Although this is called a Chicago-Denver timetable, only three of the six trains shown actually went to Denver: the Denver Zephyr, the California Zephyr, and mail train 7 & 8. Also shown were the Nebraska Zephyr and Ak-Sar-Ben Zephyr to Lincoln and the Kansas City Zephyr, which went to Kansas City but only the portion to Galesburg is shown.
Click image to download an 592-KB PDF of this timetable.
The timetable includes two different schedules for the Denver Zephyr, one that was in effect for June through August and the other for September through May. The trains left Denver and Chicago at the same time under both schedules, but the summer trains ended in Chicago and Denver about 10 minutes behind the non-summer trains. As one Streamliner Memories reader suggested when I posted the June 1967 system timetable, this may have been to allow the train to stop twice — once for coaches, once for sleepers — in some cities when the train was too long to fit in station platforms.
The same issue – double stops at certain stations – also applied to some UP and SP trains as well. According to Fred Frailey’s book “Twilight of the Great Trains” the combined Sunset and Golden State ran as long as 27 cars west of El Paso in the summer of 1964, necessitating double stops at some stations. The UP “City of Everywhere” had to do likewise. The City train was a little more complicated, because there were stops to both split the train and add to it at North Platte, Cheyenne, Green River, and Ogden. At North Platte cars were switched out for Denver and at Cheyenne the cars that arrived as the City of Kansas City were switched in. A little further along, at Green River the Portland cars were switched out to a waiting #105, and finally at Ogden the cars for the COSF were handed off to SP, albeit only 3 nights a week.
What’s pretty surprising is that UP managed to maintain a very respectable timecard for all the City trains: Chicago to L.A. in 45-1/2 hours, Chicago to Oakland in 47-1/4 hours, and Chicago to Portland in just over 42 hours.