Before the Fall

As with the Golden State and the Imperial, the Sunset Limited had always had a "running mate" to handle small-town and short-hop passengers, with a schedule that could be tweaked to provide service to major destinations during normal waking hours if the other passed through in the dead of night. In this case it was the Sunset Limited which had the fancy new equipment, the tight schedule, and the cachet, while the Argonaut was the workhorse which handled mail and express and the "whistle stop" travelers.

By the late 1950s the highways and the airlines had siphoned off enough customers that passenger railroads were definitely bleeding red ink. Southern Pacific was especially feeling the pinch. In an earlier era Espee management had been willing to let freight profits subsidize passenger losses, but as the new Interstates tilted that playing field in favor of truck lines the freight profits were drying up as well. The passenger trains that couldn't pay their own way would have to go.

At first, it seems, Espee's plan was to eliminate the redundancies and excess capacity in its passenger timetables, but continue to operate the surviving trains to a high standard. So, between the two daily trains on the Sunset Route, it was the Argonaut which had to go. It would be truncated to a Houston-New Orleans train on June 7, 1958, and eventually discontinued altogether in 1963. The Sunset would inherit its mail and express business and lose its title as a "Limited". For the remainder of its days as a Southern Pacific train, it would be known simply as the "Sunset".

Unfortunately, Southern Pacific had not considered the issue of "connectivity". As you reduce the possible combinations of connections and destinations, you render the remaining ones less valuable, not more. I never went far enough with linear algebra to break it down into matrix theory, but the essential fact that Espee discovered the hard way was this: If you cut one of a pair of trains, ridership on the remaining train goes DOWN, not up (assuming, of course, that passengers have viable non-rail alternatives).

This was not in the plan. And so expenses would be shaved again and over again. Dollars were made here and there, in dribs and drabs—Espee sold off its immodestly named Grand Central Station edifice in Houston to the U.S. Government in 1959 to be the site of a new post office, replacing it with a pathetic structure which could easily be mistaken for a small-town bus depot (and which still serves as Amtrak's only surviving station in the Bayou City). But there were only so many stations to sell, only so many redundancies to cut. In 1960, the fresh flowers which graced the tables in the Audobon dining cars aboard the Sunset were quietly replaced with plastic. It was a harbinger of things to come.