Armchair Time Traveller #4 LNER Continental Timetable October 1935 to May 1936

Playing all the right notes, but not necessarily in the right order, I'm now jumping back almost 30 years to a vintage timetable that I picked up for Christmas in 2018.

Going back to the Grouping Era, it's time for this bad boy:

OK, it's not a man or a woman, but there's plenty of Bad in it... as in towns called 'Bad something'.

With a momentary pause in the bad puns, let's go...

The context

1935 was a year when the international situation very much began its slide down the slope to the depths of the Second World War. The Luftwaffe was formed and conscription was introduced in Nazi Germany as Hitler openly went against the Treaty of Versailles; the Nuremberg Laws were introduced that stripped citizenship from non-Aryans. Mussolini invaded what is now Ethiopia in a quest for imperial glory that was a brutal campaign from the outset.

On the other side of the coin, canned beer was invented.

The popular conception of railways before the war is of a world full of steam locomotives. Certainly steam engines were the norm in most places. Electrification was the norm on tram networks and it was starting to spread to railway ones as well, who wanted to compete with them and increasing numbers of coaches as roads improved. Steam locomotives aren't the cleanest of things and they're not the fastest either. The 'sparks effect' of electrification increased passenger numbers and helped develop suburbs as people moved to cleaner areas away from city centres, commuting into work on electric trains.

The timetable itself notes that an Italian line is being electrified, while Germany, the Netherlands and Italy were starting to wire up main lines.

In the UK, the Southern Railway had pretty much done its suburban network in 1930, with mainline services next, using the third rail system. Brighton, Worthing, Eastbourne and Hastings were already connected, with Portsmouth being worked on.

The LNER itself had taken over electric suburban services in Tyneside and would start on wiring the line from Liverpool Street to Shenfield, although this was suspended with the outbreak of the war - British Railways would finish it off.

Europe had different political boundaries in 1935 - especially in the east of Europe, where the USSR was much smaller than it would become after the war and Poland was over to the east, including big parts of what is today Belarus, Ukraine and Lithuania. Lithuania in 1935 used standard gauge for its network, a result of the German occupation in the First World War so it had a direct connection to the network of most of Europe; there also appears to have been a standard gauge line to Riga, Latvia.

The contents

There is a lot packaged into this 185-page affair, certainly far more than you'd get in any modern timetable. To give you some of the highlights:

• Plenty of terms and conditions stuff, including a statement that LNER will not be liable for any loss or damage at Sea (their capitalisation) due to, for example (and I actually quote):
• The King's enemies
• Accidents from machinery, boilers and steam
• Accidents of the seas, rivers and navigation of whatever nature or kind soever
• An eight-page index of continental stations
• No less than 45 pages of fare listings, including fares from London via Harwich to many European cities, fares from 'provincial stations' of the Big Four to Harwich and fares from Harwich to European cities. All of these are in £.s.d. so you might have a fair bit of complex adding up to do.
• Rates for a wide variety of luggage including:
• Motorcycles
• Cars
• Typewriters
• Sewing machines
• Nautical Instruments (15 shillings to the Continental ports)
• How to send telegrams from ships
• Information on sending goods and parcels via train and ship (a train ferry service for freight was also around) 
• A long list of agencies through which LNER sold tickets in both Europe and the US

The actual timetables themselves take up a minority of the book and employ the standard format for the international timetables I have in my collection; you read the times down on the left hand side for services going away from London and up on the right hand side for coming back - this means you only have the station names one i.e. in the middle. The details of the through carriages available and any variations are at the bottom. One thing that is obvious is that the icons are a good deal more detailed than you would find in a modern publication. An example of the timetables can be seen below. I couldn't scan from this book without risking damaging it:

There are also three fold out maps at the rear of the book, one of Belgium, one of the Netherlands and the one below:

These schematic style, not quite geographically accurate maps for the LNER and LMS were created by George Dow and in fact were the inspiration for Harry Beck's world-famous London Underground Map. More information and history of these can be found here. 

