The front cover of this timetable (since the cover shown below is on the back) uses Southern Pacific’s familiar theme of “four wonderful ways” to “anywhere” even though the SP could offer four ways only to California. It illustrates each of the four ways with the premiere train on three of them: the Shasta Daylight, Golden State, and Sunset Limited. But for the fourth it uses the San Francisco Overland, only mentioning the “fast streamlined City of San Francisco” in fine print.

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The timetable shows the City of San Francisco taking 39-2/3 hours to get from Chicago to Oakland (with another 35 minutes for the ferry ride to San Francisco). Although the Overland was also streamlined by 1951, it required 48-1/4 hours to Oakland. The ad probably used the Overland name because the name of that “way” was the “Overland Route” just as the names of the premiere trains on the other routes were also the names of those routes.

Both trains carried a diner, lounge, cafe car, coaches, and sleepers. Even the Overland was fast compared with the third train on the route, the Gold Coast, which took 61 hours to make the trip from Chicago to Oakland. It had primarily heavyweight equipment including a diner, lounge, and, between Ogden and Oakland, a “news agent car” offering snacks. The Gold Coast made many more stops than the other two trains and was probably still pulled by steam locomotives, which would account for some of the extra hours.