TRY Timetable World
Timetable World is free to use. Here are a few books from Europe and North America you can browse immediately. Just click on the images. The full catalogue is available from the menus.
 | In its final year before nationalisation, this LMS timetable shows a network stretching from London to the northernmost station in Scotland (Thurso). Railways in Northern Ireland were part of the LMS, and were to be hived of into Northern Ireland Railways in 1948. Other "out-of-area" lines reached South Wales, the south coast (at Bournemouth) and the Essex coast (Shoeburyness). |
 | Published since 1868, The Official Guide of the Railways covered rail and marine passenger services across North and Central America. Although the network was much-reduced by the 1930's Depression and private motor-vehicle and airline competition, this edition from August 1952 still runs to 1,500 pages and shows a largely-dieselised network before the major cutbacks in passenger services of the late-1950s. |
 | The East German (DDR) timetable in operation when the two Germanies were formally re-united (3rd October 1990). The Berlin Wall had fallen in November the previous year and Karl-Marx-Stadt had reverted to Chemnitz, but cross-border services are minimal and the timetable still carries an advertisement for Soviet Railways. |
 | The Western Region of British Railways covers the south-west of England, the south Midlands and most of Wales. Many routes are rural and sparsely-populated, but the South Wales coalfield contrasts with a dense railway network criss-crossing and tunneling the hilly terrain. |
 | Scotland was served by the London, Midland & Scottish (LMS) and London North-Eastern Railway [LNER] companies prior to the formation of British Railways in 1947. This is one of the earliest unified national timetables for Scotland, prepared for the newly-created Scottish Region of BR. |
NEWS from Timetable World
Date: 19th August 2016
Various back-end changes on the new hosting service
Date: 14th June 2016
timetableworld.net/com are being migrated to a new web-hosting service. The process should be complete by late-June 2016.
The website will be revamped once the migration is complete.
Date: 24th September 2011
Two more timetable books have been added.
The Western Region (Great Britain) from 1965 shows the mid-point in the Modernisation Plan, with more thinning of branches still to come. The book was kindly scanned and donated to timetableworld by Colin Green.
Click on the image below to view the former main line between Paddington and Birmingham Snow Hill, Shrewsbury, Chester and Birkenhead. Note the hourly through services to/from Shrewsbury (there are none today), and one serving mid-Wales all year round. There's even a sleeper service from Wolverhampton for what is today a 100-minute journey.
This Deutsche Reichbahn timetable (from East Germany) covers a momentus period in history when the two Germanies are re-united. The railway administrations of East and West merged four years later in 1994, so this book shows the former still-segregated operations.
Click on the image below, which opens on the famous narrow-guage route across the Harz mountains (Wernigerode - Nordhausen - Table 678). The Warsaw Pact listening post on the Brocken (1,141m) has a Soviet/Russian presence for four years after Re-unification and the friction-only rail ascent (Table 676) remains out-of-use.
Date: 3rd July 2011
Timetableworld.com can now be viewed in many languages, thanks to Google's website translator. Choose your langauge from the list available top-right.
Date: 17th June 2011
Two new timetable books have been added. They both cover north-western Germany, one from the final year of the War (Deutsche Reichbahn 1944) and one from Deutsche Bundesbahn 1962.
Click on the images below.
Date: 14th May 2011
The website has been revamped in order to simplify the site, and a new tile-based approach (like Google Maps) has been adopted to improve the rendering of large timetable images. Station-based indexing and Google Maps integration has been removed for the time being. It's not gone for good but the priority is to grow the collection first.
If you have any comments or suggestions about the updated site, we'd love to hear from you. contact@timetableworld.com
RAILWAY TIMETABLES
Timetable World is a free-to-use online resource for those interested in transport, social history, local studies and the like. Complete facsimilies of timetables are available to browse, zoom into, compare.
Key features are:
- Complete timetable are reproduced
- High-precision scans are used
- Pull-out maps are also reproduced and are fully-zoomable
- Indexing enables users to browse efficiently
The collection is growing, and we welcome timetable loans to help the project along.
New image viewer
The new image viewer makes it easier and faster to access large timetable sections.
- PCs (zooming using mouse scroll, same as Google Maps)
- Macs (2D panning with the mouse scroll or touch panels)
- Mobile devices with touch interfaces: iOS and Android (supports pinch to zoom and pan gestures)
- Phones and tablets (scales controls according to the screen size)
- Zoom-in: Up to 400%. Zoom-out: Varies
- Thumbnail navigation available
Supported browsers
Timetable World supports all the major modern browsers and can be accessed on leading mobile devices.
- Chrome 3+
- Safari 3+
- FireFox 2+
- Internet Explorer 8+
- Opera 9+
All these browsers are free to download and install.
Contributing to Timetable World: Timetable Loans
Whether you are a serious, long-term timetable collector, or just have a few old books, we'd love to hear from you. Getting your timetables scanned, indexed and co-mingled with other on-line timetables is a great way to preserve and get more use from these delicate items and help others share in the contents. If you're an archivist, Timetable World offers a solid way to improve access without undue impact on the originals.
- To begin with, please contact us at contact@timetableworld.com and provide a few basic details of the items you can offer.
That means: - Publisher or Transport Undertaking
- Validity period
- Condition of the item
- Country and Language
- Number of pages (approximately) and any pull-out maps
- Estimated value (only necessary for higher-value individual items over USD50).
- Our considerations when deciding which items to proceed with, and when, are:
- Rarity and historical value
- The likely interest to Timetable World users
- How different from, or complementary to, the rest of the collection
- For items still in copyright, whether we are able to obtain a reproduction license
- The condition of the item
- The backlog of scanning and indexing work already committed.
We'll be happy to cover your postage costs.
Copyright
Timetable World takes copyright seriously. Timetable publishers are automatically granted copyright protection on the information content and its presentation for a period of time. We will only offer timetables for which we have obtained a publisher's license or where we reasonably believe the item to be out-of-copyright. We seek licenses to reproduce scanned images on the understanding that we make subsequent access on a non-commercial and free-to-users basis, and will credit items accordingly. The same terms will apply to any person or organisation that uses material obtained from Timetable World.
Copyright can be re-assigned, as often happens when a transport undertaking is acquired or liquidated. We will make reasonable efforts to identify the current beneficial owner in order to seek permission to reproduce images. If you believe we have inadvertently impinged your copyright, please contact us immediately at contact@timetableworld.com.
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; there will be cost associated with preparing and delivering the data on physical media.