The schedules in this timetable are unchanged from 1957 except for the westbound California Zephyr. That train left Salt Lake City at the same time as in 1957 but arrived in Oakland an hour and five minutes later. Passengers enjoyed a few more minutes of daylight travel across the Sierra Nevada and still arrived in San Francisco in time for dinner.
Click image to download a 4.8-MB PDF of this 8-page timetable.
Like many of the timetables we’ve seen, this one notes that “all times shown in this folder are standard time.” The railroads hated daylight savings time, partly because they ran 24 hour operations so the transitions from one to another were major headaches.
More important, between 1945 and 1966 there was no federal law establishing daylight time, and its use varied from state to state. The states that did use it weren’t always consistent about the dates that daylight time went into and out of effect. Worse, in some states daylight time was observed in some cities but not in others. Until 1967, when Congress fixed dates at the federal level, it was easier for the railroads to simply ignore daylight time and use standard time everywhere.
Of course, this created confusion for passengers. Fortunately, the worst that could happen would be that people would show up at a train station an hour early during the summer.
Not really railroad related, but Daylight Saving Time used to be traditionally observed from the end of April to the end of October. Leaving aside the years of the energy crisis, the start date has gradually crept up first to early April and then to early March, with the end now early in November.
DST creates some weird side effects. I live in Boise, which most people don’t realize is further west than Las Vegas, but Vegas is on Pacific Time, while the southern half of Idaho is on Mountain Time. Being at the far west end of the Mountain Time zone (and just south of the 45th parallel) the sun comes up later and goes down later than, let’s say, in Denver. The earliest sunset in the wintertime is around 5:10, but the sun doesn’t come up until well past 8 o’clock. And in the summertime the latest sunset is 9:30, so we really don’t need DST at all.