The fares 

International travel was not exactly cheap at this time. £1 in 1935 was equivalent to £70 now. If you wanted to go to Amsterdam to partake of the red light district (it existed, but was a lot less in your face than today), you were looking at £4 17s 10d each for a Third Class Return via "Flushing" (Vlissingen, which no longer has any ferry services to the UK since the Sheerness service was terminated in 1994). That's over £300 each before luggage, hotels and meals were included. You were able to get special weekend tickets that allowed you to travel without a passport, but the precise information on these is not provided in this timetable. 

(Yes, bachelor parties were around back then). 

If your stag do inclinations stretched further afield to the Estonian capital of Tallinn, you were looking at £12 1s 9d for a Second Class Single; a visa was also required from the Estonian Embassy at 167 Queen's Gate, SW7 - open only between 10am and 1pm. This said, at least you could get a through ticket all the way there - you can only get a through ticket to Warsaw from the UK now, with the need to buy further tickets in Vilnius and Riga. Interrail is a thing for the whole Baltics now, but the cross-border connections are limited as you get further east and you might be better to get a coach.

The travel times

London to Tallinn was possible with four trains and a ferry. Departing at 0930 GMT on Day 1, you'd be at Berlin Schlesischer Bahnhof, in English "Berlin Silesian Station" at 0733 the following morning, a journey time of 19 hours and 13 minutes, via the Harwich-Flushing ferry. This is now, after two rebuilds by East Germany, Berlin Ostbahnhof and remains a major starting point for international services, like the EuroNight Talgo sleeper to Moscow-Belorusskaya. 

Departing there 19 minutes later, you'd be in Riga at 0648 Eastern European Time on Day 3, with a two hour wait for a 2nd and 3rd Class only service to Tallinn, arriving at 1856. That's a 55 hour and 26 minutes journey.

In 2020, there is no overland route shorter than three nights... Driving takes 28 hours straight; something impractical with the need to refuel, go to the toilet and sleep.

London to Berlin was a 20 to 21 hour journey with a sleep either on the ferry or the train; although the former involved having to pay a supplement on the express train in Germany. Avoiding that would add another five hours to your journey as you had to wait for a later slower train,.

Other fun stuff

As mentioned earlier, this timetable has a large array of information on those wishing to ship goods via rail; as the railways were a 'common carrier', they were required to take nearly anything that was offered to them, no matter how profitable the market was. The exceptions were manure and stuff like lime that could damage their stock. So you could get ship propellers put on a flatbed.

Full details of the rates available required you to contact one of the Goods Managers or a freight forwarding agent; since this would entail me doing a seance, I can't provide them to you. There were special inclusive rates for express goods at 805 Belgian francs per metric tonne to Antwerp, which was just under £6 - although this did not apply to perishables. These had to be delivered to Bishopsgate Goods Station before 3pm on any weekday.

The most common freight wagons at this were 20-foot boxcars and those could be shipped to the continent without the need to tranship via the Harwich-Zeebrugge train ferry that ran from 1924 until 1987; these wagons could be sent as far as Poland and 'Roumania' (the spelling in English didn't standardise until 1975). LNER also advertised a through shipment company called All Rapid Transport Service, who said they could ship goods to Palestine (the British Mandate) in 9 days, China in 27 days "&c &c".

Rather relevant in today's day and age were Customs regulations. At time where the European Union was over twenty years from creation, every frontier required some form of customs examination and the items that were subject to duty, restriction or outright prohibition ranged from the normal to the downright bizarre, like:

• Tobacco
• Hats
• Field and Opera Glasses (there is a difference between field glasses and binoculars; the former lack internal prisms that can jolted out of alignment via rough handling)
• Gramophones and Gramophone Records
• Plumage
• Handkerchiefs

Also, don't try to bribe a Customs Officer or you could be fined £200. Also, you won't be allowed to pass Go.

Conclusion

The inter-war years are considered a golden age for the railways and to an extent that's true, with the sheer array of international services, along with some very snazzy rolling stock. However, it wasn't exactly the fastest of services and international travel could be quite bureaucratic, especially if you wanted to bring home some hats.

