Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914

Great Western Railway timetable poster, c.1903-1914.

Printed by R Quinton, Chepstow, letterpress, 430 x 280mm (Collection of Mike Esbester)

In the first decade of the twentieth century the Great Western Railway produced this poster to advertise services to an event at Chepstow Castle, ‘on the banks of the far-famed River Wye.’ At some point in its life the poster was trimmed to fit in the confines of a book, and the details of the event – its twelfth annual occurrence – were removed, so we do not know what it was. The lower half of the poster gives us a list of stations from which trains could be caught. The River Wye and Chepstow Castle were ‘far-famed’ indeed: as well as South Wales and Birmingham, which would perhaps be expected, people could come from Liverpool, London and Manchester.

This poster would have been displayed at railway stations, for people to consult; it is probable that at least one copy of the poster would have been displayed at the stations listed. Indirectly it casts light on the social lives of people in the past: the day off work, here Whit Tuesday, offered the possibility of an excursion beyond the confines of the locality. Access to transport in these ways expanded people’s worlds; and it helped to transform what might once have been small-scale local events into larger-scale regional, if not national, events.

The display typeface used for ‘Chepstow Castle,’ with its two-colour printing, is an example of the ways in which printers could attract the eye without the use of pictures. There is a great contrast between the simplicity and clarity of the message in the poster’s top half and the complexity of its bottom half. Before readers could claim the promised excursion they had to navigate their ways through the densely-packed information detailing the train times. This information was shrouded in conventions – barely tolerable if you understood them, and almost certainly impenetrable if you were not familiar with the codes. These codes include the use of darker typefaces for ‘significant’ stations (such as Wolverhampton, Dudley, Birmingham or Kidderminster in the first column) or dots to lead the eye from the station to the departure time (except where there are quote marks, signifying ‘ditto’, in the second column in the stations underneath Treherbert). In addition, note that the poster gave train times only to Chepstow; for details of the return journey would-be passengers had to find the information elsewhere. In bold typeface underneath the outbound times, people were advised: ‘N.B.-For times of returning and other particulars, see Official announcements of the Companies.’ In the 1900s, was railway travel a common enough occurrence that most people would have been familiar with the timetable and its conventions? 
(Click to enlarge detail, below.)