Historical route planner

[Nelsontoyota]

Does a historical route planner exist?
I have often thought about road trips of my childhood and wondered about the route that was taken by my father as he drove us to wherever we were going.
Does such a thing exist?

[doebag]

The AA and the RAC used to provide route plans to their members. You would tell them start and finish points and anyhwere in between and they would type them up. These do appear on Ebay and similar from time to time.

However I have used a dedicated route planning app like MyRoute-app along with the historical OS maps available through this website to replicate routes from my childhood.

[c2R]

Apologies if you know already, but if you click on the Maps link in the yellow banner above, you'll find out of copyright Mapping...

You could use this to try and work out which towns on your trips would have been bypassed and likely routes!

[Nelsontoyota]

Thank you all for your replies. It certainly would be a useful website if you could select a route and a year and look at the routings. To improve it a bit more the ability to select a typical period cruising speed to work out the travel times. My wife has been telling me about trips to Cornwall from West Kent as a child in a Hillman Hunter in the 1970s sparked this request.

[KeithW]

Thank you all for your replies. It certainly would be a useful website if you could select a route and a year and look at the routings. To improve it a bit more the ability to select a typical period cruising speed to work out the travel times. My wife has been telling me about trips to Cornwall from West Kent as a child in a Hillman Hunter in the 1970s sparked this request.

There were no turn by turn Route Planning systems way back when. You had to pore over a map, select your route and write it down with pen and paper. The earliest such appeared in the 1990's as I recall. The AA did have maps with recommended routes from large towns and cities. I have one from Middlesbrough that I think dates back to the mid 70's

There are Route Planning maps are right here on Sabre
Click on Maps

When you see a map of the UK Select Category and you will see an option for OS Route Planning Maps

In the drop down list you will see Route Planning maps for the years between 1964 and 1971

Dont forget the Map Fader option. Clicking on it lets you fade the map with the slider to see the difference between then and now.

[roadtester]

Well there was this...

https://www.bbc.co.uk/archive/cassette- ... 71/z6sbt39

[wrinkly]

There have been previous threads about this.

As doebag mentions, AA and RAC members could send off for a customised route between two specified points. My father got them from the AA on two or three occasions for our holidays. They were made up from mostly ready-made pre-printed pages between key towns, and they corresponded to the Iteraries in the front of the AA Road Book of England and Wales - which also contained a few pages at the front on "Through Routes From" specified places - if I remember correctly there was a page each for routes from London, Bristol, Birmingham, and Manchester, and a page for Newcastle and Carlisle combined.

[SteveA30]

Here's one I bought from a stand at a rally. There were dozens but obviously this one caught my attention. Also, one of the AA boxes along the route described. A30 Moor Lane. As the car has an Exeter reg, I think we can assume it is a publicity shot...

[Nelsontoyota]

Apologies for any misunderstanding but what I meant was a modern route planner tool using old maps and not necessarily for leisure routes.
Journeys I remember as a child include St Athan in South Wales to Birmingham airport, and also to Paisley and Treherbert .
My Dad also used to drive from Perth to Newport and back once a month when he was at flying school in Scotland in the late 1960s. He used to do this journey in a Hillman Imp.It must have taken hours.He wasn’t a member of any driving organisations as he was not paid during his flying training.

[bothar]

It might be an interesting project to do a Sabre historical route planner. Have the map for year X and some data in average speeds. You could even add fuel prices.

[KeithW]

Apologies for any misunderstanding but what I meant was a modern route planner tool using old maps and not necessarily for leisure routes.
Journeys I remember as a child include St Athan in South Wales to Birmingham airport, and also to Paisley and Treherbert .
My Dad also used to drive from Perth to Newport and back once a month when he was at flying school in Scotland in the late 1960s. He used to do this journey in a Hillman Imp.It must have taken hours.He wasn’t a member of any driving organisations as he was not paid during his flying training.

Realistically I dont see much likelihood of anyone doing this. It would involve considerable programming, data collection etc and the market for such a thing would be small. You can do a rough approximation with some thing like Excel by tabulating the mileage from the OS route planning maps and estimating average speeds in pre motorway days. As I recall for the route from London to Birmingham before the M1 opened an average of 40 mph wasn't far wrong.

Another approach is to use Google Maps and make your routes use the old roads. For example London to the West Midlands via the A5 or A41 instead of M1/M6. I recall that before the M5 opened we used to travel from the North East to Cornwall via the A9/A168/A1/M1/A38. We usually took at least 12 hours with an overnight stay somewhere south of Gloucester to get an early start on the sections through Bristol and the dreaded Exeter Bypass.

