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Delighted to see that The Trains Now Departed is still ranked tops in its category on Amazon – with all five-star reviews. And it’s got a lovely display in our local bookshops in north London. Here’s the Primrose Hill Bookshop (alongside my fellow local and and former colleague Andrew Marr) http://amzn.to/1xKrjzz http://bit.ly/1r1FrBy Home What Amazon […]

AS an author of books about railways, I’m often asked what makes us British so obsessed with nostalgia about railways. The mood seems to be everywhere. Here is Michael Portillo, ubiquitous on our living room TVs, brandishing his Bradshaw and seemingly endlessly roaming the rails and catching the zeitgeist with his Great Train Journeys. Pete […]

SUCH POWER, such technology, such speed! Last month a state-of-the-art Japanese magnetic levitation train smashed the world train speed record, hitting just over 600 km/h (375 mph). The train, known as a “Maglev ”, ran perfectly and the ride was was reported to be very comfortable. What was there not to celebrate? Yet somehow there […]

 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 than they do now – they would publish what were known as “window gazers”. These […]

  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 station in the world. But all that’s left today of the institution that was once […]

JUST three weeks ago, Penguin Random House published my latest book The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways. There’s been a lovely response from the national media, including extracts published by the ‘Daily Telegraph’, the ‘Independent’ and ‘i’ newspapers – and I’ve done many interviews on the BBC. And as […]

I never thought my writing about railways would be compared to a novel – let alone magical realism. But here’s a nice spread based on my new book The Trains Now Departed from the ‘Western Morning News’ newspaper. See the Lynton & Barnstaple article on the right

I was struck, travelling from Liverpool Street today into Essex how much of our railway heritage is still falling into ruin. My picture here is of the old Burnham on Crouch station on the line to Southminster, used by London commuters every day. I didn’t write about it in my chapter on lost heritage in […]