“Enjoy some of the most beautiful scenery in the Eastern United States — right from your Erie car window,” advises the front-page ad on this timetable (the image below being the back cover). “The Erie follows the valleys of the Allegheny, Canisteo, Susquehanna and Delaware rivers for over 300 miles — picturesque in any season.”

Click image to download a 11.6-MB PDF of this 16-page timetable.

It was also slower than competitor New York Central’s Hudson River route. While the Central could run trains from Chicago to Manhattan in under 16 hours, the Erie’s fastest train took 21 hours to get from Chicago to Jersey City, and then another 30 minutes for a ferry and bus or taxi ride to midtown Manhattan.

The Erie’s fastest train was not the Erie Limited but instead was the Lake Cities, which left Chicago at 9:25 am and on the return trip arrived in Chicago at 3:10 pm, thus pretty much killing a whole business day either way. The Erie Limited took about 24 hours, arriving in New York at around 6:30 pm and left New York at around 8:00 am, again killing a whole business day. A third New York-Chicago train, called the Pacific Express westbound and Atlantic Express eastbound, also took about 24 hours.