My Site contains an expanding series of lists aiming to record all passenger stations and stopping places for various railway and tramway systems throughout the world. This includes relocated and restricted use stations (e.g. for private use, workmen, sports events, armed forces, etc), where information has been found. Information is given either on an “all time” basis or for a particular date or period. All lists give stations and stops in geographical sequence for each line.

I first started preparing such lists in the early 1950's when I was about 10 years old. My first effort was to copy out (by hand, of course) all the stations in a rather tatty copy of a 1949 Bradshaws Guide given to me by one of my teachers. About the same time, my Uncle gave me a Rutebok for Norge (Norway) railway timetable for 1953. I soon noted that the footnotes indicated there were extra stops not shown in the timetable. My second list, typewritten, followed a holiday with my parents to Norway in 1962. I found that many of the local line leaflets did show these stops, but not all and I could not find leaflets for all lines. Thus, I spent several hours at various stations copying out the names of these minor stops from staff issue booklets kindly shown to me by the staff and prepared a list on return home.

Those gifts started me on my life long interest in acquiring railway timetables from across the world. My collection now numbers around 5000 items, both public and working timetables. This is not the largest collection in the world, of course, but one of the most varied, as I aim to acquire items at about 5 - 10 year intervals, rather than long runs of every issue.

Preparation of the current series of lists started in the 1980's, originally by electric typewriter, then by use of an Amstrad PC, using Supercalc 3. At that time, only a few were prepared, generally for the smaller British colonies, island systems and in response to queries from collectors of railway tickets. The major expansion of the series was started in the early 1990's. Preparation of lists as Word Documents, I regret, did not commence until 2004. I have retyped some of the older SC3 lists as Word docs. and intend to convert the other older lists in due course. In the meantime, most of the older lists have been scanned in and can be viewed but I cannot update them. Many of these include annotations by hand and other "work in progress" notes. Many of the French Secondary Railways lists (also the two Netherlands lists) were not properly formatted before my Amstrad and printer broke down and have to be read continuously on the left hand side of every page first, then the right hand side.

Impressive but still much to do.

Very impressive. I noted that he did not use the Official Guide in gathering North American stations. Seem that would be helpful.

Well, what appears to be missing is the preservationist angle. From the one short look I took a one listing, yes, the list is impressive. But adding a footnote about a station from the point of being preserved could be added. And yes, I realize that that would be a lot of additional work. But a footnote (sp - station preserved) or (spal - station preserved in another location) or (sxbnp - station existing but not preserved) would help those interested in history and preservation.