As someone who has spent little time in New England, I find the Boston & Maine to be totally bewildering. The area it served was considerably smaller than my home state of Oregon, which in 1952 was served by five major railroads that operated a total of around 18 passenger trains a day, seven of which served only one city in the state. In that same year, the Boston & Maine operated around 200 passenger trains a day on dozens of different routes — and it was only one of several railroads in New England.

Click image to download a 20.9-MB PDF of this 40-page timetable.

Most of these trains radiated from Boston on four major routes and several minor ones. More than 30 trains a day each went on routes to Concord, Haverhill, and Portsmouth and 18 went on the route to Troy. Not all of these trains went all the way to those destinations but some went beyond those destinations to places such as Portland and White River Junction. Among the trains that didn’t come from Boston were more than a dozen per day out of Springfield and a handful out of Worchester.

The timetable describes a few of the trains as “Budd Highliners.” These were a few Rail Diesel Cars that B&M purchased on an experimental basis in 1952. The railroad liked them so well that in 1954 it ordered 64 more, the largest number ever purchased at one time. But in 1952, other than the Highliners and the streamlined Diesel-powered Flying Yankee, most trains were steam-powered with coaches that may have been semi-streamlined American Flyer cars but heavyweight sleeping and food service cars.