Bradshaw's Guide

[8] In April 1845, the issue number jumped from 40 to 141:[6] the publisher claimed this was an innocent mistake, although it has been speculated as a commercial ploy, where more advertising revenue could be generated by making it look longer-established than it really was.

When in 1865, Punch praised Bradshaw's publications, it stated that "seldom has the gigantic intellect of man been employed upon a work of greater utility."

At last, some order had been imposed on the chaos that had been created by some 150 rail companies whose tracks criss-crossed the country and whose largely uncoordinated network was rapidly expanding.

Parts of Bradshaw's guide began to be reset in the newer British Railways style from 1955, but modernisation of the whole volume was never completed.

In W. Somerset Maugham's "The Book Bag" the narrator states "I would sooner read the catalogue of the Army and Navy Stores or Bradshaw's Guide than nothing at all, and indeed have spent many delightful hours over both these works" Crime writers were fascinated with trains and timetables, especially as a new source of alibis.

One mention is by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle in the Sherlock Holmes story The Valley of Fear: "the vocabulary of Bradshaw is nervous and terse, but limited."

Other references include another Sherlock Holmes story, "The Adventure of the Copper Beeches"; Lewis Carroll's long poem Phantasmagoria; and Bram Stoker's Dracula, which makes note of Count Dracula reading an "English Bradshaw's Guide" as part of his planning for his voyage to England.

In the 1866 comic opera Cox and Box, the following exchange takes place: There is also a reference in Death in the Clouds (1935) by Agatha Christie: "Mr Clancy, writer of detective stories ... extracted a Continental Bradshaw from his raincoat pocket ... to work out a complicated alibi."

In Daphne du Maurier's Rebecca (1938), the second Mrs de Winter observes that "Some people have a vice of reading Bradshaws.

Another reference is in an aside in The Riddle of the Sands (1903) by Erskine Childers: "... an extraordinary book, Bradshaw, turned to from habit, even when least wanted, as men fondle guns and rods in the close season."

In G. K. Chesterton's The Man Who Was Thursday, the protagonist Gabriel Syme praises Bradshaw as a poet of order: "No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride.

Bradshaw is mentioned in modern novels with a period setting, and in Philip Pullman's The Shadow in the North (Sally Lockhart Quartet).

In the Terry Pratchett Discworld novel “Raising Steam,” Moist Von Lipwig meets a Mrs. Georgina Bradshaw who subsequently begins writing guides to rail destinations for the Ankh-Morpork and Sto Lat Hygienic Railway.

Network Rail had discontinued official hard copies in favour of PDF editions, which could be downloaded free of charge.