The tops of most pages of this timetable have helpful admonitions, such as “Fire Destroys – Save the Forests”; travel advice, such as “Santa Cruz Big Trees – Easily Reached”; or outright ads, such as “Eight Trains Daily, Each Way, Between San Francisco and Los Angeles.” One treads across two pages: “The Apache Trail of Arizona ‘All Motor Mountain Trip’ A Wonderful Scenic Trip Detour from Maricopa or Bowie,” but then warns that “No Service During July or August.”
Click image to download a 27.9-MB PDF of this 48-page timetable.
Beyond that, many of the train names are unfamiliar to someone more used to post-war timetables. Instead of the Apache, the secondary train on the Golden State route is the Californian, while the secondary train on the Sunset route was the Sunset Express (which wasn’t much of an express as it took almost a full day longer than the Sunset Limited). The Daylight Limited operated non-stop between San Francisco and Los Angeles, while other trains populating the Coast route included the Padre, the Shoreline Limited, the Lark, and of course the Sunset Limited and Sunset Express, both of which went all the way from New Orleans to San Francisco in those days.
I acquired this timetable because I was curious about extra fares on the Golden State Limited and other trains, but the timetable doesn’t include any information about Southern Pacific fares. It does, however, say that the New York Central charged extra fares on eight trains each way between New York and Chicago, while the Pennsylvania charged extra fares for six each way. In 1923, the extra fare for at least the premiere New York-Chicago trains was $9.60, or around $170 in today’s money.
This timetable is missing half a page of the back cover, which happens to be the cover shown above. Southern Pacific usually made the left and right sides of its main covers nearly identical, so I was able to photoshop the missing area of the cover. The part missing from the inside was the train between Eugene and Coos Bay, which is too bad as I have a special interest in that area. But the rest of the timetables are readable.