The Montreal & Boston Air Line wasn’t a railroad but a route service by a consortium of connecting railroads. Most prominently mentioned are the Boston & Lowell Railroad, the Passumsic Railway, the South Eastern Railway, and the Portland & Ogdensburg. The first three were were needed to go from Boston to Montreal while the latter was also needed to go from Portland to Montreal.

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

For getting to other destinations, the timetables also refer to an alphabet soup of other railroads, including (to name a few) the P&FN, the P&W, the N&W, the W&M, the W&J, the CRR, and several others. Travel must have been pretty confusing for New England train riders in the 1880s.