I'd go for a visit, but I wouldn't like to live there.

Armchair Time Traveller #3: BR London Midland Region Timetable, June to September 1964

So, back to Britain for the third part of this ongoing series, in which I look at old train timetables.

I acquired this tome (it's so big that 'tome' is the only word one can really use to describe it[1]) via eBay, which is the go to source for historical train timetables of all eras and countries. When I shuffle off this mortal coil, then someone is going to be selling my small collection on a future version of this site, I'd imagine/hope...

Anyway, an explanation. BR for most of its history was split into a number of regions, largely aligned with the boundaries of the pre-nationalisation Big Four, although there were differences and changes over time. The London Midland Region or LMR for short was based around the boundaries of the London, Midland and Scottish Railway (LMS - interestingly, these initials are trademarked by the Government so we might get a return of this to join the other three Big Four companies). In practice, this meant services from the four London termini in the picture in a generally NW direction, although the now closed and demolished Broad Street connected to the now London Overground line to Richmond. Services crossing the Pennines also came partly under LMR's aegis.

The historical context

While not the first electrification project carried out by BR, the West Coast Main Line electrification from London to Glasgow, opened in stages from 1959 to 1974, was arguably the most major event of the first half of the near 50-year existence of the organisation. Locomotives constructed for this operation, namely the AL6/Class 86, still ply our rails on freight operations to this day, with some now earning their keep in Bulgaria.

As a result, steam haulage continued on the London Midland at this time, with a major presence for the LMS Stanier Class 5 4-6-0 mixed traffic engine, colloquially known as the "Black Five", along with the BR Standard Class 5, its post-war development. 

However, diesel and electric stock was well established. 

On the Chiltern Main Line out of  London Marylebone, the four-car diesel units later known as Class 115 were in operation. Their interiors were a good deal more luxurious than the more bus-like ones of other Mark 1 based units, to serve the better off commuters of Buckinghamshire. St Pancras had the Class 127, also a four-car unit. Both had the capacity for passengers to see out through the front window and watch the driver at work, although some would pull the blinds down.

The Sulzer Type 2 (Class 25) became so common on the LMR and elsewhere that enthusiasts nicknamed them "Rats", the standard term for them today, but plenty of other types were around.

Electrification from Crewe to Liverpool, as well as in the Birmingham and Manchester areas had resulted in the introduction of the Class 304, with a rather distinctive compressor noise.

However, 25kV was by no means the only spark game in town. The iconic Woodhead Line from Manchester to Sheffield has 1500V DC overhead with units and locomotives to match, some of which ended up in the Netherlands. 

The Bury Line, later converted to a tram line had 1200V DC side contact rail from its World War One era conversion and the Class 504. 

The Watford DC Line, operating from Euston to Watford Junction, shared with the Bakerloo Line (which also ran to the latter at this point) and now part of London Overground, had also been done at the same time, with 750V DC third rail; Class 501 units with bars on the windows to prevent passengers from leaning out were used here as well as to Broad Street and Richmond.

Now about Broad Street. This station, situated next to Liverpool Street, had been severely damaged in air raids in the Second World War and was progressively being run down over this time - the route had limited appeal for those going to central London as faster alternatives were available. It would finally shut entirely in 1986 and be replaced by the Broadgate shopping centre.

Speaking of closures, Richard Beeching was Chairman of British Railways at this time. This is of course a name very familiar to any British rail enthusiast for the wrong reasons. The Great Central Railway, while closed after his return to ICI, would lose its through services to London in 1966 and close entirely in 1969. It has services here in the London St. Pancras to Sheffield line, although many of the intermediate stations had closed in 1963.

Also noted are the closure of Normacot and Cheadle stations on the Crewe-Derby Line (today served by East Midlands Trains) and the closed Cheadle branch line off that respectively; the former had closed in March 1964 and no trace remains, while the latter went the year before with only the station master's house surviving. A proposal to run charter trains to Cheadle for Alton Towers in the 1980s did not come to fruition and the track has since been lifted.

