This timetable springs from an author's request: A gentleman using the handle of "SMM" posed a "history question" on the Railfan.net forums. It seems his protagonist would find himself dropped off in West Texas between Tucumcari and Amarillo sometime in 1916 and would need to make his way to Albuquerque as quickly as possible. While the Rock Island's Golden State Route was in operation by this time, Albuquerque was (and still is) the private property of the A. T. & S. F. Another participant in the forum mentioned the Santa Fe's Scout which had debuted in January 1916 as a possibility, but when I looked up the actual timetables from the period I saw that the Scout in these early years took the northern route to California via Raton. Santa Fe's main through passenger train on the Belen Cutoff route at this time was named "The Missionary." My references from the pre-depression years are few, but I know that sometime between this period and the mid-Depression era the Scout developed into an economy-minded travelers' passenger train operating from Chicago to California via Amarillo and Clovis and competing head-to-head with Union Pacific's Challenger and the Rock Island-Southern Pacific Californian.