Lehigh Valley carried coal from Pennsylvania to Buffalo on the west and Jersey City on the east. This timetable shows that it operated 30 passenger trains in 1885. These are numbered 0 to 28 westbound and 1 to 29 eastbound. This is the first time I have seen a train numbered 0.

Click image to download a 5.6-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

A majority of the trains shuttled in a 20-mile corridor between Phillipsburg, NJ, and Coplay, Pennsylvania. Only 8 trains started in Jersey City and only two of those made it all the way to Buffalo. Lehigh Valley also ran frequent trains on three branch lines out of Penn Haven Junction as well as branches to Ithaca, Rochester, and Niagara Falls.

The timetable lists no names for any of the trains. However, a side panel says that train 2 from New York to Buffalo and train 9 from Buffalo to New York were called the Comet. These day trains had Pullman parlor cars while the overnight trains on the same route, numbered 8 and 15, had Pullman sleeping cars.

Lehigh Valley got into the lodging business about a year before this timetable was issued when it built the Glen Summit Hotel, roughly midway between Jersey City and Buffalo. Trains stopped at the hotel to allow passengers to have lunch and other meals, though that ceased when Lehigh Valley began running dining cars a few years later. For a time, the hotel remained a popular spot for wealthy New Yorkers. However, the railroad sold it in 1909 and it was torn down in 1914.