Invitation to adventure: 150 years of the European rail timetable

For a book that was to make history, the slim first edition of Cook’s Continental Time Tables looks entirely inconsequential. It can easily be slipped into a jacket pocket. The year is 1873, and the book is the pilot issue of the volume which today is still published as the European Rail Timetable.

The 1870s represented a golden age of European travel. International tourism was booming: a growing middle class could, for the first time, afford journeys to see regions that their parents would never have dreamed of visiting. In England, in particular, there was a huge appetite for visiting accessible regions of the near-Continent, notably the Low Countries, the Rhineland and the western Alps.

Few of these travellers from England could afford berths on the first Wagons-Lits sleeping cars which, in 1873, made their debut on routes from the Belgian port of Ostend to Germany. Instead the new adventurers, ever conscious of keeping to a budget, travelled by day trains, usually in second class. They stayed in modest hotels, paying with special coupons supplied by Thomas Cook – the man who industrialised and democratised international travel.

The preacher-turned-entrepreneur provided for the tourist’s every need. Prepaid hotel coupons were an ingenious invention permitting travellers to know prices in advance and avoided having to fiddle with foreign currency. There was also the security of having a hotel explicitly commended by the omniscient Cook.

For some, there was the chance of a tour personally escorted by the man himself, and this gave nervous travellers or first-timers the chance to venture abroad with greater confidence. Cook’s tours became especially popular with single women. But there were also great cohorts of travellers who were happy to go-it-alone with the help of Cook’s prepaid coupons – and, from March 1873, his invaluable timetable.

The choices of routes preferred by those early travellers did not greatly vary. They stuck to Cook’s recommendations, favouring hotels where they would inevitably meet other English guests.

The first issue of Cook’s Continental is an insight into another world, one where readers are reassured that several English newspapers are available at the Old Bible Hotel in Amsterdam and that…