Like the Atlantic Coast Line, the Queen & Crescent Route wasn’t a railroad but a cooperative venture by five independent railroads. Cincinnati liked to call itself the Queen city while New Orleans was the Crescent city, so the rail route between them received this name.

Click image to download a 12.0-MB PDF of this timetable, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

The northern-most partner, the Cincinnati Southern, was owned by the city of Cincinnati, the only case of an American city owning an interstate railroad. It is shown on the map as the Cincinnati, New Orleans and Texas Pacific, which was the name of the company that leased and operated the Cincinnati Southern. Eventually, the Southern Railway bought all of the partners, including the CNO&TP, and Norfolk Southern today continues to lease the portion owned by the city of Cincinnati.

The timetable shows that in 1885 four trains a day left and arrived at Cincinnati, but two of them went just 118 miles to Junction City, Kentucky, where a line branched to Louisville. A third train ended at Chattanooga. That left one train to go on to New Orleans, with a branch from Meridian, Mississippi to Shreveport. The total time over the 826 miles from Cincinnati to New Orleans was about 36-1/2 hours, for an average speed of 22.6 mph.

All of that information fit on two of the 16 panels on the timetable side of the brochure. Most of the remaining panels are devoted to showing connections with trains to New York, Baltimore, Atlanta, California, Montreal, Kankakee, Kokomo, and just about anywhere else in the U.S. and Canada.

The bottom of the timetable claims that the route was the “shortest and best line to the world’s exposition at New Orleans, December 1884 1885.” From December 1884 through June 1885, New Orleans held the “World’s Industrial and Cotton Centennial Exposition,” that year being the centennial of the first cotton exports from the United States to another country. That fair lost money, so in a failed effort to recover some of those losses, the city held a second one in 1885-1886 called the “North, Central and South American Exposition.” It actually began in November, but it was apparently easier to replace “1884” with “1885” than to replace “December” with “November” on the printer’s plate from the previous timetable.