The contents

After a couple of full page notices advertising freight services and warning about engineering work for the WCML electrification, we then have a 13 page index of stations, followed shortly after by 16 pages on seat reservations (2 shillings each) and Regulation Tickets (to enable you to ride at all on a particular service, no charge). A long list of trains that could have been much more simply with a symbol above the appropriate service in the main timetable, where people are going to look anyway!

We then have the sleeper services, which were much more extensive back in 1964, also operating out of St Pancras, Marylebone and Kensington Olympia, the last being an arrival point only for some reason. With many terminus stations being reached in the wee hours, BR helpfully would shunt the sleepers to one side so you could get a longer kip. Also, I have to love this line (emphasis mine):

Dogs or other livestock are not allowed to be taken into the sleeping cars.

This sort of line begs the question of just what someone took on a sleeper train to result in the need to specify that. I'm imagine a chicken clucking all the way down Shap...

We then have the boat train services to the island of Ireland, which has the option on the ferry from Holyhead to Dun Laoghaire to have an "open berth" with either a made-up bed for 8 shillings or "rug and pillow only" for 7 shillings. So, a big dormitory with a rug and pillow on some bunk? Who is running this ferry service? Ryanair?

The summary tables for key routes take us up to page 110 and then we get to a whole string of passenger information, including "Specimen single fares between principal stations", which like Ronseal, does pretty much exactly what it says on the tin, giving a table of second class fares between the key station. Euston to Glasgow will set you visitors in 1964 back 84 shillings exactly i.e. £4 4s.

(For ease of use, prices were often displayed in shillings and pence only).

This is a walk up flat fare - discounted advance tickets were not a general thing in 1964. Basically around £80 at today's prices. You can get an Advance Single on Virgin Trains today for £65, but you're looking at £141.50 for the any off peak train variety.

However, discounts were available including:

• Mid-Week Period Return: Go out on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday, return on those same days in one of the following weeks within one month.
• Excursion tickets: To go to principal towns, holiday resorts and for special events.
• Holiday Runabout Tickets: A rover ticket
• Circular Tour Tickets: For when you want to take a more indirect route.
• Ramblers' Tickets: Travel to one station, come back from another

The vintage terms of the 1960s appear as we work our way through the rest of the passenger information. There are a list of charges for bicycles, perambulators ("prams" being the contraction from the 19th century that has superseded this word[2]) and humanity's best friend, Canis familiaris i.e. the dog. Dogs at the time had to be tied up or caged in the guard's van in many cases - they also needed to be "efficiently muzzled" to prevent them from barking or requesting other stations on the LTS line[4].

It was common at the time to send luggage you didn't need on the trip ahead of you when going on holiday or up to university (or public school!). This cost 2/9 for each package to be collected and conveyed or conveyed and delivered within Great Britain i.e. part of the road journey being included. For the whole trip, you'd pay 5/6.

Finally, we have a quick section on London Underground services with a tube map.

The rest is timetables with adverts for various services repeated throughout to save space.

The travel times

So, how long is it going to take you to travel through the London Midland Region of British Railways?

I'll cover three types of services here: a London region commuter service, a London to Scotland journey and a 'Regional Railways' service in North Wales.

London commuter service

The Chiltern service from London to Aylesbury Town in 1964, using Class 115 DMUs, took 58 minutes in the peak times, stopping at all the stations on the route - the service frequency was every 15 minutes. For example, 5.57pm departure would get you to Amersham at 6.55pm.

Today, you can do that journey in 54 minutes; the service also goes on for a further nine minutes to the 2008 opened Aylesbury Vale Parkway. Not really a huge difference, but remember that the 115s had a lot more doors.


Long distance

One of the key railway journeys in the UK is from London to Glasgow; the Lowland Sleeper goes there and it is the limit of long distance electrification on the West Coast Main Line. There were in fact three main stations in Glasgow at this point in time - Central, Queen Street and St Enoch. The last of these was closed in 1966 and the site demolished; it is now home to a shopping centre.

