Rio Grande operated five main trains a day plus several locals in 1952. The main trains were the California Zephyr; the streamlined Prospector, which was the overnight train on the same route as the Zephyr; the partially streamlined, dome-equipped Royal Gorge; the Pueblo-Denver portion of the Colorado Eagle; and the Mountaineer, an overnight heavyweight train between Denver and Montrose that followed the same route to Grand Junction as the Zephyr and Prospector but stopped at more than 30 towns that the other two trains skipped.

Click image to download an 11.1-MB PDF of this 20-page timetable.

Local trains included one between Denver and Craig. This was really the Mountaineer to Orestod, where a sleeping car and coach were detached and (after a three-hour layover) hauled to Steamboat Springs and Craig. This had been a daytime service until 1952.

Two other locals are shown on page 10: Denver to Alamosa and Durango to Silverton, which Rio Grande operated as a tourist line. Not shown on page 10 with the other local trains is a service to Leadville, which was five miles off of the Royal Gorge route. The timetable doesn’t say what equipment was used on that five-mile segment, only that passengers had the option of using rail tickets on a Continental Trailways bus. I suspect that some sort of rail car was used to Leadville.