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The end of our affair with the railways?
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 Rail indulges in its traditional holday ritual of closing down the railway for engineering works. […]
Read More Easter rail shutdown – the end of our affair with the railways?
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 of Britain turned into a public transport desert as Network Rail indulges in its traditional […]
Read More Will we ever love our trains again?
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 turned into a public transport desert as Network Rail indulges in its traditional holday ritual […]
Read More ‘One of the most glorious train journeys in Britain’ – a view from On the Slow Train Again
CATCHING a train at Carlisle station to travel over the Settle and Carlisle line yesterday, it was nice, though somewhat eerie, to find my own words staring at me from the Northern Rail timetable…
Read More The Trains Now Departed – talking about ghost trains on BBC WM
WHAT are the ghost trains that wend their spooky way around the rail network? And how about the ‘ghosties’ – the railway enthusiasts who travel on them? I spoke about this on BBC Local Radio this morning, describing my travels on Britain’s ‘ghost trains’ in my new book The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen excursions into […]
Read More The Trains Now Departed – and why rail travel for women used to be a better experience
IN MY new book The Trains Now Departed: sixteen excursions into the lost delights of Britain’s railways, I explore some of the ways in which the experience of railway travel in Britain was often better than it is now. Here’s a wonderful example, taken from the British Railways Rule Book for staff in 1950. How wonderful […]
Read More The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen excursions into the lost delights of Britain’s railways – and the story behind the cover of my new book
MANY HAVE asked me about the lovely image on the cover of of my new book The Trains Now Departed. It is of the Headstone Viaduct, built by the Midland Railway over the River Wye in the Peak district of Derbyshire, on the old main line from St Pancras to Manchester.The picture was produced by the artist […]
Read More The Trains Now Departed – and how to get the British to love their railways once more
For the past two years I’ve been on an odyssey to determine the best and worst of our national railway system. The results will be published in my new book The Trains Now Departed, out from Penguin Random House on May 7. You can argue over the good and bad bits of the railways. But […]
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