Unlike yesterday’s brochure, which was mostly text with only two panels of timetables, this one is mostly timetables with no supplementary text other than footnotes. One side has nine panels of timetables while the other has one timetable panel, one panel with condensed timetables, a list of agents, a map that fills four panels, and the two panel cover.

Click image to download a 7.0-MB PDF of this brochure, which is from the David Rumsey map collection.

All of the timetables are outbound from Chicago. These include trains to Omaha, the Twin Cities, the Dakotas, California, the Northwest, Michigan, the Black Hills, and Milwaukee.

Most of the trains are identified by number, but several are named. While there is still a “Day Express” and “Night Express,” there is also the North-Western Limited to the Twin Cities; the Pacific Limited to Portland and San Francisco; and the Denver Limited to, you guessed it, Denver.

There was also a train called the Overland Express, which was not the Overland Limited (a name then used only by Union Pacific). Far from a limited train, the Overland Express made more stops and took almost 11 hours longer to get to Oakland than the Pacific Limited.

The front cover has woodcuts of James J. Hill’s Stone Arch Bridge across the Mississippi River in Minneapolis and two bridges across the Willamette River in Portland. The Portland bridge furthest from the viewer is supposed to be the original Morrison Bridge (though it doesn’t look anything like it), built of wood in 1887. The closer bridge is the original Steel Bridge, built of iron and steel in 1888. The 1888 Steel Bridge, as with its 1912 replacement, had two decks: the upper deck was for pedestrians, wagons, and (later) streetcars while the lower deck was for trains. Both of the bridges in the woodcut were swing-span bridges to allow for river traffic.