Blog

  Such sadness! The Liverpool Post, one of the greatest provincial daily papers, is to close this Thursday after 158 years – another casualty of the winds of change sweeping through the newspaper industry. It was the place where I did my journalistic training, and in its day the paper was an important “seedbed” for […]

Had a call today from the Britain Correspondent of The Economist to ask why the British still love steam trains, decades after they vanished. I’ve thought about this a lot for my books and there’s no simple answer. Partly it’s nostalgia, partly it’s a sense of pride in Britain’s invention of the steam locomotive. But […]

I came across an intriguing book category the other day on a bookshelf labelled ‘Rambling and Railways’. I suppose the two are linked by a healthy interest in the rural regions of Britain – which offer so much more than the bubble of city life. As it happens, this was in the excellent Foyles bookshop […]

Good news in today’s autumn statement that George Osborne is to go slower on raising rail fares, with the projected increase in the New Year pegged at just over 3 per cent. But why should taxpayers subside rail travellers at all, given that only 7 per cent of all passenger journeys in the UK are […]

Fascinating interview with film maker Patrick Keiller on Radio 4’s Start the Week today, talking about his new book The View from the Train. He seems to be a man after my own heart, seeing the railways as a prism through which all human life can be viewed. Of his book, The Guardian says: “With […]

As an author of books about railways, I’m often asked questions about the new HS2 by people who are trying to make up their mind whether to support the project. Although I am broadly in support of the new line, sometimes it is difficult to mount a defence. For example, new figures from the Office […]

‘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 how Britain’s railways won the war’.

As a writer who is passionate about slow travel, devoting books to the subject, I am often asked about HS2 – the proposed high-speed line to the north. Today the Paving Bill for the new railway went in front of Parliament. Although it gives authorisation for the new line, it does not guarantee that it […]