Blog
Steamed up about rail fares? Don’t be!
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. Yet filling the screen behind him was the station’s magnificent new concourse, one of the […]
Read More Poor analysis of rail fare rises in the media
In the absence of any other news in the New Year silly season, lazy news editors always fall back on the annual ritual of clobbering the railways over the January fare rises. But you might expect better of the BBC. Sadly analysis of the topic on Radio 4’s Today programme this morning was as flabby […]
Read More Time to end weary media ritual of bashing railways over fares
As regular as mince pies and comes the annual Christmas ritual of the media bashing the railways over fare rises – always handy to mop up a few column inches as the Silly Season kicks in. But this year it looks especially silly as rail fares for 2014 have been kept down to a n […]
Read More ‘Exhaustive and fascinating’, says Steaming to Victory review
A nice review of my World War 2 history, ‘Steaming to Victory’, in top rail magazine Heritage Railway. The writer describes it as ‘an exhaustive and fascinating account…’
Read More The BBC’s Great Train Robbery – splendid detail from the Slow Train era
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 cab of the Class 40 locomotive, which was a top-link express loco of the Beeching […]
Read More The BBC’s Great Train Robbery – splendid detail from the Slow Train era
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 cab of the Class 40 locomotive, which was a top-link express loco of the Beeching […]
Read More The heroic story of how ordinary wartime folk went steaming to victory
“One day I looked up and saw the flying bomb within inches of our cab. We ducked and just carried on. We had a trainload of passengers to get to safety. It was all in a day’s work…” These are the words of loco fireman Reg Farrow, one of the last in […]
Read More On the slow train to Laos – the land that time forgot
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 been one of the most luxurious trains in the world. But today the “Eastern and […]
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