When the national railway operators ceased publishing a single national printed timetable many people, who did not have access to the internet or simply liked print better, felt the lack. That lack was filled by Middleton Press, a cottage industry based in Sussex who had made a great success of books of old railway photographs which larger publishers had said would not sell. They now published, as Rail Times, the national railway timetable which the operators had thought no longer necessary. I was an enthusiastic subscriber from the beginning, preferring to see the ‘hidden wiring’ of different routes and times and compare them for myself rather than trust an algorithm to produce a single right answer. There turned out to be a healthy demand for Rail Times, some of which came from railway operators in mainland Europe for use in enquiry offices.
Middleton Press said that their market research had shown that potential customers wanted a publication that was portable. Early issues of Rail Times, though unsurprisingly not small or light in any absolute sense, were pleasingly compact and enjoyable to handle. I was happy to take it away with me for long stays in London, and to carry it on day trips exploring railway lines with a rover ticket.
As time went on, things did not go smoothly for Rail Times. Network Rail, who provided the timetable data, became invariably late in doing so, so that the published volume did not reach subscribers until a week or more after the timetables began validity. The data NR provided was often inaccurate, so much so that Middleton Press for a while ceased getting it from NR, instead using data from the publishers of the European Rail Timetable to publish an ‘abbreviated’ Rail Times containing only summary timetables – very easily portable, and as data presentation curiously elegant but, while usually fine for end-to-end journeys, it did not provide the instant detailed information you were likely to want while exploring local lines.
Eventually the comprehensive Rail Times reappeared but, thanks to the need for multiple timetables to cover engineering works and suchlike, its volume had expanded by about a third and its weight by at least as much. I no longer felt inclined to carry it on day trips, or on longer stays away. I found I was consulting it less (partly because of age and deteriorating eyesight) though I faithfully went on subscribing.
Demand must have been falling. In 2017 the editor, Vic Mitchell, wrote of comprehensive printed timetables: ‘Few nations now retain one’. Two years later he announced that the winter 2019 edition, valid from December 2019 to May 2020, would be the last: ‘I share your sadness that this is our last edition. It will, unfortunately, no longer be viable to have Rail Times printed.’
It was tragic luck that this final edition had its validity curtailed two months early, by the introduction of an emergency timetable in March 2020. But I have kept the final edition because it is now a significant archival source. Though even its nominal validity has long since ceased, it is for the time being the only record I have of what a normal-times train service looks like. For me – and can I be the only one? – the final edition of Rail Times is enjoying a strange afterlife. Even Middleton Press, to whose commercial acumen I pay grateful tribute, cannot have foreseen that.
Update: February 2021
I am very sorry to learn of the death of Vic Mitchell on 18 January, at the age of 86. As should be clear from the post above, he had an entrepreneurial instinct of an unusual type, making a commercial success of seemingly recondite ventures which larger, more conventional businesses had thought had no potential. Described by the Railway Magazine as ‘a self-confessed eccentric’, he was, it is also clear, one of those determined to plot his own individual path through life. He was in short a champion of ‘All things counter, original, spare, strange’. Such people are rare and valuable. My condolences to his family and friends.
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