Product Description

A4 format Scale 1:1 000 000 (1 cm to 10 kms / 1 inch to 16 miles) A fully revised edition of A4 spiral road atlas containing road mapping, route planning maps, large scale road maps of the Ruhr and Rhine, city through route maps and a comprehensive place names index. AREA OF COVERAGE Europe from North Cape to Gibraltar and from Ireland to western Turkey. MAIN FEATURES Clear, easy to follow road maps at a scale of 1:1 000 000. Euroroutes and motorways easily distinguished. International road classification, road distances in kilometres and relief shown by attractive layer tints. INCLUDES Route planning maps, 48 through route maps of the following cities: Amsterdam, Athens, Barcelona, Belgrade, Berlin, Birmingham, Bonn, Brussels, Bucharest, Budapest, Cologne, Copenhagen, Dublin, Edinburgh, Frankfurt, Glasgow, Gothenburg, The Hague, Hamburg, Helsinki, Istanbul, Leipzig, Lisbon, London, Lyon, Madrid, Manchester, Marseille, Milan, Munich, Naples, Oslo, Palermo, Paris, Prague, Rome, Rotterdam, Seville, Sofia, Stockholm, Strasbourg, Toulouse, Turin, Valencia, Venice, Vienna, Warsaw, Zurich.Also includes larger scale road mapping extending from Amsterdam to Munich and making route following easier through this densely populated area. WHO THE PRODUCT IS AIMED AT Motorists planning a journey in Europe and for use en route. OTHER PRODUCTS IN THE SERIES 2007 Collins Road Atlas Britain 2007 Collins Road Atlas Europe (A3) Collins Road Atlas France Collins Road Atlas Italy Collins Road Atlas Spain & Portugal

Product Details

• Amazon Sales Rank: #456135 in Books
• Published on: 2008-01-07
• Original language: English
• Binding: Spiral-bound
• 280 pages

Customer Reviews

If you've got to have Europe in one atlas, it might as well be this one.
Although I have two GPS units, in the spirit of maritime navigation lore, I regard GPS and other gizmos as merely aides to navigation. However good the satnav service is, the gizmo itself - or maybe both - may go down. You need good old paper maps and charts to fall back on.

I bought this atlas because I felt it's a a bit naff taking clients across France, Belgium and into Holland, to tour the areas involved in 'Operation Market Garden' [Sept 1944 a.k.a. 'A Bridge Too Far'] with only satnav to navigate with.

So it was I bought this atlas and parked it in a prominent position in the bus to show the punters I was a belt-and-braces kinda guy and I was not going to get them lost.

As it says on the cover, its a road atlas of Europe. In fact, it's the EU plus a bit of eastern Turkey. If you need to drive from the village of Gamvic in northern Finland, to Faro in Portugal, this atlas will get you there.

It's got a brief summary of some of the major legal requirements of various countries. Two warning triangles for Spain, for instance. These and hi-viz vests [along with a single triangle, mandatory in France now] must be inside the car, not in the boot. Useful info, this.

The problem is that the scale is so small, to accommodate this all-encompassing coverage, that detail in the bits between major towns and off the m/ways is just about OK to work round a major m/way hold-up, say, but not much use for cruising the area. Collins have acknowledged this problem by adding, at the end of the mapping pages, 6 sides in a larger scale of a rectangle of the most densely built-up part of northwest europe, from Lille and Amsterdam in the west to Wurtsburg and Ulm in the east.

The city maps are only as basic as needed to get you from your approach m/way to the centre or an adjacent area. All are presented on the same size panel, about the size of a postcard. If a city has a ringroad or m/way 'periferique', the city is shown with that as the boundary. So London, for instance, shown within the M25, is 40+ miles across x 30+ miles deep. Edinburgh, bounded by the A720 and A902 with plenty of the Firth of Forth to the north and the Pentland Hills to the south, is 20 miles x 15 on the same size panel. Knowing both these cities well, I'd have a stab at finding Edinburgh Castle using the Edinburgh map but the British Museum on the London map? No chance. The scale is so small that inside the Norrf/Sarrf Circular, there's no room for the names of any boroughs, just a few stars marking Buck House, the B.M. the Hs.o.P. Pretty useless.

The perennial problem of the binding comes up. Do you go for ring-bound, which will lie flat when opened but create a substantial gap between adjacent pages, or do you go for glued or stapled? Continuous mapping but won't lie flat - glued much worse in this respect than stapled.

My experience of glued binding of road atlases is that if you bend the pages back or otherwise try to get the pages to lie flat, single pages soon come unglued, so when it goes AWOL [it will], you've lost 2 sides of mapping. Worse, stapled double-page spreads make holes around the staples and that loses you 4 sides of mapping. Most of the major road atlas are available in both ring bound and stapled. Stapled is better if someone is riding shotgun but ring bound is better if you're going solo.

So the upshot is this. If, like a truckie, you drive hundreds of miles in any one day and you already know your way round a destination city, this atlas is a good one to have handy if the satnav packs up.

If you need more detail to actually get around and see something in a visit to an area, or you need to drive around in a city, you're going to need another atlas for that country and maybe some city maps, too.

But, as I said, my copy is only really for show and I see that a punter has planted a dirty great muddy footprint on the front cover during my last visit to the WW1 battlefields around Mons. Good job the cover is wipeable and that the book wasn't open at the right page ...