Blog

Enjoyed a seminar this week at the Institute of Transport in the University of Central Lancashire which presented the case that slow travel makes us more sociable and helps us to make friends. There’s even a diagram to prove it!

Very excited to be involved in plans for a special train to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, to run next June from Birmingham to Gloucester. The train will be called ‘Steaming to Victory’, taking its title from my book of the same name and will hopefully be pulled by a magnificent Castle class locomotive […]

Welcome to my new website, where I’ll be blogging on my passions for travel, railways and new developments in the media. (They may not be as disparate as they seem – as one friend observed, they all frequently involve “changing platforms”!) You can also read here about my books, my journalism and everything else that […]

Imagine a rail main line to the north running parallel to the controversial new HS2 route. It’s already built to the highest inter-continental standards. Much of the track is already in place and the stations and viaducts mellowed into the landscape. There will be no need to blast through our green and pleasant land to […]

Amid a field of giant hogweed on the fringes of south-east Edinburgh, history was made last week [August 6] as the concrete pourers moved in to create the first new bridge for the new 30-mile Borders Railway to Tweedbank. The line, sponsored by the Scottish Government and being built by Network Rail at a cost […]

Could there ever have been a more extravagant mobile assembly of the world’s nastiest dictators? Here, plushly seated on the 28 red leather chairs around the long conference table in this sumptuous railway carriage rolling elegantly through central Europe, are the ghosts of some of the legends of evil, tucking into the spoils of power. […]

IT WAS a moment of utter spine-tingling terror as the driver of the heavy freight train powering through Cambridgeshire looked back from his cab just after midnight and saw smoke and flames billowing from the leading wagon, just behind his engine. For this was no ordinary payload. The train’s 51 trucks were weighed down with […]

At 200 tons it weighs in at more than some of the biggest locomotives ever. In full operation it can pack a velocity of nearly 2,000 feet a second. It needs 50 people to operate it, and has had an astonishing working life spanning nearly 40 years. Could this be the most unusual railway vehicle […]