Retired Engineer's Timetable Collection Declared 'Historically Significant' by No One Except Retired Engineer

Retired locomotive engineer Walter Timetable has declared his personal collection of 4,000 printed train schedules spanning 46 years to be 'a nationally significant historical archive,' a designation that no institution, organization, or individual besides Walter Timetable has endorsed. 'Every schedule tells a story,' said Timetable, standing in the spare bedroom he has converted into what he calls the Walter Timetable Center for Railway Temporal Studies. 'This one from October 1974 shows the 6:42 AM service to Leeds was moved to 6:47 AM. Five minutes. Do you understand what that means?' When asked what it means, Timetable produced a binder containing his analysis of the scheduling change, which ran to thirty-seven pages and concluded that the alteration was made to accommodate a new freight service on the same line. The analysis took him four months. The collection has been offered to the National Railway Museum, the Smithsonian, the British Library, and the Millbrook Heritage Railway, all of which declined. The National Railway Museum's rejection letter described the collection as 'impressive in scope' while noting that they already possess 'sufficient timetables.' 'There is no such thing as sufficient timetables,' Timetable responded. His wife, Dorothy, who shared the house with the collection for thirty years before it was moved to the spare bedroom, described the archive as 'the reason I took up gardening.' 'He reads them at night,' she said. 'He reads old train schedules the way normal people read novels. He has favorites. He rereads them. He has a ranking system.' Timetable is currently seeking grant funding to digitize the collection, a process he estimates will take six years. He has received no grants but remains optimistic. 'History will vindicate me,' he said, straightening a display of Southern Railway summer schedules from 1968.