Bradshaw

Lately in London I picked up a copy of Bradshaw’s Continental Railway Guide and General Handbook for 1913. At 1,106 pages, this massive work of reference was compiled by hand; revised annually; subsidised by the sale of hundreds of advertisements, and provided an awesome vista of unencumbered travel by rail the length and breadth of Europe, indeed beyond, from Trondheim to Jerusalem; from Manchuria to Astrakhan at the mouth of the Volga on the Caspian Sea and thence to Lisbon or Dublin. Its timetables covered every branch line; provided accurate information about pretty much every railway siding, bridle path (for the enthusiastic pedestrian) and stopping place; and also noted whether or not there was a restaurant car and/or sleepers, as well as local time differences +/- Greenwich Mean Time; and listed the thousands of comfortable hotels from which international travellers could take their pick—often for a cure or to take the waters at any number of popular spas. This is Europe on the eve of destruction, and this Europe, it strikes you, closely resembles the one from which Britain is about to cast herself adrift next March. True, in 1913 there were any number of frontiers to cross, but the psychic picture, by contrast, is one of relatively unrestricted circulation between the European capitals and on a network of railways whose proliferation in far less than 100 years must constitute one of the most radical, revolutionary feats of infrastructure, of transcontinental construction that has ever been undertaken. Beyond the laying of the tracks themselves, you need only contemplate the corresponding numbers of bridges, viaducts, cuttings, tunnels, turntables, railway stations, coaling stations, level crossings, and so on to grasp what was achieved through the second half of the nineteenth century—five short decades only. The catastrophe of 1914 threw up barriers many of which have remained insuperable ever since. It swept away the completely fluid Europe of Bradshaw, and in many respects we are still dealing with the consequences. True, there are important qualifiers. Those who consulted Bradshaw were in the minority, no doubt about it. The vast majority of people never travelled at all, and the poorest still tended to travel only as far as they could walk. It was not uncommon for an old party in Windsor never to have set foot in London. However, in 1913 Bradshaw people were growing in number at an accelerating rate; travel by rail was increasingly accessible to the many and not only the privileged few, so in 1914 the effect of sudden disruption, you could argue, had never before had an impact upon more people the length and breadth of Europe. After 1918, Bradshaw was back in business but you sense that by then something innate had permanently gone missing from the network, apart from free circulation within the former Austro-Hungarian and Ottoman and German and Russian Empires.