NEW MAY 2022.  When World War Two started, the railways had to reduce passenger services in order to give priority to wartime traffic. Here we offer a planned working timetable for passenger trains and their associated empty stock workings, issued by the LNER at some undisclosed date in 1939. It covers the entire GE area, both suburban and country.

The front cover proclaims that "ON AND FROM A DATE to be subsequently advised, the whole of the Passenger Train Service (including Parcels and News Trains) in the Public and Working Time Tables WILL BE WITHDRAWN and trains will run as shown in this Emergency Time Table. The times of the trains from stations must be advertised by blackboard notice."

The LNER issued the public timetables for their reduced emergency services, which started on 2 October 1939. These are available from the Files Emporium as Files TP015 and TP016, covering suburban and country zones respectively. The timetables here do not match those ones, however: the cuts are much more drastic. The Felixstowe branch, for example, was provided with seven passenger trains each way in the October public timetable, but in this working one there are only three.

What was its status, then? One possibility is that it was a first draft for the October 1939 revisions, but it was later decided that less severe measures would suffice. More likely, however, it post-dates those revisions, and indicates plans secretly in hand for far greater action if it turned out that the national situation required it - the fact that trains were to be advertised by blackboards at stations rather than by a public timetable supports that view. If so, presumably the plans here mercifully never had to be enacted.

We thank David Woodward of the LNER Society for making these scans available to us, so the item now becomes accessible to all who are interested.

We have provided bookmarks to the main tables. The file will be available to download as soon as payment has been made. You go to your account and click on ‘Downloads’. New customers create an account as they place their order.