The old time-tables of the Cumberland Road make an interesting study. One of the first of these published after the great stage lines were in operation over the entire road and the southern branch to Cincinnati, appeared early in the year 1833. By this schedule the Great Eastern Mail left Washington daily at 7 P. M. and Baltimore at 9 P. M. and arrived in Wheeling, on the Ohio River, in fifty-five hours. Leaving Wheeling at 4:30 A. M., it arrived in Columbus at five the morning following, and in Cincinnati at the same hour the next morning, making forty-eight hours from one point on the river to the other, much better time than any packet could make. The Great Western Mail left Cincinnati daily at 2 P. M. and reached Columbus at 1 P. M. on the day following. It left Columbus at 1:30 P. M. and reached Wheeling at 2:30 P. M. the day following, thence Washington in fifty-five hours.[66] At times the mails on the Cumberland Road were greatly delayed, taxing the patience of the public beyond endurance. The road itself was so well built that rain had little effect upon it as a rule. In fact, delay of the mails was more often due to inefficiency of the Post Office Department, inefficiency of the stage line service, or failure of contractors, than poor roads. Until a bridge was built across the Ohio River at Wheeling, in 1836, mails often became congested, especially when ice was running out. There were frequent derangements of cross and way mails which affected seriously the efficiency of the service. The vast number of connecting mails on the Cumberland Road made regularity in transmission of cross mails confusing, especially if the through mails were at all irregular. To us living in the present age of telegraphic communication and the ubiquitous daily paper, it may not occur that the mail stages of the old days were the newsboys of the age, and that thousands looked to their coming for the first word of news from distant portions of the land. In times of war or political excitement the express mailstage and its precious load of papers from Baltimore, Philadelphia, and New York, was hailed as the latest editions of our newspapers are today. Thus it must have been that a greater proportion of the population along the Cumberland Road awaited with eager interest the coming of the stage in the old days, than today await the arrival of the long mail trains from the east.