ABC Rail Guide

"ABC Guide" redirects here. For the short-lived Australian on-air TV guide, see ABC Television (Australian TV network) § 2000 to present.

ABC Rail Guide
The ABC Alphabetical Railway Guide, No. 847, April 1924
CategoriesTravel
FrequencyMonthly
Founded1853
Final issue2007
CountryUnited Kingdom
LanguageEnglish
Mock railway timetable from Punch magazine, 1865, satirising the complexity of ABC's competitor Bradshaw.[1]
Cover of first edition of Agatha Christie's The A.B.C. Murders, 1936.

The ABC Rail Guide, first published in 1853 as The ABC or Alphabetical Railway Guide, was a monthly railway timetable guide to the United Kingdom that was organised on an alphabetical basis that made it easier to use than its competitor Bradshaw's Guide which had a reputation for difficulty.

It was one of many railway timetable guides published during the expansion of the British railway network in the Victorian era, had many imitators, and was seen as symbolic of the more regulated nature of life in the industrial era.

In 1936, the guides were a plot element in Agatha Christie's detective novel The A.B.C. Murders. After a number of changes of publisher in the later twentieth century during which it was renamed the OAG Rail Guide, it ceased publication in 2007.

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