centers between Chicago and Omaha, UP felt it had to make a switch.
The only other potential partners were Rock Island and Burlington. In the case of the former, it was SP’s partner in the Chicago to Los Angeles market and Burlington’s owners (GN and NP) were probably uninterested in running its competition’s passenger trains.