Riverside is about 11 miles west of Chicago Union Station and a third of the way to Aurora, where Burlington had its main shops and the terminus of Burlington’s commuter-rail line. Harlem Avenue is about a mile short of Riverside. Today’s commuter timetables show five stops between Union Station and Harlem Avenue, but this timetable was apparently prepared for trains that stopped only at Harlem Avenue and Riverside. Or perhaps the other stops simply aren’t shown: the trains in this timetable were only 1 to 2 minutes faster than today’s trains that make the five intermediate stops.

Click image to download a 627-KB PDF of this timetable.

Riverside was designed in 1869 by Calvert Vaux and Frederick Law Olmsted, the co-designers of New York City’s Central Park. It is known today as the first planned residential suburb and is probably only the second neighborhood in the U.S. to be planned with protective covenants to give buyers assurance that their property values would not be reduced by incompatible uses next door. Today it would be called a master-planned community as it came with parks, a public square, and various community buildings. Since the covenants required half-acre minimum lot sizes, only the wealthy lived there, so Burlington might have felt they were deserving of exclusive trains, or at least an exclusive timetable.