The St. Louis, Iron Mountain & Southern Railway was, like the International & Great Northern, an independent railroad when this timetable was published but would be taken over by Jay Gould in 1883 and eventually became part of the Missouri Pacific. The railroad’s main route was from St. Louis through Little Rock to Texarkana, where it met the Texas & Pacific.

Click image to download a 12.2-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The Iron Mountain had two trains a day in each direction between St. Louis and Texarkana, one leaving in the morning and one in the evening and each taking about 22 hours to go 489 miles. A third train went from St. Louis over the main line to Knobel, Arkansas, then over a branch line to Nettleton, where it continued on to Memphis over the rails of the Kansas City, Springfield & Memphis Railway. However, neither Nettleton, the branch line to Nettleton, nor the KCS&M are shown on the map.

All of this information could have been conveyed on two panels of this brochure, which has 16 panels on each side. Instead, 13 panels are devoted to timetables, apparently in an effort to convince potential passengers that they could take the Iron Mountain Route from St. Louis to just about anywhere in the country, ranging from San Francisco in the West to Richmond, Virginia in the East. In fact, going to Richmond would require at least four changes of trains (and railroads), often with long layovers between them.

Yesterday’s International & Great Northern timetable only had west-/southbound trains. This timetable is biased towards southbound trains, with only one of the 13 panels showing northbound schedules.

None of the trains listed in the timetable, whether on the Iron Mountain route or its connecting lines, have a name. Instead, all are simply labeled “Express.”