Golden Rocket (passenger train)

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An EMD E7 ABA locomotive set in Golden State service bears the Golden Rocket color scheme as it passes through Carrizozo, New Mexico in September, 1947. The paint scheme is bright vermilion on top and aluminum below.

Rock Island's magazine ad for the Golden Rocket.

Southern Pacific's magazine ad for the Golden Rocket.

The Golden Rocket was a proposed named passenger train of the Rock Island (CRIP) and Southern Pacific (SP) railroads.

In the 1940s, the Rock Island and Southern Pacific Railroads planned on jointly-introducing a high-speed, tri-weekly passenger train that would run between Chicago, Illinois and Los Angeles, California. Two 11-car consists were to have been placed into service on the new line, one owned by the CRIP and the other by the SP. However, just as Pullman-Standard neared completion on the Rock Island trainset in 1947, and in the midst of an aggressive advertising campaign, the Southern Pacific abruptly withdrew from the project. Rock Island took delivery of its rolling stock: a baggage-dormitory car, three coaches, a coffee shop-bar-lounge car, four sleeping cars, and a sleeper-lounge-observation car (with barbershop).

The units arrived bearing the ill-fated Golden Rocket's eye-popping livery, painted bright vermilion on top and bare stainless steel on the bottom. The cars also retained the festive Mexican-themed interiors originally intended for the Rocket. Rock Island immediately placed the cars into service on the Golden State, its other transcontinental train (jointly-operated with Southern Pacific).

The Golden State's cars and locomotives retained the Golden Rocket colors well into 1953, after which time they were repainted in the SP's well-known read-and-orange Daylight livery. Ads for the Golden Rocket had promised that it would be "America's Newest, Most Beautiful Streamliner"; instead, it became "the train that never was."