Timetables since 1948

The railways in Great Britain were nationalised in 1948.  British Railways was initially organised into six regions and timetable production was on a regional basis. Scotland had hitherto been divided between two of the Big 4 railway companies - the London, Midland & Scottish Railway (LMSR) and the London & North Eastern Railway (LNER) - but now was its own discrete region.   The LNER was further broken up to into Eastern and North Eastern regions.

Various boundary changes were made over the years as BR's modernisation developed, and the Eastern and North Eastern regions were merged in 1967.

It took until 1974 before a unified national timetable was produced.  The large format books covered a whole year from May, and relied on various supplements to cope with change.  A smaller format was adopted 1982 - described as "handy", but still 1164 pages.  In 1986, publication switched to twice-yearly, usually late-May and late-September.

A form of privatisation of the railways took place from 1994.  The timetable became the Great Britain Passenger Railway Timetable, published initially by Railtrack - the shareholder-owned infrastructure company.  The railways grew strongly - and the timetable with it.  There were two occasions when the book had to be split into Parts 1 and 2, sold together.

Network Rail - an arms-length public body - took over from Railtrack in 2003.  The timetable continued in printed form until 2007, with the final May 2007 edition reaching a chunky 3188 pages.  From December 2007, an electronic railway timetable (ERT) took over, being a PDF download. Alternative publishers, including TSO and the Middleton Press, brought out printed versions to meet the residual demand from customers, but the ventures quickly faded as the interactive timetables from National Rail Enquiries and The Trainline gained favour.

Early PDFs were single files, and were challenging to download on the dial-up connections then prevalent.  Later editions were split into individual files per table.  The former searchability became less straightforward.