Guides, timetables and rule books

About these books

Where the trains went, and when

The first Bradshaw’s Railway Time Tables came out in October 1839, priced at sixpence, and the copy on the site is dated on its title page “10th Mo. 19th, 1839”. It is a small book in green cloth with the title stamped in gold, sold by G. Bradshaw of Brown-Street, Manchester. Inside are a map of the railways in Lancashire coloured by hand, plans of Liverpool, Manchester and Leeds, and the trains on the lines between them. The Liverpool to Manchester table names twenty-one stopping places in its 31 miles and allows each passenger 60lbs. of luggage; on the Manchester and Bolton, dogs went at 6d. each. The Bradshaws that followed in 1840 are here too.

The Old Colony Railroad and Fall River Line printed its timetable for the Central and Cape Cod Divisions as a four-page folder, to take effect on Monday, October 22, 1888, in Eastern Standard Time, with the week-day times for Cottage City, Edgartown and Nantucket printed beside a map of the whole system. Guidebooks took the traveller further. F. N. Otis’s Illustrated History of the Panama Railroad of 1862 carries a guide for passengers crossing the isthmus, with woodcuts of the line and the country it ran through.

The rule books were the other side of the timetable, written for the men who kept the trains to it. The Ontario, Simcoe and Huron Railroad Union Company issued its rules and regulations for the persons it employed in 1854, the Toronto Street Railway its rules for drivers and conductors in 1880, and the Baltimore and Ohio its Book of Rules in 1913.