Bradshaw’s Guide: Three sections down, one to go

Bradshaw’s Guide is a hyperlinked revival of a popular Victorian guide to Britain and Ireland’s nascent railway network.

I started this project twelve years ago and 7 years since my last update, today I can report that I’ve completed the third and penultimate section.

The website now covers 2575 stations, over 230 lines and branches, operated by 89 railway companies, serving 966 towns and cities, across 118 counties and regions.

Tours in the third section include:

• the major cities of Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow,
• the Lake District, at that time split between the counties of Cumberland and Westmoreland,
• Ayr, an opportunity for the guide’s author to wax lyrical about the works of Robert Burns.

The design is largely unchanged, save for a few quality of life improvements, light refactoring and removing front-end hacks and workarounds that are no longer needed.

Ideally, I’d have redesigned the site, improving the curation of the somewhat piecemeal route descriptions and better delineating source material from supporting line diagrams, maps and photochrom prints. Navigating between different stations, places and routes could also be improved. I have some ideas.

From a technical point of view, maps with complex routes can take a long time to appear (if they appear at all). And while the site uses static caching, loading uncached pages for the first time can be painfully slow.

For now, my focus remains on completing the guide. As we arrive in 2025 and approach the 200th anniversary of the birth of the modern railway, I’m a little annoyed that I’ve not yet been able to. I may add remaining place descriptions in the coming months (it’s adding coordinates to stations and preparing routes that takes the most time). Maybe I can get the entire guide online before the railway’s birthday on 27 September.

But even once I’ve added the remaining section, I’ll only have arrived at the point where I can start building something more compelling.