I am studying a group of immigrants who came to the northeastern United States from Saxony in the 1870s to 1890s. Many of them were skilled workers all recruited from the same area specifically for their skills in the textile industries.
Of the "second wave" immigrants (1800 to 1920), James Beidler, in his book The Family Tree German Genealogy Guide, says on page 33:
Rhine-to-Rotterdam was no longer the emigrant superhighway. Immigrants used other rivers and, as the nineteenth century wore on, railroads to get to the ports of Bremerhaven (the harbor for the ancient city-state of Bremen) and Hamburg.
The United States passenger lists for these families indicate that most of these families departed from Bremen, so I don't have embarkation records for them.
I'd like to put the information I glean from the records created in the USA in context by locating the towns on a map. Finding railroad schedules, maps, and travel guides for the period would give me a better idea of the time it might take to travel to the ports and would help me correlate the information I have.