I can't really explain quite why discovering the mere existence of this fills me with such pleasure.  Maybe it's just that it has the right name, or maybe it's because, unlike Network Rail's last attempt at such a thing (3000 pages!) it can actually be carried around without risk of a hernia.

In so many ways, it's a symbol of an earlier, simpler age.  An age where travel was, almost by definition, by train, and where such trains were enormous, gasping, oiled beasts, of brass and steam and soot.  Where railway stations, and everybody in them, smelt of hot coal.
This was the age in which it seemed Sherlock Holmes could barely embark on an adventure without first asking, "Watson, do you happen to have a Bradshaw about your person?"  Watson, that stalwart of reliability, always did, of course.  There would be a feverish rifling of pages, before Holmes would triumphantly announce that they had a mere five minutes to reach Paddington in order to catch the 4.38 express.  This, too, was the age when that express would have had a guaranteed connection with a succession of branch lines, all of them catalogued by Bradshaw, and which would have delivered Holmes & Watson to a tidy little rural station, where their journey would have been completed by pony and trap.

The last original Bradshaw was sadly last published in 1961, but as of December 2007 there's this.

Curiously, in our modern era of internet timetables and journey planners, I have a feeling it really does have a place.  I've ordered one, and I expect to find myself using it.

I really hope it succeeds.