In the 1880s,
it took 12 hours to go by train from St. Louis to Kansas City. That was about the limit for teams that didn't want to waste a day travelling. Still, the schedule was grueling for KC teams. In 1888, the KC Cowboys of the American Association ended their first homestand on May 1 and
didn't return home again until June 13 - a 42-day, 32-game road trip that had the team play every other club in the circuit, including stops at St. Louis and Louisville on the way out and back.
Even by the standards of the day, that was a
long road trip, but it was necessitated by the travel limitations of the day. Cities farther west or south would, for all practical purposes, be inaccessible. A train leaving KC at 10 a.m., for instance, wouldn't arrive in Denver until
6:30 p.m. the next day. Team owners didn't want their clubs spending their time on trains. A team that wasn't playing wasn't making the owner any money, so leagues increased the number of games and cut back on travel days as the 19th century progressed. The NL went from a 70-game schedule in 1876 to 154 games in 1899. By that point, there just wasn't any room in the schedule for two-day jumps between cities, even though travel times improved markedly over that time period (by 1896, for example, it took only 9 hours to go from St. Louis to KC). Little wonder, then, that the major leagues didn't expand west or south until teams started travelling by air beginning in the late 1940s and early '50s.