Timetables

My father had an irresistible penchant for collecting railroad timetables. He would say it was because the price of each one was too good to pass up, but I imagine it had more to do with the convergence of several of his interests under one stapled wrapper: schedule minutia, maps, and passenger trains. The timetables shown here he collected during his travels, and they account for his ability to recall the names, routes, and even schedules of every major passenger movement in the Deep South even decades after southern roads had dropped the service of travel. Their colors and artistry: testimonies to an era now gone.

I confess to my own early interest in timetables. Often in the summers my mom would take me to Hammond, Louisiana, to catch the northbound City of New Orleans to Jackson, Mississippi. The prospect of riding Amtrak all by myself was almost more than I could stand, and what seemed like hours of waiting in the dingy passenger room at the old IC Hammond depot was made more bearable by securing a few timetables of my own. By them I counted off the sleepy Mississippi towns on each run up to the Mid-America to see my grandmother. I own them still.