The Royal Scot, the 10am departure from Euston to Glasgow Central, arrived after a stop at Carlisle at 5.10pm, a journey time of 7 hours and 10 minutes. Today you can do the journey in 4 hours and 29 minutes on a Pendolino, which is of course considerably shorter.

Regional Railways

Liverpool to Manchester is the oldest inter-city railway route recognisable as a railway in the world (opened in 1830) and can be done in under 40 minutes today depending on what train you get, although the average is around 54 minutes.

In 1964, the journey lengths were about the same, but with a much lower overall service frequency. Today I believe the actual issue is congestion...

An important note - Manchester Piccadilly was not the main station at this time (for one thing undergoing rebuilding as part of electrification), with Manchester Exchange being one of the main calling points. This was closed in 1969 and is now home to the Manchester Central Convention Centre, connected to the Metrolink tram network.


Conclusion

The long distance times here show much electrification sped up journey times nearlywherever it was introduced. I've been on steam hauled rail tours and while they are limited by the need to fit in with other traffic, they're not exactly very fast affairs. And you might only have one book to keep you entertained; for many members of the public, steam only became glamorous once it had disappeared.

1964 would be the end of an era for British Railways; for one thing, it would be British Rail from 1965 onwards...



[1] It weighs 868 grammes or 1lb 14.6 ozs in old money.
[2] Not the only contraction superseding the original world. You have a (tele)phone, women generally wear bra(ssiere)s[3] and many fly on a (aero)plane.
[3]Be careful not to mix that word up with brasserie.
[4]Thank you, I'm here all night.

Armchair Time Traveller #2: 1963 East German International Timetable

The Electronic Reading Room of the Central Intelligence Agency's Freedom of Information Act wing is a source for a lot of very interesting data from the Cold War era. What I was not expecting when I was doing research for my 1960s set spy RP game Secret '67 was to find a number of train timetables scanned and uploaded within the archives.

Anyway, I managed to find a particular gem that has become a useful resource for the game; the Summer 1963 International and Domestic Timetable for Deutsche Reichsbahn, the East German state operator.

(Reich is a German word literally meaning 'realm' or more figuratively meaning 'nation'. While most English speakers would automatically associate the word with Hitler and the Third Reich, it is not in itself a negative term, but Germany does not use the term any more for official use. Therefore the name of the company is 'German National Railways')

The document, declassified in 2011 and uploaded in 2016 only ever bore a CONFIDENTIAL classification due to the (redacted) information on the front as to the sourcing of the document. The main timetable contains nothing at all secret; being a publicly purchasable document that would have been obtained from the DR ticket office at Berlin Zoologischer Garten station in West Berlin. That's right, you didn't even need to cross over the Berlin Wall to get one.

I will be focussing solely on the international timetable for the purpose of this article.

The historical context

The idea of the Iron Curtain being some fortified barrier that one tried to cross only at one's mortal peril was true... but mostly for the people who lived on the eastern side of it. The communist governments over time became increasingly keen for the tourist dollar - and I mean the tourist dollar. Certain goods needed for their economies - and their leadership - had to be imported from the West; with Western businesses not exactly keen on taking East German marks or Soviet roubles, actual dollars or pounds were needed.

So, they were keen to advertise their nation to Western tourists who could see the socialist system in action - the parts of it that they wanted them to see at any rate. With air travel still very expensive for most, long distance train travel or driving were the common ways to get between European nations. Western tourists and visitors would need to apply for a visa of course, although you could get a day permit for East Berlin just by turning up at one of the appropriate checkpoints, such as the one at Berlin Friedrichstrasse station - more on that later.

Furthermore, Eastern Europeans could, after applying for permission, go on vacation to other countries in the Soviet bloc. A popular destination for East Germans was Czechoslovakia, which happened to be next door for one thing...

****

East Germany itself was still very much a land of steam. The Soviet Union had taken much of the pre-war electrification equipment and rolling stock back home as war reparations, leaving a war-battered East Germany (there were still uncleared ruins in East Berlin) reliant on rolling stock dating back to the 1920s and beyond. Track maintenance increasingly fell by the wayside, speed restrictions popped up all over the system and with a literally captive passenger base (car ownership not exactly being very high in the GDR), there was little incentive to improve.

