This poor little old thing was originally one big sheet, but it's already disintegrated into three parts, and those parts are crumpled and crumbling.
It doesn't mention Ainsworth, but one can hardly hope that a condensed international timetable would mention a one-horse podunk town where nobody in their right mind would want to go.
Anyway, for what it's worth, I scanned the old thing as best I could, and here it is, in pieces.
(Click on images to enlarge)
Check out the dining car. If the cuisine was like the décor, those Canadian passengers ate richly:
Looks like Ainsworth had more trains stopping in 1924 than in 1928. A daily train westbound train from Valpo to Chicago, stopping in Ainsworth at 7:55 a.m. (the "milk train," I suppose), a daily eastbound stopping at 5:13 p.m.; and two daily-except-Sunday trains, westbound stopping at 5:20 p.m., eastbound at 10:18 a.m.
(How could there not be a 7-days-a-week milk train in 1928? What did the cows do on Sunday?)
(Don't talk to me about refrigeration. I prefer to think the cows had Sunday off.)
Another wartime public timetable. This one acknowledges the existence of Ainsworth, but doesn't show any trains stopping there — obviously, because they wouldn't want that vital information to fall into enemy hands. Any good American would already know when the train stopped at Ainsworth. And we'd learned a thing or two about keeping secrets since World War I.
So apparently the railroads were taken over by the federal government during World War I? That's something I didn't remember from high school, and I haven't really studied World War I since high school.
On the last page there is a statement from W.G. McAdoo, Director General of Railroads, chiding railroad employees for blaming the government when the trains run late, and otherwise being rude to the public, and suggesting that such behavior isn't helping us beat the Kaiser, you know!
We have to go to page 6 to see that eastbound trains stop in Ainsworth at 10:42 a.m. (daily except Sunday) and 5:30 p.m. (daily), while westbound trains stop at 8:00 a.m. (daily) and 5:02 p.m. (daily except Sunday).
In connection with some of those little stops that weren't really stations between, I think they may have been called milk stands. I'm basing that conclusion on news items such as this, from the Hobart Gazette's "Ainsworth Pick-Ups" column of December 23, 1904:
It looked very foolish and daring to see a young fellow gallop down the railroad track from Adams milk stand to Ainsworth over culverts, cattle-guards and ties, just to do a little trading, especially while the roads are so smooth and nice.
And this, from the "Local Drifts" of August 5, 1910:
F.B. Price who lives on the Albert Halsted farm near the Adams milk stand threshed his wheat this week and was well pleased with the returns. His forty acres of wheat averaged 28½ bushels per acre and his oats and barley amounted to 2,000 bushels.
Looking at both the 1891 Plat Book and the 1926 Plat Book, we find that Albert Halsted's 77 acres in Ross Township lay between Ainsworth and Lottaville and were bisected by the Grand Trunk Railroad, so the Adams milk stand would correspond with the "Adams" shown between Ainsworth and Lottaville on this 1918 timetable. (Who this Adams guy was, though, I have no clue.)
The Index to Stations lists Ainsworth, but tells us that if we want to know when the train stops there, we have to consult the Chicago District Timetable, which apparently is a separate publication. *sigh*
As you can see, I've gone back to Scribd.com. All relationships have their problems; we're going to try to work things out.
Gee, guys, nice of you to mention Ainsworth. And you even mentioned that telephone on the pole at Ainsworth. What? — the siding? — oh, please don't trouble yourself to mention that.
Another day, another document-sharing site. I'd have stuck with scribd.com forever if only it weren't so temperamental about uploading documents.
Page 41 of this timetable (page 42 in the PDF scan) mentions the Ainsworth siding, including its length (660 feet) and the location of its switching point. Apparently in 1984 the siding hadn’t been abandoned and disconnected yet.
Page 132 (133 PDF) tells us that there was a train dispatcher telephone box at Ainsworth.
First of all I have to apologize for the fact that pages 9 and 10 of this timetable are at the back of the document. I didn’t realize I had skipped over them until I was finished scanning, and I wasn’t going to subject this fragile old document to re-scanning, nor was I going to pay for Adobe Writer which would allow me to insert pages into the middle of a document. So that’s me — half curator, half cheapskate.
