C&O/B&O October, 1966 Timetable

In 1960, Chesapeake & Ohio began buying stock in the Baltimore & Ohio. B&O stockholders approved the sale and by 1964 the C&O owned 90 percent of B&O stock. The two continued to operate as separate railroads for many years, but coordinated their operations, as shown by this 1966 timetable.

Click image to download a 7.0-MB PDF of this 12-page timetable.

The timetable opens with a letter from passenger services director Paul Reistrup, who a decade later served as Amtrak’s second president where one of his many accomplishments was buying most of the Northeast Corridor for a mere $86.4 million. This letter claims that the C&O/B&O welcomes passengers as evidenced by the “food bar coaches” added to many trains, which sound to me like a cheap and probably tasteless alternative to dining cars.

Although at 12 pages this timetable is somewhat thin, at first glance there were still plenty of trains in service. Three from Baltimore to Chicago on the B&O via Toledo; one from Baltimore to Chicago on the C&O via Cincinnati; one more from Baltimore terminating at Cincinnati; two from Baltimore to St. Louis; and several shorter-distance trains. But here’s a curiosity: there were two trains a day between Chicago and Grand Rapids and two between Grand Rapids and Detroit, but none through from Chicago to Detroit, and the connections at Grand Rapids were not convenient. This sounds like a schedule designed to discourage ridership.


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