What was a plausible timetable for a train journey across Europe in 1870?

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Accepted answer

The excellent Timetable World website makes old railway, bus, and airline timetables available on the Internet. Obviously covering every possible route on every possible date would be a monumental task, but the following timetables straddle your request:

Don't be surprised if it takes you a few minutes to get the hang of the Timetable World interface. It does not open a PDF showing one page at a time, as you might expect. Instead, it shows all the pages and then you zoom in on the ones you want to see, as if you were looking at an online map. This is effective because timetables are often spread across multiple pages and have different orientations (even on the same page!). You can use the bookmark icon (the one with a star) in the top left-hand corner to open the table of contents.

You will also need to put a little bit of effort into understanding Bradshaw's Continental Railway Guide; 19th century travellers talked about it in the same way that people today complain about the mysteries of the Facebook algorithm or online banking.

Let's use your example of Calais to Vienna. Because Bradshaw's was published primarily for British travellers, the easiest way is to see the possibilities is to go to the 1866 Through Routes bookmark and look at the London-Vienna route (page i*, which is not the same as page i or page 1, so use the bookmark). So you can see that at this date you could settle down in your carriage in London at 7.25 a.m. and relax, knowing that you could stay in the same seat on the same ticket until you arrived in the Austrian capital at 9.30 a.m. the following morning. I don't know whether this train stopped or even passed through Calais (many train ferries used Boulogne on the French side of the Channel). You would need to cross-reference the arrival time in Paris against the times listed for the Calais-Paris route to see whether you could join the through train in Calais or would need to make a connection at another point. It might be faster to just get the fastest train from Calais to Paris and then look at the Paris-Vienna timetable.

For 1880, you could find Vienna in the List of Most Direct Routes (p.8 or use the bookmark), which helpfully lists a London-Vienna route via Calais, with more details on p.80 (which is under the Belgian Railway Timetables bookmark because the route goes via Brussels).

If you are interested in this era you are presumably aware that the Franco-Prussian War of 1870-71 resulted in border changes and therefore the 1866 guide is probably closer to 1870 than 1880. But of course four years is enough time that there would be routine changes anyway. If it's critically important that you have exact times for a particular date in 1870, a 19th century book specialist might be able to get you a copy of the Bradshaw's for that exact month, but be prepared to pay hundreds of dollars/euros/pounds if it's available at all. Unfortunately the main alternative, Cook's Continental Time Table, was not published until 1873.

Upvote:11

Why Calais to Cologne? Ostend to Cologne would be easier and mail boats from Dover started 1846. Rail connections between Ostend through Cologne onwards to Vienna would have existed after 1860.

The first "fast train", introduced on the 16th of September 1861, between Vienna (over Brùnn, Prague, Dresden, Leipzig, Hannover) to Cologne took 32 hours 15 minutes and continued on to Paris (13 hours 5 minutes ; alltogeather 45 hours 20 minutes).

The 1866 version of Bradshaw's (page 311, PDF: 418) for Cologne, shows the route to Vienna over Dresden as the only route. The 1875 version (page 424, PDF: 489) also shows Stuttgart and Munich as alternative routes.

Both show the route to London over Ostende (22 hours) as the first and Calais (26 hours) as an alternative.

The route to Paris from Cologne (Köln) is not meantioned in the newspaper notice shown below.

From @ccprog:
The route to Paris would have been either

  • Köln - Aachen - Liège (Rheinische Eisenbahngesellschaft) - Bruxelles Nord - Gent - Mouscron (Chemin de fer de l'État belge) - Lille - Paris Nord (Compagnie de Chemins de fer du Nord) or
  • Köln - Aachen - Liège - Namur - Charleroi - Jeumont (Compagnie du Nord-Belge, a susidiary of the French Chemins de fer du Nord) - Creil - Paris Nord (Compagnie de Chemins de fer du Nord).

Gent is the station where a train to Paris would leave the main line from Bruxelles to Oostende.
A train from Calais could divert to Bruxelles at Lille.

Railway Time vs. LMT

On the 1st of June 1891, Railway time (UTC+1) was intoduced in Austria and Germany for the railways, replacing the used Prague and Berlin times (Prussia only) which were used in train schedules until then (and were different from the Local Mean Time (LMT) used in the individual cities).

The Berlin time was rounded to the nearest ¼ minute for the individual cities when it was introduced on the 18th of January 1848 as prussian railway time.

  • Cities within the Western European Time Zone (UTC+0)
    • Amsterdam (UTC+0:19:32.13)
    • Brussels (UTC+0:17:30)
    • Dublin (UTC-0:25:21)
    • Lisbon (UTC-0:36:45)
    • London (UTC-0:1:15)
    • Madrid (UTC-0:14:44)
    • Paris (UTC+0:09:21)
  • Cities within the Central European Time Zone (UTC+1)
    • Berlin (UTC+0:53:36)
    • Bern (UTC+0:29:45.5)
    • Budapest (UTC+1:16:20)
    • Copenhagen (UTC+0:50:20)
    • Frankfurt/Main (UTC+0:34:44)
    • Geneva (UTC+0:24:34.39)
    • Hamburg (UTC+0:39:53.81)
    • Karlsruhe (UTC+0:33:38.4)
    • Königsberg (UTC+1:21:58.60)
    • Ludwigshafen (UTC+0:33:47)
    • Munich (UTC+0:46:12)
    • Oslo (UTC+0:43:00)
    • Prague (UTC+0:57:41.5)
    • Rome (UTC+0:49:56)
    • Stockholm (UTC+1:12:12)
    • Stuttgart (UTC+0:36:40.8)
    • Vienna (UTC+1:05:20.2)
    • Zürich (UTC+0:34:08)

Sources:

Since 1846 mail boats had been sailing between Oostende (Ostend) in Belgium and Dover in England, connecting to the railways on both sides.

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