All-change at midnight in the latest nrt

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National Rail Timetable

Fares and Services Expert BARRY DOE reviews the National Rail Timetable for December 10 2023June 1 2024

This is only the fifth edition of the Fabdigital National Rail Timetable (NRT), but it has proved to be indispensable owing to its clarity and reliability.

We have gained station three-letter codes, the total elimination of wavy lines, and a vastly improved station index with excellent subdivisions when any station appears in more than four tables.

However, in order to comply with the need to substantially reduce production time/costs, and to make the tables available earlier, Fabdigital has had to make some changes to items that are hand-edited and so consume a great deal of time.

It seems that very few users other than enthusiasts want Train IDs shown, while in footnotes references to ‘see table X’ are no longer shown. But these notes still show where trains come from and to where they are going, and the detailed Index makes it easy to find the appropriate tables.

Perhaps the most important change is a move away from rigorously treating midnight as the start and end of the service day. Yes, it’s the start and end of the day, but for clarity if services run for a while after midnight, research showed that users think of those trains as part of the preceding day - they don’t ever think to look at the start of the table for more trains home after a day out.

Of course, Transport for London has moved everyone to think of the start of the day as 0430 for ticketing and timetable purposes, which has perhaps muddied the waters.

But take Table 004 as an example. It had over a page of columns in red to commence, up to the 0022 Paddington-Shenfield then 0046, 0050 and 0055 Liverpool Street-Shenfield, before showing the 0545 Paddington-Abbey Wood. These were all column-heading MX, and there was an additional batch headed MO for the end of Sunday services.

Changes on the Cumbrian Coast mean that no fewer than nine calling points lose their previous status as request stops and become ‘normal’ stopping places. On August 15 2020, Northern 156484 runs south along the Irish Sea at Seascale (near Sellafield) with the 1909 Carlisle to Barrow-in-Furness.

At the end of the table, trains were shown out of Paddington until 0022, then the above 0046, 0050 and 0055 from Liverpool Street - all headed TSM (Tues-Sat). All this was for Mon

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