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.
