Cook's Continental Timetable August 1939 (Reprint)
'It's all in the CTT...' If you hear those words, ten-to-one the speaker is a travel agent. The initials stand for the famous Continental rail timetable published since 1873 by Thomas Cook. In the 1930s it was also a world shipping guide and a European air timetable, features which were dropped when publication re-started in 1946.
The August 1939 edition, now reprinted, shows Europe's train services at the peak of their pre-war development, with a range of forgotten frontier stations where borders were changed in 1945. The tables start with the Pullman trains such as the North Star, Blue Bird, Golden Arrow, Edelweiss and Therman Express (Paris-Vichy) and continue through the Wagons-Lits company's Trains-de-luxe, each of which has its own table including the Orient Express, the Riviera Express (Berlin to Nice and Cannes) and the Ostend-Karlsbad Express. There were three classes of carriage, but the best trains were first class only, or first and second; third-class passengers had to use slower trains. Annual changes were fewer than today, so this 1939 edition gives a good idea of how the Continent's trains ran throughout the 1930s, plus the newly-introduced diesel trains in Germany. River and lake steamers are included (Rhine, Danube, Volga), and also trains in Turkey and North Africa. Passengers by the Trans-Siberian route and destined for Japan travelled the length of Korea, or took a ship from Dairen. Thomas Cook's timetable has changed far more during the 1953-85 editorship of John Price (who writes the intro-duction) than it did in its first 66 years to 1939.
Hardback with dust jacket, 14x22cm, circa 500 pages,
Condition: Very Good
ISBN: 9780715391136
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