The contents

After a cover, literally the first thing you encounter is an advert for the German Hygiene Museum in Dresden. Founded in 1912 and still open today, it served at the time as much as a propaganda vehicle for the GDR as it did for health education; it had earlier done the same thing for the Nazis.

Other adverts for East German places to visit or things to buy also appear.

Handily enough, the explanatory notes on the timetables that follow are written in German, Russian, French and English, although the main timetables themselves are in the first language. The first part of these are bulk timetables for a particular cross-GDR route, followed by key routes in three other socialist states (Poland, Czechoslovakia and Hungary) and finally by individual timetables for the key trains running through East Germany.

The symbols are very similar to the ones found in modern international timetables, although notable standouts for this period include designations on a coach diagram for a mail carriage and a railcar.

In an age where far more correspondence went by post, railways were often the fastest means to transport letters and so it was entirely normal to add a mail carriage to the consist of an express train that was going that direction anyway; indeed, that carriage might have a letterbox for passengers to add items of their own. Indeed, British rail operators were legally obliged to take mail as required by the Postmaster General. There were dedicated mail trains as well.

Then there are "railcars" or as most people tend to call them these days "multiple units", whose main distinction was a more limited space for luggage if there was any at all. Mainline multi-carriage multiple units really started getting going in the 1930s, with the beautiful SVT 137 coming into service in 1935 running at speeds of up to 100mph. East Germany had produced a prototype version of its most famous DMU, the VT 18.16, later the Class 175, although series production would not begin until 1965.

Through coaches were very much the thing on international expresses. There was not exactly the demand for an entire twelve-carriage train from Paris to Moscow on a daily basis (there still isn't, hence why it only runs once a week), so you would have one carriage for the Soviet capital from Paris, another from Ostend and another connecting from Hoek van Holland, all part of a train mostly running between Paris and Warsaw.

This needs diagrams or a list to be fully understood and we have plenty of examples like below.

The travel times 

International train travel took a lot longer back then. One particular reason was border controls; while in-journey passport checking was common on sleepers and Trans Europe Express services, you'd still have checks when travelling within the EEC, let alone outside it. A 40-minute-plus layover when entering or exiting East Germany was not unheard as the Border Troops thoroughly checked papers and the carriages to make sure things that weren't supposed to cross the border were not present. This even applied to trips to fellow socialist countries like Poland and Czechoslovakia; remember permission was needed for East Germans to even go there for a holiday.

To take a similar route to my 2016 trip from London to Berlin, I would need to depart from London Victoria at 10am on one of the boat trains that connected with the ferry from Dover to Ostend in Belgium, arriving at the latter at 3.20pm; no need to change my watch as the mainland of Europe was not using Daylight Savings Time, while we were. A 4pm train, designated F 52 or the Oostende-Wien Express, depositing me at Cologne at 9.18pm. I would then have to wait for an hour to pick up D 105 as shown above, the famous Paris-Moscow service, where I could end up in one of three sleeper carriages heading for Berlin; one operated by Mitropa, the East German sleeper and restaurant car provider or the other two operated by Soviet Railways. The other option was a DR couchette car; Mitropa did not lower itself to those. Apparently the Soviet sleepers had net curtains...

Helmstedt on the West German side of the border would have been reached at 3.48am for a twelve minute stop to swap the locomotives. Then a 16 minute stop at 4.14am to 4.30am. The passport checks for the GDR would have done on route, but the need to get and pay for the transit visa would have probably meant I'd have been woken up... Hence why the Thomas Cook advice was to fly to West Berlin.

After taking 3 hours and 3 minutes (!) to travel the 118 kilometres to Berlin Zoo, I'd have arrived bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, I hope, at 7.33am. Journey time, 21 hours and 33 minutes. This has been much accelerated of course since then.

