ABC Rail Guide

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. The guide also features in the short story The Girl in the Train and the novel By the Pricking of My Thumbs.

The A.B.C. Murders
In Agatha Christie's detective novel of 1936 featuring Hercule Poirot, The A.B.C. Murders, an "ABC railway guide" is left at the scene of each of a series of murders of which Alexander Bonaparte Cust is suspected. A copy of the guide was pictured on the cover. Christie's grandson, Mathew Prichard, claimed in an interview that the story was inspired by a copy of the ABC guide that she always kept by her telephone. In the novel, after the first murder, a copy of a railway guide is found, open at Andover. Poirot asks the police inspector, "A railway guide, you say. A Bradshaw – or an A B C?" to which the inspector replies "By the Lord, it was an A B C". Poirot subsequently attributes his interest in the case to the involvement of the railway guide, "so familiarly known by its abbreviation of A B C".

In the 1960s, the guide again featured on the cover of Christie's The A.B.C. Murders after the August 1935 edition was chosen as the background image and frame for a scene from the novel in one of Tom Adams' illustrations for the Fontana paperback edition.

The Girl in the Train
When George Rowland is fired by his uncle he dicides to go away. In the ABC guide he finds a location called Rowland's Castle. (The Girl in the Train)

By the Pricking of My Tumbs
Tuppence Beresford uses an ABC guide, among other things, when she is trying to locate a house on a painting by William Boscowan. She remembers having passed the house many years earlier, during a train journey. She tries to triangulate the location of the house by using the locations Medchester, Westleigh, Market Basing, Middlesham and Inchwell.

Why Didn't They Ask Evans?
Frankie Derwent finds an open ABC guide at 17 St Leonard's Gardens, and deduces that Mr and Mrs Cayman has traveled down to Chipping Somerton.