Why Timetable World?
Public transport timetables from yesteryear. What is the fascination for old railroad, bus, airline and shipping schedules that encourages professional publishers, archivists and hobbyists to reprint facsimiles of these out-of-date items? And by providing complete facsimiles online, what is Timetable World doing that hasn't been done before?
The timetables and maps offer hours of browsing opportunities to the amateur historian and transport enthusiast. Use the timetables to imagine journeys that millions made in the past and rarely do now. As an emigrant, as a travelling business person, as a vacationer. Look at the wealth of on-board services - sleeping- and restaurant-cars, through-cars and slip-coaches. Marvel at how complex the railroads were in those pre-computer days. Evidence on-the-ground of the rural branch lines and dense industrial networks is fast-disappearing but together, the timetables, the maps and the links to other online resources help recreate a lost world.
Timetables and maps are a great research tool. Transport networks tell us a great deal about the geography, the industrial development, the social history of a nation and its political culture, physically turned into lines, bridges, tunnels. How much more interesting to look back at how the networks have changed in response to changing settlement patterns, industrialisation, de-industrialisation, border-changes, the impact of economic bubble and depression, the spread of personal mobility? How railroad companies competed and duplicated in some countries, or acted as agents of the state in others. How changing technology, rising labour costs and increasing alternatives caused transport undertakings to adapt and thrive, or die. By bringing timetables and maps together, we can see not only where trains ran and ships sailed, but how often, how fast, and how services have improved or declined over time.
The Scope of Timetable World
Not all the elements shown in the picture are available now, but it shows where we're heading.
Online Service
Timetable World is an online service, free to use.
As an online service, Timetable World can make your search easier and more rewarding. We apply a creative approach to indexing the pages to make access quicker and more intuitive. The underlying database allows you to search and compare across multiple timetables and maps just as easily, which would be hard-to-do with the originals or other book- and CD-based facsimiles.
Our aim is to build a global collection of complete scanned transport timetables and maps for use by historians, geographers, archivists, transport enthusiasts, students and the like. The collection will encompass any country, any public transport mode, any historical period. Not every book - but representative examples covering each country and time period (though not current timetables). By making the collection free-to-users we hope to encourage non-financially-motivated contributions and integrate better with other free-to-use sources, such as Google Maps, Google Earth and the like.
Railroad timetables have the biggest "lost" physical infrastructure to document, and is the first priority for Timetable World. Some great websites already exist for airline timetables, but Timetable World will try to cover all modes as resources allow.
The project was launched in May 2009. The collection is currently very limited but there are a number of ways you may be able to help us to grow the collection. So please read on.
Image Quality
Scans of timetables and maps are made at 400x400 dpi (dots per inch). The resulting data files occupy several gigabytes per book. OCR (optical character recognition) is used at these high resolutions to help prepare the index. For display in Timetable World, we apply image-compression techniques, which dramatically improve access times and save bandwidth with only limited loss of usable precision. Click on these sample images to review the results, and here to find out more about the technology used in Timetable World.
Copyright
Timetable World takes copyright seriously. Copyright law varies between countries and it is not always clear whether an item is in-copyright or out-of-copyright. Where possible, we obtain permission from transport undertakings and other publishers to scan and disseminate historical items that might be in-copyright on a free-use basis.
You are free to use the information and images in Timetable World for your private study and for non-commercial dissemination. You can apply to Timetable World for access to the full-precision scans, but there will be cost associated with preparing and delivering the data on physical media.
Contributing
Of course, the smell and feel of an old book is not available on an online service. Many of the original items are rare, usually held in private collections, and often printed on thin, acid paper and quite fragile. Ephemera is rarely valued until it is already old so even libraries discard superseded items. Collectors of physical timetables get a buzz from rooting-out and handling a rare item, but we encourage anyone who has historical material to share it with Timetable World for scanning and indexing. We use a professional book-scanning service, which specialises in handling delicate archive items.
Other types of contribution are also welcome. Timetable World will publish (or re-publish) relevant articles about timetable content, preparation and interpretation, maps, industrial and social history, network theory and the like. Please contact us to discuss this, or any of your ideas, further.
You can assist by collecting current timetables, especially those in PDF form, for future publication (once dissemination rights have been established and the timetables have been superseded).
All contributions will be credited on Timetable World.