M&B Air Line 1887 Timetable

Posted on by August 17, 2022
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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.

Grand Trunk 1887 Timetable

Posted on by August 17, 2022
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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. Continue reading →

Manitoba 1887 Timetable

Posted on by August 17, 2022
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What a difference a single year can make when a railroad is being managed by someone as dynamic as James J. Hill! I previously noted a railroad whose timetable was unchanged in the eight years between 1878 and 1886. By comparison, the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba’s timetable drastically changed in just one year between 1886 and 1887.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this brochure, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

Comparing the maps reveals that Hill had built or extended rails in many places. I previously noted that the 1886 map showed six parallel north-south lines serving farmers in the Red River Valley; the 1887 map shows a seventh line under construction. He also opened new lines to Hutchinson and Brownsville, Minnesota, Aberdeen, South Dakota, and towards the Canadian border in the Dakota territory. Continue reading →

Central Vermont 1887 Timetable

Posted on by August 15, 2022
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The map on the back of this brochure has the heaviest lines going from Boston and New York in the East to Detroit and Chicago in the West. But Central Vermont only owned a tiny portion of this route, with the rest owned by the Grand Trunk and a variety of tiny New England railroads. While the bright orange cover of this brochure says “Central Vermont and Grand Trunk Line,” the rest of the brochure makes it clear that it was issued by Central Vermont, not Grand Trunk.

Click image to download a 9.9-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

In 1887, Central Vermont basically consisted of a line from St. Johns, Quebec south to Essex Junction, Vermont, where it split into a line to Bellows Falls and one to White River Junction, Vermont. There was also a branch from St. Johns to Sherbrooke, Quebec and one from St. Albans to Richford, Vermont, but there are no timetables for these lines. Continue reading →

Debate Over Railroad Land Grants

Posted on by August 15, 2022
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In 1871, Kentucky Congressman J. Proctor Knott gave a humorous speech on the floor of the House of Representatives ridiculing the idea of giving land grants to western railroads. He focused on Duluth, which at the time had about 3,000 residents, and his basic argument was that U.S. taxpayers in general should not be required to subsidize projects that benefitted only a few.

Click image to download a 16.1-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The speech was widely reprinted by those skeptical of government pork barrel (a term that first became popular about the time Knott gave his speech). Sixteen years later, Northern Pacific, which received what was probably the largest land grant to a private company in American history, reprinted the speech in this brochure. Continue reading →

Wabash 1886 Timetables

Posted on by October 31, 2022
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Wikipedia says that the first published version of the song Wabash Cannonball appeared in 1904, while before that a song with similar words was called the Great Rock Island Route, which is dated to 1882. However, the Wabash version of the song must have been known by 1886 because this timetable refers to the railroad’s Chicago-Kansas City route as “the Cannon Ball Train.” There were three daily trains on that route, designated numbers 1, 3, and 5, so it is likely that in 1886 the term just applied to the route, not one of the trains. Only in 1949 did the railroad officially run a train called the Cannon Ball between Detroit and St. Louis.

Click image to download a 16.1-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

In 1886, the real name of the Wabash Railroad was Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific, being shortened to just Wabash in 1889. In contrast to most railroads that were either east or west of Chicago and St. Louis, Wabash sprawled across the Midwest, reaching Detroit and Toledo on the east end and Kansas City and Council Bluffs on the west end. In between, the railroad had branches to Indianapolis, Chicago, St. Louis, Ottumwa, and Des Moines, among other cities. Continue reading →

Louisville & Nashville 1886 Timetable

Posted on by November 3, 2022
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The Louisville & Nashville‘s main line in 1886 was from Cincinnati to New Orleans (via Louisville and Nashville), with branches to Memphis, Knoxville, and Lexington plus another line or branch from St. Louis to Nashville. The railroad offered two trains a day between Cincinnati and New Orleans plus several more than went only part of the distance.

Click image to download a 17.7-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

Train no. 1, identified as “Mail,” took 47-1/4 hours to go 921 miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans, for an average speed of 19.5 mph. Train no. 3, identified as “Fast,” made far fewer stops and took only 40 hours for an average speed of 23 mph. Train no. 5, listed as “Express,” only went as far as Louisville, taking 4 hours and 35 minutes to go 110 miles, averaging 24 mph. Continue reading →

Missouri Pacific 1886 Timetable

Posted on by August 13, 2022
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Like yesterday’s Iron Mountain Route timetable, this one is accompanied by a map showing all of Jay Gould’s railroads (I&GN, MKT, MP, and T&P) with thick lines, but the actual timetables focus on Missouri Pacific. One timetable does show the connection with the Texas & Pacific line to El Paso, mainly so that it could also show the El Paso connection with Southern Pacific to California.

Click image to download a 12.4-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The timetables also show connections with UP/CP to California, Burlington to Denver, Rio Grande to Ogden, and Santa Fe to New Mexico. But they don’t show connections to International & Great Northern to Houston or the Iron Mountain Route to Austin or San Antonio, which suggests the railroads weren’t cooperating as much as Gould would have wanted them to. Continue reading →

Iron Mountain 1886 Timetable

Posted on by August 13, 2022
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The eight years between 1878 and 1886 saw huge changes in the railroad industry. Some of these changes are visible by comparing the map in this brochure with the one in the Iron Mountain’s 1878 timetable. The 1878 map used the heaviest lines for just the Iron Mountain Route, namely St. Louis to Texarkana and branches to Columbus, Kentucky and Cairo, Illinois.

Click image to download a 11.2-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

By 1886, the Iron Mountain Route had been purchased by Jay Gould and, along with the Texas & Pacific and International & Great Northern, made a part of the Missouri Pacific system. As a result, the map in today’s brochure shows the entire Missouri Pacific and these subsidiaries in a heavy line. Continue reading →

Manitoba 1886 Timetable

Posted on by August 13, 2022
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In 1870, only a few hundred people farmed a few thousand acres in the Red River Valley of northwestern Minnesota and eastern North Dakota. Then James J. Hill blanketed the valley with rail lines of the St. Paul, Minneapolis & Manitoba Railway supporting millions of acres of wheat farms. For example, the map in this brochure shows that, from the Northern Pacific’s east-west line, Hill ran six parallel Manitoba lines for nearly 50 miles north an average of about 8 miles apart from one another, putting all farmers in a roughly 2-million-acre area no more than 5 or 6 miles from a rail head.

Click image to download a 19.0-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

“It is here that no. 1 hard wheat is produced, in quality, in quantity and to a certainty that has surprised the world,” says the map. Hill’s rail lines transported a large share of the wheat production of the entire country to mills in Minneapolis and Buffalo, where he built the world’s largest grain elevator so he could ship wheat from Duluth by steamship rather than share revenues with railroads east of St. Paul. The profits he made from Red River wheat enabled him to build west to Minot, Great Falls, and eventually the Pacific Northwest. Continue reading →