Headline
Figure 1
This timetable cover from 1877 represented a great improvement over the visually uninteresting announcements that railroads inserted in local newspapers during the years from 1830 through 1865 to inform travelers of their train arrival and departure times.
Figure 2
During the 1880s and 1890s, railroads introduced color graphics to add visual interest to their public timetables. A station display might feature public timetables from several dozen different railroads, all of them competing for the viewer’s attention. The Hannibal and St. Joseph was Missouri’s most successful railroad in the 1880s, but as this timetable cover indicated, by that decade it had clearly gravitated to the Illinois-based Chicago, Burlington & Quincy to further the bitter railroad rivalry between Chicago and Saint Louis.