Colorado & Southern 1946 Timetable

The Colorado & Southern traces its history to several Colorado railroads connecting mining communities such as Georgetown, Leadville, and Cripple Creek with Denver and Colorado Springs. Other lines went to Pueblo and Cheyenne, Wyoming. The Union Pacific bought controlling interest in these lines in the late 1880s. In 1888, a railroad called the Denver, Texas and Fort Worth built from Pueblo, Colorado to the Texas border, where it met the Fort Worth and Denver, which was a separate company due to a Texas law requiring all Texas railroads to be incorporated and headquartered in Texas.


Click image to download a 9.4-MB PDF of this 12-page timetable.

In 1890, UP merged these railroads (except the Ft. Worth & Denver) into the Union Pacific, Denver and Gulf Railway. But UP lost control of them when it went bankrupt after the Panic of 1893. A man named Frank Trumbull became receiver of UP’s Colorado subsidiaries, and in 1899 he merged them together to form the Colorado and Southern (keeping the FW&D independent, of course).

In 1908, the Burlington bought the Colorado & Southern, thus transferring what had once been UP’s Denver-Texas lines to James J. Hill’s empire. This purchase is often credited to James J. Hill himself, and Hill and his son James N. Hill both served on C&S’s board of directors. But the Burlington had contemplated buying the C&S before Hill bought the Burlington in 1904, and Hill never once rode over the rails of the C&S or FW&D railways (though his son, an early investor in Texaco, might have). Meanwhile, Trumbull–who had started as a clerk on the MKT when he was just 15 years old–went on to become chairman of the Chesapeake and Ohio Railroad.

Though this timetable is 12 pages long, only three pages actually have schedules of C&S trains. One page shows trains from Denver to Dallas and Dallas to Houston. A second page shows trains from Denver to Billings, though only the portion from Denver to Wendover, Wyoming was on the C&S. The third page has local trains such as Dallas-Lubbock and Wichita Falls-Abeline. This page also shows ten trip a day each way between Denver and Boulder; identified as “Burlington Transportation Company,” these must have been buses. The remaining pages are the usual lists of fares, station agents, a station index, and a centerfold map of the entire Burlington system.


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