[Ruperts Trooper]

Apologies for any misunderstanding but what I meant was a modern route planner tool using old maps and not necessarily for leisure routes.
Journeys I remember as a child include St Athan in South Wales to Birmingham airport, and also to Paisley and Treherbert .
My Dad also used to drive from Perth to Newport and back once a month when he was at flying school in Scotland in the late 1960s. He used to do this journey in a Hillman Imp.It must have taken hours.He wasn’t a member of any driving organisations as he was not paid during his flying training.

Of course, drivers didn't use route planner tools in those days, but relied on maps of the era to plot an optimum route - I, and many others, used OS 1/4" to mile maps (available in Sabre Maps) which showed motorways and dual/single carriageway allowing a visual assessment of the optimum route - the biggest problem was knowing which sections of motorway were open at the time of your journey.

[doebag]

My father's route from London to Helston in the 60's and 70's was roughly A4/A30/M3/A303/A30/B3297.

Using the historical maps on here, and using the map fader device, I followed the route on modern mapping and transferred it it to MyRoute-app.
The route is 274 miles with an estimated time of 5 hours 54 minutes, giving an average speed of 45mph. However that makes no allowances for holiday traffic. This matches pretty much with his timings in an old note book of his that I have.

[Piatkow]

Another approach is to use Google Maps and make your routes use the old roads. For example London to the West Midlands via the A5 or A41 instead of M1/M6. I recall that before the M5 opened we used to travel from the North East to Cornwall via the A9/A168/A1/M1/A38. We usually took at least 12 hours with an overnight stay somewhere south of Gloucester to get an early start on the sections through Bristol and the dreaded Exeter Bypass.

I tried this to get some distances / times on a previous thread about historic journeys. I found that Google will fight back and keep trying to adjust previous segments to the current best route when you move a later one to an older route.

My main childhood journey would have been on our visits from Romford to my mother's sister in South Wales. I am not sure of journey times as we usually took a picnic and had a break in the Forest of Dean. Certainly it got quicker over the years as various settlements were bypassed, originally with no M40, no bypasses at Witney, Northleach or Gloucester. These days the longest section close to its original state would be from just west of Over through Huntley and the Forest to Monmouth. Living to the north west of London now I still prefer driving this route to using the M4 as long as I miss the rush hour in Gloucester.

[KeithW]

Another approach is to use Google Maps and make your routes use the old roads. For example London to the West Midlands via the A5 or A41 instead of M1/M6. I recall that before the M5 opened we used to travel from the North East to Cornwall via the A9/A168/A1/M1/A38. We usually took at least 12 hours with an overnight stay somewhere south of Gloucester to get an early start on the sections through Bristol and the dreaded Exeter Bypass.

I tried this to get some distances / times on a previous thread about historic journeys. I found that Google will fight back and keep trying to adjust previous segments to the current best route when you move a later one to an older route.

My main childhood journey would have been on our visits from Romford to my mother's sister in South Wales. I am not sure of journey times as we usually took a picnic and had a break in the Forest of Dean. Certainly it got quicker over the years as various settlements were bypassed, originally with no M40, no bypasses at Witney, Northleach or Gloucester. These days the longest section close to its original state would be from just west of Over through Huntley and the Forest to Monmouth. Living to the north west of London now I still prefer driving this route to using the M4 as long as I miss the rush hour in Gloucester.

The trick is to use multiple chained destinations, that way previous segments dont get changed.

[WHBM]

Way back a colleague at university once had a summer job actually working for the AA in the team that sent out these customised route plans. It was a fairly intense activity with a large number prepared each day, with two sorts of pages stapled between covers. One was pre-printed routings between major nodes, and the others were specially prepared and typed. In those far-off days men didn't/couldn't/wouldn't type and women obviously wouldn't know anything about maps, so the men who did the planning wrote these "specials" out by hand, and women, on ancient mechanical typewriters, did their best to understand the handwriting, so they came back with lots of typos, many of which were not caught before they were assembled and sent out.

His summer job was to take the plan, devised as something like "12-63-122-38 (not after Scotch Corner)-Special 683", give the special to the typing pool, go the a large rack and assemble the pre-printed pages, cross out with a biro the 'not after' part, wait for the typing to be returned, staple, send out.

He described a fair number of nonsense requests, some were ignored and some received silly answers !

[doebag]

The trick is to use multiple chained destinations, that way previous segments dont get changed.

Also when planning the route use plenty of way points so the route ‘has’ to visit them.