The time is 12:30 PM on October 13, 1949. We’re inside Mission Tower, half a mile out of Los Angeles Union Station, watching Southern Pacific train 4, the Golden State (left) and Santa Fe 20, the Chief, departing simultaneously for Chicago. It looks like a race, but it’s not really much of a contest: The Chief, running on Santa Fe all the way for 2,224 miles, will beat the Golden State (2,268 miles on the SP and Rock Island) to the Windy City by about 7-3/4 hours.
The Chief will cross Cajon Pass to Barstow and shoot east across northern Arizona to Albuquerque, NM, then northeast over two mountain passes, and cut through the southeast corner of Colorado. After a stop in Dodge City and a few others, it will aim for Kansas City. Cutting through the SE corner of Iowa, crossing the Mississippi River, it will visit some cities in Illinois before arriving at Dearborn Station, one of seven railroad stations in Chicago.
The Golden State exits California near Yuma, does a bee-line for El Paso, then NE through New Mexico to Tucumcari. There the Rock Island takes over touching a bit of Oklahoma, slicing through Kansas to Topeka and on to Kansas City. Then the GS treks through a corner of Iowa, zips through the Quad Cities. On through the corn fields of Illinois, it completes its trek at LaSalle Street Station, only a few blocks from Dearborn and the Santa Fe.
There were other passenger trains that competed head-to-head, mainly the New York Centrals 20th Century Limited and Pennsy’s Broadway Limited. They raced out-of-Chicago, on parallel tracks, for many miles in their quest to get their patrons to New York City, fast. That daily race was a little more even-handed. The New York Central route to the Big Apple was 960.9 miles, with mostly water level terrain. The Broadway’s routing was only 908.2 miles, but included scaling the Appalachian Mountains in Pennsylvania. Wikipedia states that both of these luxury trains completed their task in about 16 hours. The green hat crowd and the red hatters probably will never agree on that.
Credits: First paragraph verbatim in Classic Trains Magazine, Spring 2021
Submitted by Gary O. Ostlund