Going east, a whole string of long distance expresses operated. Some have disappeared into railway history, others have been contracted but one that definitely survives is Hungaria (EC 173); which has indeed expanded from Berlin-Budapest to Hamburg-Budapest with only one loco change at Prague. A 1963 journey time of 14 hours and 33 minutes for the former has now been reduced to 11 hours and 2 minutes, with the whole route taking under 14 hours.

Ex 154 from 1963 is described as a 'Triebwagen... mit Speiseabteil' i.e. a multiple unit with catering; the 1969 data from VagonWEB is for two Czechoslovak M 298.0 four-car DMUs, which were built from 1962-64, so one may well have run this service at the time. Today it's a locomotive hauled service using modern electric traction.

Conclusion

Train travel between countries in the communist bloc of the 1960s could be slow, bureaucratic and unreliable, unlike today's world of open borders and high speed trains. That said, the trains looked good (mostly) and you'd have been able to see steam engines in their natural element instead of pottering about on heritage lines. Just bring a good non-offensive book to read.

Can I recommend Sherlock Holmes?

Armchair Time Traveller #1: January 1958 ABC Railway Guide

In this series of posts that I'll doing over 2018, I'll be reviewing, so to speak, some of the old railway timetables that I have in my possession or have managed to locate online, giving a general view of how things have changed for better and worse. The plan is for a total of six of these posts, but that may well change... and drag on into 2019.

In this first post, I'm going to look at the January 1958 ABC Railway Guide.

Published monthly from 1853 to 2007 (the name has been revived for an enthusiast's guide to rolling stock and locomotives) and a rival to the Bradshaw's books that have featured in Michael Portillo's long running TV series, this book's main function is to provide an alphabetical list of all the railway stations in Great Britain and tell you how to get there from London, with timetables for the major routes at the back.

Costing 7 shillings and sixpence (37 and a half pence in new money), this tome can be considered pocket sized if you have a garment with large pockets; it's 21cm by 12.5cm by 3.7cm. Coming in at 918 pages counting the covers and weighing 682 grams (1lb 8.1 oz in old money) this is more an object one would keep in the study for reference rather than lug around on a commute.

The contents

This has adverts. Quite a lot of adverts. Firstly on the cover for the Motor Union Insurance Co. Ltd, (which I believe is now part of the AA) and also for Gestetner, whose duplicators were the predecessors of the modern photocopier - you would create a master copy something of a form or leaflet, then use this to make as many copies as you needed, at least until the master degraded.

The main adverts, however, are for hotels. 252 pages of them, arranged by town so you can be find what is available in your planned destination. Some of the things advertised for these hotels are things that one doesn't tend to see advertised in modern hotels because they're kind of taken for granted:

• Central Heating
• Private bathrooms, often for many of the rooms
• You may mock, indeed you can mock, but the Orient Express and other luxury sleeper trains operated by the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits didn't have en-suite toilets. Which means it was entirely possible for you to be waiting for Audrey Hepburn or Burt Lancaster to finish up, well, delivering a sit down performance, on Le Train Bleu or an American equivalent.
  
• A lift
• Gas fires
• A television lounge - that is one television for the whole hotel
• Interior sprung mattresses

Also quite a few are quoting weekly rates. This was a time where holidays were much longer and care homes fewer; an old person of means might well move into a hotel as they'd be looked after. The Major in Fawlty Towers is one example.

We then have four pages of tables for sleeper services and these were a lot more numerous back in 1958. Taking a typical Monday night, a Londoner could get:

• 5 trains from Paddington (2 to Penzance, 1 to Plymouth with seating to Penzance, 1 to Carmarthen with seating to a station called Neyland in Pembrokeshire which would close in 1964)
• 8 from King's Cross
• 12 from Euston
• 3 from St Pancras

Some of those had multiple portions, a restaurant car and "improved type 2nd class accommodation". The last of these probably refers to the British Railways Mark 1 sleeper carriages that were being introduced at this time; these were replacing Grouping era sleepers with four-berth compartments that lacked a washbasin.. Not many of these survive; they had a lot of asbestos in them for one thing.

