The garage being too cold for modelling work, I had a burst of ‘compositing inspiration’ to accompany the cough/cold over the Christmas holiday, and made three sets of imaginary Working Time Tables for Atherington Victoria.  The exercising of the “little grey cells” made it an enjoyable distraction.  One must decide the routes’ lengths and imaginary station positions after poring over O.S. maps (and ignoring the geography), comparative train speeds, and head-codes and reporting numbers.  Write all this information on many lists, measure bits of string, wrestle with your conscience as to how far you wish to adhere to ‘reality’, and voila :

The first image, page “F218”, is in a ‘hand set’ compositing style used up to the mid-1970’s (I think).  The filled columns are left-justified, and at this time trains were timed to the half-minute.  I look on bemusedly these days as my fellow commuters and I push onto our too-short train through too few doors, comparing it to the days of the slam-door 4VEPs, when, at some stations, just twenty seconds were timed for a station stop.

But I digress.  The remaining five pages’ columns are centre-justified (and look neater).  My services are:

- F218 and F241 : a 1970’s style passenger service;

- N66 and N76 : a 1974 wagon-load service;

- WK109 and WK111 : a mid-1980’s Speedlink (“ABS” and later “SLK” in Southern Region Freight W.T.T.s) and block-train (“COY”) service.

I included a late-’80’s ‘Q’ (‘runs as required’) service to/from Stratford Yard to serve intermittent deliveries of fruit from overseas to Tilling Port, that place being my replacement combination of Eastbourne town and Newhaven.  I am pleased how well ‘Word’ can imitate such a document, and find the results rather pretty, but then documents are my trade.

I messed up the distances between Sanderstead and Farleigh, so replaced the latter with the foolish temporary homage to a much-loved film “Marienbad”, and there are still some minor corrections needed to a few of the fonts.  I am not sure about some of the connections, lay-overs, and turn-around times, — ultimately it is all futile phantasy — but it kept me amused over cups of tea and glasses of port as there was little worth watching on the television.

Thanks to all contributors of comments to previous posts over the years who prompted the idea.  I hope this is of interest, and might help others who “want to make a time table” for their layouts.