This timetable is for the Chicago & Grand Trunk Railway, which was the U.S. portion of the Grand Trunk. The railway extended from Detroit and Port Huron to Chicago, with a branch line to Grand Haven (with a ferry link to Milwaukee) owned by subsidiary Detroit, Grand Haven & Milwaukee Railway.

Click image to download a 10.9-MB PDF of this brochure, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The main timetable shows three trains a day between Chicago and Port Huron and four trains a day between Grand Haven and Detroit. Some of those trains met Grand Trunk trains at the border that continued east in Canada and the brochure suggests that Pullman passengers could go from Chicago to Montreal, Toronto, or Buffalo without changing cars.

Oddly, although the two lines cross one another at Durand, Michigan, the Chicago & Grand Trunk didn’t see fit to offer any through trains from Chicago to Detroit. With one or two exceptions, it didn’t even time trains to allow convenient cross-the-platform transfers at Durand. This is strange because in 1887 Port Huron had only about 12,000 people while Detroit had close to 200,000, so residents of Chicago would be more likely to travel to the latter.

Other timetables in the brochure show the railway offered two passenger and two mixed trains a day on a short (59-mile) line between Detroit and Port Huron as well as service on a branch line to Jackson, Michigan. Otherwise, the timetables in the brochure mainly show connections with other railroads to Boston, New York, Philadelphia, and other cities.