In 1955, the Bangor & Aroostook operated two trains a day on its 236-mile mainline between Bangor and Van Buren in northern Maine. The premiere train was the afternoon Aroostook Flyer, which left Van Buren at 3:20 pm and arrived in Bangor at 10:00 pm, and on the return left Bangor at 4:50 pm arriving in Van Buren at 11:05 pm.

Click image to download a 2.9-MB PDF of this timetable contributed by Ellery Goode.

The other train was the romantically named Potatoland Special, whose morning schedule was roughly twelve hours apart from the Flyer, meaning that it left Bangor at an inconvenient 4:00 am and Van Buren at the somewhat more convenient 7:30 am. The Potatohead had a sleeping car to Boston while the Flyer was just coaches; both trains had a buffet car that offered “delightful full course meals.”

The significance of Van Buren is that passengers could connect with Canadian Pacific and Canadian National trains across the St. John River in St. Leonard, New Brunswick. However, this timetable doesn’t say anything about what connections could be made there.

The timetable does say that passengers to Bangor could connect with trains to Boston, New York, Washington, and Chicago on the Boston & Albany, Boston & Maine, Maine Central, and other railroads. Bangor & Aroostook did offer one other passenger service, a mixed train from Derby to Greenville. That was strictly for locals, however, as that train had no direct connection with the mainline trains.