You may know that I collect railway paperwork, specifically timetables and train orders. I have a pretty large timetable collection, and for years I’ve shared some scans online (links below).
Recently I’ve been drawing a map for a project that Richard Manicom and Bill Linley are working on. I’ll likely share the map here in a while once their project is published, but for now I am sharing a couple of scanned timetables that came out of that project.
CN timetable #1 took effect a minute after midnight on April 30, 1961 and covers the Chaleur area. This includes northern New Brunswick and northeastern Quebec including the Gaspe region.
CN timetable #5 took effect on June 28, 1963 and also covers the Chaleur area.
Employee timetables are considerably more detailed than public timetables, and include details on sidings, industry sidings, speed limits, weight restrictions and special instructions. They also included a list of medical officers – for periodic checkups, I guess – and watch inspectors, who would inspect the accurate watches that the running trades had to wear back in the days of timetable and train order operation.
Timetables were usually issued in the spring and fall of each year, often taking effect on the day when Daylight Saving Time changed, but not always.
Sometimes details would change after a timetable was issued, so the railway would issue a supplement to the previous timetable containing only the changes from the official timetable. This is the case for the June 28, 1963 Chaleur area timetable, which has two supplements.
The first supplement has changes for the Matapedia, Rimouski, Cascapedia and Chandler subdivisions, adding trains 58/59 and changing trains 629/630 to 29/30. It was essential to issue a supplement any time a scheduled train was added, deleted or changed, because extra trains had to defer to scheduled trains and the crews need to know when every scheduled train was due.
The second supplement revised the same subdivisions, deleting trains 58/59 and changing trains 29/30 back to 629/630. I think CN had added an extra passenger train over the summer and also replaced the RDC / Railliner run with a regular train at the same time. I have no idea why.
Anyway, you can see those timetables and more at my CN Scanned Timetables page. Naturally there is also a CP Scanned Timetables page.
Just One More Thing
Please consider donating blood. It’s a great thing you can do to help others and it doesn’t cost anything except a bit of time and a bit of your blood. Plus you get cookies!
I’ve donated 19 times so far. At the moment I can’t donate blood because my hemoglobin (iron) levels are too low but I hope to return to donating soon.
Find out if you’re eligible, then book an appointment!
Good for you donating Steve. Take an iron supplement and you’ll be fine. I’ve been donating for 40 years. That’s a lot of cookies.
Hi Eric, thanks for donating so many times! My hemoglobin levels are a little more complicated because I have celiac disease… hoping to get things back to normal shortly.