I personally think Desert Pioneer would be a better name for the combined route, Pioneer Wind sounds like someone passed gas.
I don't think timing the Desert Pioneer would be possible or even recommend since the Zephyr passes through Salt Lake at 11pm and 3 am. That would be a rough transfer let alone arrival times in Salt Lake.
I'm not sure what the Pioneer and Desert Wind schedule was like when they ran. Finding schedules prior to the wide distribution of scanners is next to impossible.
I'll attach the proposed timetable from the last positive official Amtrak study of the
Pioneer/Desert Wind. It was only partly implemented, adding to the cost of the Pioneer without adding the advantages identified in the 1991 study.
[I worked on the planning for the original 1977 SEA - PDX - BOI - SLC train, some elements of the 1991 Wyoming/Denver extension and the 2008/2009 response to the "study" of restoring the Pioneer.]
When one gets out the scratch pads and the geographic and traffic information, there are a number of ways of running it, all of them astoundingly better than what Amtrak drafted for the outrage they called a study. By the time C.B. Hall of All Aboard Washington and I (for ColoRail) finished, my alternative timetable spreadsheet was up to 29 pages.
Spoiler alert: we informally concluded that if sleepers had to be included, the very best alternative was the
Portland Rose pattern (two nights and one business day), running SEA - PDX - BOI - SLC - DEN. It hits all major cities at decent times. That results in a civilized loose connection in Denver which would be hard for even the UP to mess up. Much of the load turns over in Denver anyway and unlike the Crossroads of the West, the Mile High City is set up to handle it. There are some subcategories to this: the best economically is to run it as a second train on the Moffat Line (the overnight
Prospector did that for the Rio Grande), the next best is via Cheyenne and the C&S (BNSF) along the Front Range through the big university cities, and the too-fast route is via the Borie cut-off, screwing Cheyenne for a third time.
With input from my fellow AORTA (Oregon) members, we came up with the idea of juggling it so that in one direction it came through the Columbia Gorge at breakfast time and down the hill from the Moffat Tunnel or along the Front Range for breakfast in the other direction.
