A couple of weeks ago I presented a November 1957 Colorado & Southern timetable. Not much has changed in the intervening seven-and-one-half years. As in 1957, all of the train schedules in this timetable fit on one-and-a-half of the eight pages.
Click image to download an 4.9-MB PDF of this 8-page timetable.
The big difference between the 1957 and 1965 editions was that the 1957 showed two trains between Houston and Dallas-Fort Worth: Burlington’s Sam Houston Zephyr and Rock Island’s Twin Star Rocket, while the Rocket has been deleted from the 1965 schedule.
Why did Burlington list its competitor’s train on the 1957 timetable? Most of the tracks between Houston and Dallas were jointly owned by the Burlington and Rock Island. In fact, they were once a separate railroad called the Burlington-Rock Island Railroad.
The two railroads may have had some sort of marketing agreement for this corridor. The Wikipedia article about the Twin Star Rocket shows a Burlington timetable that lists the train. However, any marketing agreement wasn’t strong enough for Burlington to include the Twin Star Rocket in the system timetables I’ve looked at or its 1965 Colorado & Southern timetable.
The CBQ – CRIP arrangement sort of reminds me of the timetable SP issued in 1962 showing Santa Fe’s San Joaquin Valley service alongside its own. Santa Fe was a tenant on SP’s line between Bakersfield and Mojave, but it’s doubtful they had any kind of arrangement beyond that. Some might suspect that by giving travelers up and down the valley an option, SP was trying to subtly nudge passengers in Santa Fe’s direction. If that’s what they were up to it didn’t work, as the Golden Gate coordinated rail-bus service was dropped in 1963, leaving only the San Francisco Chief and the Fast Mail.
The Twin Star Rocket was discontinued south of Ft Worth as of Sept 15, 1964. After that date it wouldn’t have run on the B-RI.