© 2020 Michael Wenn Williams. Cookie Policy.
WHEN the moon comes up, loggerhead turtles will creep on to the beach to lay their eggs. Behind us, even in these baking summer months, is succulent forest, populated by radiant tropical birds, longleaf pine, and moss-hung oak, magnolia, palm […]
Black Horse Ride: The Inside Story of Lloyds and the Banking Crisis’, by Ivan Fallon, The Robson Press, £25 THE global financial crisis was not just a failure of banking but of journalism, too – with the media in the […]
Book review of Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line by James Attlee (Guardian Books, £14.99) IN the 1930s heyday of the railway – when the train companies studied the comfort of their passengers rather more […]
I’M HOPELESSLY lost in Blackpool, blundering around beneath the Tower, dodging the touts and the hot-dog sellers, looking for the remains of Blackpool Central. Once everyone would have known their way here. It was the largest and busiest seaside […]
Here’s my article in today’s Independent and ‘i’ newspapers based on a chapter from my new book the Trains Now Departed, published tomorrow, May 7 http://ind.pn/1EX9MZe
IT’S NOW as much part of the traditional British Easter as egg-rolling, simnel cake and chocolate bunnies. This Good Friday morning the nation will wake up to find whole swathes of Britain turned into a public transport desert as Network […]
Here’s what I wrote in yesterday’s ‘Independent’ and ‘i’ newspapers: IT’S NOW as much part of the traditional British Easter as egg-rolling, simnel cake and chocolate bunnies. This Good Friday morning the nation will wake up to find whole swathes […]
From the Independent and i newspapers April 2 2015 IT’S NOW as much part of the traditional British Easter as egg-rolling, simnel cake and chocolate bunnies. This morning [Friday] the nation will wake up to find whole swathes of Britain […]
Review of Rush Hour by Iain Gately (Head of Zeus, £16.99) The Independent,November 29 2014 Here are some facts you’d probably prefer not to think about as you get out of bed in the morning. Britain’s rail commuters are allocated […]
I am often asked about my association with the Independent newspaper and it associated media titles. For most of my professional journalistic life I have been associated with the Independent – one of the world’s great media brands. For many […]
It could hardly be more be surreal. Here I am discussing the significance of the Lord’s Prayer, that most emblematic totem of the Christian liturgy, with the most powerful woman in British Judaism in the magnificent Victorian-Byzantine setting of the […]
It was the ironic TV image of the week. “We always pay more but they never seem to spend any money on the railways?” the angry King’s Cross commuter fumed in an interview about the latest train fare rises. […]
Whoops…here’s a crystal glass of claret sailing across the restaurant car’s starched white tablecloth, heading straight for my lap. Hold tight…there goes my steaming bowl of soup volleying the other way. It’s not normally like this, aboard what has long […]
Imagine a rail main line to the north running parallel to the controversial new HS2 route. It’s already built to the highest inter-continental standards. Much of the track is already in place and the stations and viaducts mellowed into the […]
Could there ever have been a more extravagant mobile assembly of the world’s nastiest dictators? Here, plushly seated on the 28 red leather chairs around the long conference table in this sumptuous railway carriage rolling elegantly through central Europe, are […]
“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We […]
She had been a bright student with a good degree who had trained as a journalist, believing it was somehow an honourable career. Instead, in her first job on a newspaper she was told to dress up in a skimpy […]
“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We […]
In a world dominated by anoraks, bobble hats, enamel badges and vacuum flasks, railways and fashion are not obvious partners. Most of us boys gave up finding trains sexy when we discovered girls. And most girls – of any age […]
Could there be anything less ghostly than the scene at London’s Paddington station on this bright December morning? The sun is sparkling through the glass of the newly restored canopy of Brunel’s magnificent terminus as commuters and shoppers scurry across […]
What’s the difference between a twitcher and a gricer? Answer: not much. One spots birds and the other spots trains. Unfortunately there’s not an imminent prospect of sighting either from where I’m sitting on this gorgeous spring afternoon amid the […]
The Deerstalker Express, London Euston to the West Highlands In the unglamorous world of Britain’s privatised railways, there is one train that still recaptures the thrill of travel to romantic and lonely places. The 21.05pm sleeper to Fort William will […]
Settle and Carlisle railway: Drama abounds on this magnificent ride over the “roof of England”. A masterpiece of Victorian engineering, it includes the famous Ribblehead viaduct. Cumbria Coast line: Britain’s best-kept railway secret. Sandwiched between the Lakeland fells and the […]
There are few love affairs more passionate than that of the British with their trains. On a basic level it’s obvious. We invented the railways and pride in the great heroes of the railway age – the Stephensons, Trevithick, Brunel […]
There are few love affairs more passionate than that of the British with their trains. On a basic level it’s obvious. We invented the railways and pride in the great heroes of the railway age – the Stephensons, Trevithick, Brunel […]
There are few things more evocative of the British landscape than the country branch line. A little engine chuffs along a single track, a few wisps of steam drifting across the fields, the sun glinting off its copper-capped chimney. There […]
Future historians trying to get to the heart of the early 1960s should inspect closely photographs of any major railway station in the land. Kings Cross, Euston, Crewe, York, Edinburgh, you name them. Here the platform ends were thronged by […]
Glamorous, sure. But would Bond have approved? As the Danube Express, Europe’s newest luxury train, pulled majestically out of the austere platforms of Berlin’s Schönefeld airport station for its maiden journey to Budapest last week, I’m thinking of the world’s […]
I had somebody to find in the warren of streets and alleyways in the old walled city of Damascus. There is no mention of him in the guidebooks, but I’d heard the rumours more than once. Would he still be […]
“Are there smoked salmon in the lake, Daddy?” Shhhh! This is my five-year old son giving away our secret – that we are just another bunch of townies on a trip to the countryside. But we’ve a special reason not […]
Railway historians will have to rewrite the record books after a train from Brussels to St Pancras International yesterday achieved the fastest rail journey ever between a European capital and London, knocking more than 30 minutes off the current timing. […]
“It depends on whether you are going to do a big one or a tiddler,” says Jade, hooting with laughter. We’re in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Australian outback, inspecting the Heath Robinson flushing mechanism of […]
They rolled in off the Roaring Forties, spouting and with their flanks glistening like fountains on basalt. Who knows where they had come from. There is nothing much in the 10,000 wind-tossed miles of the great Southern Ocean between here […]
© 2020 Michael Wenn Williams. Cookie Policy.
