© 2021 Michael Wenn Williams. Cookie Policy.
BRITAIN’S celebrated High Speed Trains bowed out this week on the last stretch of railway on which they could show their paces – the Midland Main Line from St Pancras to Sheffield. Sleek, elegant and still modern-looking, despite being 45 […]
ONE OF the legacies of the Beeching closures in the 1960s has been a wonderful inheritance of old railway bridges, tunnels and trackbeds which have melded into the landscape and are often used by cyclists, walkers and other rural […]
WONDERFUL news that daily rail services are to restart between Okehampton and Exeter in Devon for the first time in nearly 50 years. December has been pencilled in for the resumption of regular passenger services on the 14 mile […]
It will be one of the grandest pieces of railway architecture since the Victorian age – a brand new bridge longer than the famous Forth Bridge, built in the heroic tradition of Stephenson and Brunel. The bridge, which will carry […]
YOU may think of it as the place where London’s police force first originated in 1749 or the famous orange location on the Monopoly board. But the new Bow Street station which opened this week is nowhere near the bright […]
ENJOYED breakfast with Michael Portillo at the Great Northern Hotel at King’s Cross filming an episode for the new series of Great British Railway Journeys for the BBC. We were talking about the Golden Age of rail travel in the […]
TWO studies into the spread of COVID-19 on railways have found that the chance of contracting the disease by travelling on a train is extremely low, according to a report in Rail magazine The RSSB (formerly the Rail Safety and […]
TODAY is the dawn of a new age of the railway as Boris Johnson gives the go-ahead for HS2 as well as new tracks across the Pennines. At last we have a vision in the spirit of Stephenson and […]
CAN there be a time warp like this anywhere on the British railway system? Elderly Tube trains dating from 1938 trundle between Ryde and Shanklin in the Isle of Wight as they have done for the past 30 years. It […]
‘Northern Fail’, ‘Network Fail’ – and everyone else seems to be failing in this latest debacle on the railways where the new May timetables have led to thousands of cancellations across the country, mostly on Northern Rail and Govia Thameslink. […]
WONDERFUL to see steam on timetabled services on the Settle and Carlisle line this week. For the first time in half a century it’s been possible to buy a ticket on National Rail and travel behind a steam locomotive on […]
JUST returned from a trip sampling some of the finest heritage steam in Yorkshire – aboard the magical trains of the Keighley and Worth Valley Railway and the North Yorkshire Moors Railway. It’s half-term and the services are packed […]
Goodbye Independent! My farewell from the European Journalism Observatory website http://en.ejo.ch/media-economics/independent
It’s from a review by Andrew Martin of Simon Bradley’s excellent new book, The Railways, Nation, Network and People
THE best and the worst of railway dining car meals. On Friday I took the 13.05 Great Western Railway train to Plymouth. Slipping into the dining car I enjoyed a splendid meal of fresh dressed Cornish crab in shell, caught […]
THE Yorkshire Post have run a nice piece on my chapter on ‘ghost trains’ in my new book The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Journeys into The Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways – to be published on May 7. The picture […]
WITH my new book, The Trains Now Departed out in less than three weeks, it’s good to see that my two best-selling original books celebrating the joy of railway travel – On the Slow Train and On the Slow Train […]
I’ve been invited to Singapore and Hong Kong next month to give some talks in both cities about ‘The Best of British Rail Travel’ to coincide with the publication on my new book ‘The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into […]
I’ve been invited by the tourist authorities in Hong Kong and Singapore next month to give some talks about the’ Best of British and World Railway Travel’. So what is the ultimate railway journey of dreams in the UK. Not […]
My day with Winston Churchill – 50 years on. The National Railway Museum in York have put me and my schoolboy memories in a new exhibition about Churchill’s final journey, opening this Friday, January 30. Here’s one of the images […]
Amid the row over inaccuracies in the TV series Broadchurch, the movies don’t do it much better. I’ve just seen Testament of Youth, the autobiographical account of a group of friends in the run-up to and during World War One. […]
I’m off next week to help the National Railway Museum set up their new exhibition on Winston Churchill’s last journey. I’m contributing some memories from my book ‘ Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’
Do join me at the University of Central Lancashire School of Tourism for my talk on how the railways shaped our modern concept of time. And how the philosophy of time and the railways are inextricably entwined. Wednesday December 3 […]
I took this picture of ‘Royal Scot’ class locomotive No. 46115 ‘Scots Guardsman speeding through Kentish Town station in north London on a special train from St Pancras this Remembrance Sunday. How appropriate to see this wonderfully restored locomotive with […]
‘The Trains Now Departed’. Thrilled with title of my latest book to be published by @PenguinRandomUK on May 7 2015
I’m just back from writing the latest chapter for my new book on the cherished icons of our railways and why they run so deep in the British psyche. It’s to be published by Penguin Random House in Spring 2015. […]
Here’s an extract from my article in today’s Tablet magazine: 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 […]
A lovely review of the new edition of Steaming to Victory on Suzi Feay’s Book Bag. It’s one of the top online websites. Here’s what it says: ‘Soon after the end of the First World War, the British railways entered […]
A super review of the new updated edition paperback edition of ‘Steaming to Victory’ in today’s Daily Express, which describes it as ‘Chuffing marvellous’. The reviewer says: ‘This highly readable book covers the essential but often overlooked role trains played […]
Just returned from a Eurostar trip from London to Paris. I’m putting the train through its paces for a chapter in my next book following on from ‘Steaming to Victory’. Although the decor is a bit tired, the train performed […]
In the new edition of Steaming to Victory, out on March 27, I had to make some cuts to accommodate new facts that had come to light since it was first published last year. It was tough to know what […]
Here’s me, asking the question of Labour’s Shadow Transport Secretary Lilian Greenwood at the Derbyshire Rail Forum on the terrace of the House of Commons last night
The terrible weather has cut the old Great Western line to Cornwall at the Dawlish sea wall. So vulnerable always! What a tragedy that Beeching axed the old Southern Railway route round Dartmoor to the north. I argued this in […]
I love this clip about who reads the newspapers from the BBC comedy ‘Yes, Prime Minister. Despite the advent of tablet computers and smart phones it’s as true today as when it was first made… http://viewrz.com/video/who-reads-the-newspapers
The BBC’s film of The Great Train Robbery 50 years on scores not only on the pace of drama (from the creator of Broadchurch), but on the loving attention to detail – unlike most TV recreations of period railways. The […]
‘Excellent railway reading material for Christmas’ is how Rail, the UK’s leading transport magazine, bills my new book ‘Steaming to Victory’. Britain’s top transport commentator Christian Wolmar describes it as his ‘favourite’, praising the book as a ‘meticulous account of […]
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