The main section of the timetable provides an alphabetical list of stations in the mainland UK with listings ranging in detail from a list of all the trains from London for main stations (with departure and arrival) to times from a major hub for branch lines. For example, Ashton in Devon is 40 minutes from Exeter St. David's and served on weekdays only... although less than five months later, it lost its passenger service entirely.

Each station has its distance from London (184 1/2 miles) and single fares for 2nd class or 1st class (30s 6d and 45s 9d) respectively at a time when railway fares were fixed per mile; 14s 7d for every 100 miles. Why this was abandoned, I don't know...

Pages 416 to 652 contain 122 full timetables for the London suburban routes, the Underground and finally boat trains to mainland Europe.

The historical context

British Railways had just turned 10 at this point and was still building steam locomotives; while simultaneously constructing new diesel and electric traction, the last for lines that were about to be electrified or had already been. All this was going on under the aegis of the 'Modernisation Plan' published in December 1954, back when you didn't have a fancy title designed for Twitter hashtags for this sort of thing and social media was a group getting together to watch a television show.

The Modernisation Plan would have decidedly mixed results in terms of traction; while it gave us much-loved units like the 4CEP and the burly beast of a locomotive that is the Class 47, many of the diesel classes were rushed into production by people with limited experience in building diesel locomotives, with a result that some didn't last much longer than steam locomotives. Ultimately, its goal to eliminate BR's operating deficit was a failure, mainly due to the plan being more 'replace steam' than 'update the railway for changing patterns of transport'. The next step was Beeching and all that entailed.

Electrification therefore was decidedly limited at this point outside London, where all the Southern Region suburban lines had been done before the war, the Liverpool Street to Shenfield suburban service just after it and the long process of getting the wires along the West Coast Main Line was yet to start. Steam was still very much king at this point in time, with pre-war and wartime classes joined by the post-war 'Standards'. Some of those could reach 100mph on a good day with a highly competent crew and a decent run or downward gradient; they certainly could not sustain it.

British Railways had started to introduce the frankly superlative Mark 1 coaches (in timber veneer and not laminate) from 1951 onwards, but they were by no means universal. Grouping era stock was still running until the early 1970s, such as the 4COR EMUs out of Waterloo and various non-corridor suburban stock. Some of the Mark 1s themselves were 'closed compartment', which wasn't the most pleasant of things on a late night.

Many services were what was known as a 'through carriage'; a number of carriages attached to one particular train, detached along the way and connected to another service when they didn't form one of their own. Getting in the wrong coach was not a brilliant idea.

Lines had been being closed for a while and would continue to be; the Midland and Great Northern Joint Railway line in North Norfolk (now partly served by the heritage North Norfolk Railway) would be recommended for total closure in May 1958 and go the following year; in January it was served by a decent number of long distance trains running from King's Cross and Liverpool Street. However, Beeching had yet to arrive and swing the axe still further.


One final thing is safety; the AWS system was finally being made mandatory across the network following the 1952 crash at Harrow and Wealdstone, although main lines had priority, which was too late to prevent another crash at Lewisham in 1957 that killed 90 people. Those fairly common events are one thing that enthusiasts definitely do not miss.

The travel times 

As mentioned, steam is a good deal slower than diesel or electric traction and this shows in the journey times:

• London King's Cross to Edinburgh Waverley was generally at least 7 hours; the Flying Scotsman came in at two minutes under that mark. It was also possible to go from St Pancras, in which case, you'd be looking at 9 hours 37 on a 'through carriage'.
• London Paddington to Cardiff Central was just under 3 hours; the average today is around 2 hours 4 minutes. It could be less, but the High Speed Train proved so successful, more stops are required for all the passengers.
• London Euston to Manchester London Road (renamed to Manchester Piccadilly in 1960) is around 3 hours 45.
• London Victoria to Brighton could regularly be done in an hour flat using electric multiple units; today this is doable in 54 minutes.
• London to Shenfield: 37 minutes on a semi-fast. It's an average of 24 minute today.

Conclusion

Things were a lot slower under steam, but you might have wanted it that way...