First stop — the Index to Stations on page 3, where we note that Ainsworth’s 1899 population is given as 60. Then we have to go to pages 19 and 20 of the timetable (the 13th page of this PDF), to find any further mention of Ainsworth. Eastward trains stop at the Ainsworth station daily except Sunday at 11:03 a.m., and daily at 6:06 p.m. Westward trains stop at 7:14 a.m., and daily except Sunday at 3:58 p.m.
Looking through all these old timetables has given me a hankering to take a long trip on Amtrak, just to ride the train. In fact I went to the Amtrak site and found a nice long journey across the northernmost states to Everett, Washington. A bit pricey, since I would simply have to have a roomette, but I’d like to do it someday.
Someday in the distant future, because I just got off the phone with Chicago Title and — yikes! There goes my Amtrak ride, and they’ve only got back as far as 1911.
More to come on that, and also more timetables to come. I’m starting to collect these timetables for their own sake, with only a passing curiosity as to whether they mention Ainsworth.
On page 7, we see that the eastbound train, from Chicago to Valparaiso, stops in Ainsworth at 9:27 a.m. daily except Sunday. The westbound train stops at 4:59 p.m. daily except Sunday. That's it.
Am I supposed to believe that during the Roaring '20s, the train stopped only once a day (except Sunday) in Ainsworth, when it stopped there four times daily (three on Sunday) in 1932, during the Depression?
On second thought, that may make sense. During the boom times, everyone buys a car. Come the bust, they all lose their cars, they need the train again.*
It's interesting to see all those little places between the stops we know, places where the train doesn't stop: for example, between the familiar stops of Lottaville and Ainsworth, we see Turkey Creek, Atkins, Adams and Pierces. I never heard of any of these places before. ____________________________ *Conjecture pulled out of thin air.
The train stops at Sedley. It stops at Lottaville. Poor Ainsworth, lying between them, gets passed by.
The only mention I could find of Ainsworth is under "Additional Tracks" on page 24. I assume additional tracks refers to the siding; here it's noted to have a car capacity of 19. That's not bad, but in the 1958 freight cars weren't as big as they are now. I have no cite for that; I just remember the freight trains of my youth in the 1960s.
I did not scan the three pages in this schedule that were superseded by the May 1, 1959 supplemental pages. Any railroadiana purist out there who wants to see those three pages, drop me a note.
I wish someone who actually knows something about trains could explain to me why they bother showing Ainsworth on the timetable if nothing stops there!
Are there trains that stop at Ainsworth that don't rate a mention on the timetable?
Trains westward to Chicago stopped in Ainsworth at 6:27 a.m. and 10:50 a.m. daily except Sunday, while the daily expresses passed through around 6:15 a.m. and 4:20 p.m. but did not stop.
Trains eastward toward Michigan stopped in Ainsworth 10:50 a.m. and 7:37 p.m. daily except Sunday; expresses passed through daily around 5:10 p.m. and 10:10 p.m.
I don't know whether in 1880 the Grand Trunk Railroad was double track or single track, but by 1932, as this employees timetable tells us, it was double track except between Sedley and Valparaiso, which would not include Ainsworth.
Westbound passenger trains traveling from Port Huron, Michigan, to Chicago, Illinois, stopped in Ainsworth daily at 5:38 a.m., 7:14 a.m., and 7:07 p.m. Westbound way freight trains stopped (I think, but I don't know exactly how to read this thing) daily, except Sunday, at 10:30 a.m.
Eastbound passenger trains traveling from Chicago to Port Huron stopped in Ainsworth daily at 10:10 a.m., 7:50 p.m. and 12:07 a.m. (12:07 a.m.?? What honest Indiana farmer would be awake at that hour? — lots of them, I suppose, if the whistle was loud enough.) Way freights stopped daily, except Sunday, at 9:10 a.m.
The train order office in Ainsworth was open from 8:30 a.m. to 5:30 p.m. daily except Sunday.
There was no railroad surgeon here. If you got hurt on the train in Ainsworth, you had to go to Valpo. Actually I don't know what a "surgeon" was for purposes of this schedule.
And that's all this schedule has to tell us about Ainsworth.
It's so small I could scan in it four passes, so I included the whole thing. Ainsworth doesn't rate a mention in the timetable itself, although it shows up in the map on the last page.
