Like yesterday’s Iron Mountain Route timetable, this one is accompanied by a map showing all of Jay Gould’s railroads (I&GN, MKT, MP, and T&P) with thick lines, but the actual timetables focus on Missouri Pacific. One timetable does show the connection with the Texas & Pacific line to El Paso, mainly so that it could also show the El Paso connection with Southern Pacific to California.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The timetables also show connections with UP/CP to California, Burlington to Denver, Rio Grande to Ogden, and Santa Fe to New Mexico. But they don’t show connections to International & Great Northern to Houston or the Iron Mountain Route to Austin or San Antonio, which suggests the railroads weren’t cooperating as much as Gould would have wanted them to.

There are numerous small changes since Missouri Pacific’s 1885 timetable. Some of the lines on the map have been extended a few miles. Some of the times on the timetable have changed in minor ways, mostly on connecting railroads.

For some reason, on many two-train-a-day routes, the trains were switched: the 1885 timetable listed the “night express” first followed by the “day express” while the 1886 timetable listed the day express first. This would have required completely laying out the timetables again, which wouldn’t have otherwise been necessary because few of the times changed on these timetables.

One minor but curious change on the map is that a line from Fort Worth to Wichita Falls was shown as thick as the other Gould lines in 1885, but in 1886 it is a thin line indicative of a competitor. This line was owned by the Fort Worth & Denver and actually continued well beyond Wichita Falls. At the time, the Fort Worth & Denver was more closely related to the Union Pacific than to the Gould system, so it is strange that it was shown as a heavy line on the 1885 map. UP lost control of it in the 1890s and it became part of the Burlington system.