Unlike the Pennsylvania and several other railroads, the Santa Fe put the main cover of its timetables on the front instead of the back. The back cover of this timetable provides detailed information about what trains carried dining cars and where other trains stopped to find Fred Harvey restaurants. Even as late as the 1950s, the Santa Fe, unlike other transcontinentals, didn’t offer on-board dining service on all of its overnight trains.
Click image to download a 38.1-MB PDF of this timetable.
Most notably, the California Limited, once Santa Fe’s premiere train, was now ranked fifth among its five Chicago-Los Angeles trains as it only carried a dining car between Wellington, Kansas and Gallup, New Mexico. That allowed for a dinner and breakfast but required passengers to provide for themselves or eat at station stops for at least four other meals.
The westbound California Limited left Chicago at 8:45 pm, so passengers would have had to fortified themselves before boarding. The schedule allowed 45 minutes in Kansas City for breakfast, 30 minutes in Newton for lunch, then had a diner for dinner and breakfast, followed by 55 minutes for lunch in Winslow and 45 minutes for dinner in Seligman. The train was scheduled to arrive in Los Angeles at 6:30 am so passengers would get breakfast only after getting off. Eastbound passengers had a little more time to eat at some of these stops but it still must have been an indignity when even short-distance trains, such as the Chicago-Kansas City Antelope and an unnamed train between La Junta and Denver carried diners.
Yeah, but 5 trains each way between Lake Michigan and L.A.? If having a dining car was that important, there were 4 other trains to choose from. Likely by this point in its career, the California Limited was Santa Fe’s all-stops accommodation train.
Note also that SP had only two daily trains between Chicago and L.A., while UP had 3.