Schedule
The July 1948 Rock Island timetable shows the Golden State leaving Chicago at 10:15 PM and arriving in Los Angeles at 5:15 PM on the second day. The return trip left Los Angeles at 11:30 AM arriving in Chicago at 11:30 AM the second morning.
The July 1954 Rock Island timetables show a speeding up of the schedule leaving Chicago at 2:15 PM and arriving in Los Angeles the second day at 7:30 AM. The return trip left Los Angeles at 1:30 PM and arrived in Chicago the second day at 9:55 AM.
Major changes in schedules involved rearranging the schedules of alternate trains on the route (see below), connections at Tucumcari and Kansas City (for both the Minneapolis and St. Louis connections) and ensuring that connections were made in Chicago with other favored carriers.
In later years, the arrival in Phoenix, for example, was quite late in the evening. Pullman passengers on the Phoenix setout were given the option to remain overnight in the sleeping car, which was hooked up to trackside steam and electrical connections. And this assumed the train was on time, a rare event in the later years of passenger train operations on the Southern Pacific.
These schedules were considerably speeded up from the traditional Depression-era timetables of three nights out on the road.
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