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  From the group’s latest Winter Bulletin The 2015 AGM  This year’s AGM was held in the Georgian Room in Kendal Town Hall. Filled with an appreciative audience it showed that you don’t have to offer crisis and bad news to tempt peo-ple into a meeting. The formal part of the AGM passed swiftly. Reports […]

IT WAS the war wound that prevented me getting on with my grandfather. Too late to regret it now but perhaps, a century after he received the blow that crippled him, I can at least attempt to piece together the events around that moment by visiting the place where his life changed for ever. To everyone

GREAT to see the mighty Flying Scotsman back on the rails today after her many tribulations. Let’s hope that the skilled engineers appointed by the National Railway Museum have exorcised what many have long regarded as the “Curse of the Flying Scotsman”. And let’s not forget that great man Sir William McAlpine, whose rescue of

I RECEIVED this letter from a reader of ‘The Trains Now Departed’ at the New Year. It expresses such a lovely sentiment, I thoughtI would share it: Dear Mr Williams, I have just finished reading “The Trains Now Departed” and I think it is the most  enjoyable railway book I have ever read in a

WITH just  a week to go to Christmas, my latest book is No. 2 in the Amazon charts

“A delight it proves to be: 16 compellingly fascinating accounts… together with a delightfully surprising cast of characters, strange tales and maybe even a ghost or two. Stir in the author’s humour and wit, and it makes for a jolly good read” – a nice review of my latest book The Trains Now Departed from

Delighted that my book ‘The Trains Now Departed’ has just been named as one of the ‘Books of the Year’ in the influential ‘Tablet’ magazine http://amzn.to/1xKrjzz

By Michael Williams (From the Sunday Telegraph, December 6 2015) It’s hell out there on the Ypres frontline. Crowds file off tourist buses marked Passchendaele and Tyne Cot, shops are touting maps, medals and memorabilia and the Flanders Fields museum is handing out digital history packages on plastic Fitbit-style wristbands. Only halfway though four years

WATCH me in a new History Channel series starting this week about railways and warfare, called Combat Trains. It’s on Sky and Virgin among other channels. I’ve done some thrilling stuff on World War II, based on my book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s Railways Won the War’. Here are some pictures of me filming

The inside story of the making of David Lean’s masterpiece, 70 years old this month, from Chapter 14 of ‘Steaming to Victory’ “YOU KNOW– David Lean chose me personally for my part in Brief Encounter. He said, “That’s the girl I want to play the part of Beryl. She was the woman behind the counter

NICE to see my published views on the value of reopening old rail routes quoted in this new report from the influential Bow Group http://www.bowgroup.org/policy/revive-britains-railways-improve-capacity-says-bow-group

Listen to me here: http://ab.co/1KMRNJH http://ab.co/1KMRNJH

WHAT is the best railway carriage view in the world? I was asked this weekend to write up my choice for Telegraph Travel. Spoilt for choice, here’s my selection. The UK really does have some special railway views. Aside from my No. 1, I could have nominated the North Sea from Virgin East Coast at

MY ARTICLE from today’s Daily Mail: IT WAS known as God’s Wonderful Railway – and with good reason. In its glory days, until the drab hand of nationalisation fell on it in 1948, the old Great Western Railway was the most admired railway in the world. It’s carriages were the most comfortable, its engines the

SURELY the railways were better in the good old days. Weren’t they? All the talk about rail renationalisation under new Labour leader Jeremy Corbyn somehow implies it was better in the past when British Rail was in charge. I’ve certainly argued in my new book The Trains Now Departed that there are many things wrong

How lovely. The story from the Independent on Sunday of my recent journey through the Scottish Borders – travelling along the new Borders Railway. http://www.independent.co.uk/travel/uk/scottish-borders-railway-brings-a-historic-region-back-into-focus-10499752.html

NOT OFTEN in a lifetime do you get ahead of the Queen! But as Her Majesty opens Scotland’s new Borders Railway today – the longest domestic main line to be built in Britain for more than a century – I was lucky to get one of the 100 tickets  to board the very first train

THIS week I’m privileged to be among the passengers on Britain’s first new domestic main line for a century – rolling through the delightful scenery of the Scottish Borders. I’ve written the story of the line in my new book The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen excursions into the lost delights of Britain’s railways http://bit.ly/1r1FrBy. It’s a

  THE CARRIAGES are shabby and have seen better days – and the service is sparse, with just five trains each way over its 75-mile length. Some of the stations have primitive facilities, with barely enough shelter to shield passengers from the cutting winds that blast down from the Pennine hills. Yet I’m thinking this

At last achieved my ambition of getting access to the spooky Down Street station on the Piccadilly Line, which I wrote about in my book Steaming to Victory. Here are some of my pix. Full of memories of Churchill – though I didn’t hear the legendary ghostly laughter from the tunnel. This is an extract

A LOVELY evening yesterday talking to local book enthusiasts in Camden about my new title The Trains Now Departed – and the prospects for HS2. It was a fun evening – and thanks to all who came along. Thanks, too, to our local bookshop, The Owl, in Kentish Town Road for hosting. Local bookshops are

A SUPER review of ‘The Trains Now Departed’ by Russ Rollings in the National Railway Museum Review. He writes: The fascinating stories are very readable, peppered with anecdotes and obscure facts. As with Michael Williams’ previous book Steaming to Victory, he has done extensive and meticulous research. Once started it was difficult to to put

WHY we need to save the statue of Sir Nigel Gresley and his Mallard at King’s Cross station. My quote in this week’s Camden New Journal @gresleyduck

I’D BE VERY pleased to see you at my talk at the Owl Bookshop – one of London’s most charming independent bookshops – on ‘The Delights of Britain’s Railways’, based on my bestselling new book ‘The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways’, published by Penguin Random House. There may

THE global financial crisis was not just a failure of banking but of journalism, too – with the media in the dock for failing to warn an unsuspecting public of impending disaster. As a news editor might put it, “we screwed up”. However, there are plenty of revelations still to be made by those prepared

A lovely review of The Trains Now Departed by Andrew Martin, famous for his Jim Stringer detective novels. He writes: “In The Trains Now Departed Williams celebrates ‘the best of what is gone from our railways’ in 16 vivid, highly readable chapters. One concerns Verney Junction, formerly the furthest outpost of the Metropolitan Railway. Nominally part of

‘Fascinating’ – another nice mention of The Trains Now Departed in the latest  edition of ‘Choice’ magazine.

VERY EXCITED to be travelling tomorrow by train to the battle sites of WW1 to write a piece for the Daily Telegraph. This is a very personal journey for me, since my grandfather, Bertie Wenn, was injured at Passchendaele serving in the Royal Horse Artillery. http://www.amazon.co.uk/Steaming-Victory-How-Britains-Railways/dp/0099557673/ref=tmm_pap_swatch_0?_encoding=UTF8&sr=&qid=  

  SO SORRY to hear of the death of Ian Allan, the patron saint of trainspotting, who fired up the imagination of a generation of schoolboys, with his ABCs of British Locomotives (and many other subjects). The huge passion of the British for trains and train travel today owes much to to this inspired publisher,

ANOTHER nice review of The Trains Now Departed, this time in The Tablet – the international Catholic weekly – which says, in reviewing three new books about railways: ‘The best of the three is The Trains Now Departed. Subtitled “sixteen excursions into the lost delights of Britain’s railways”, Williams explores old routes and services with

Earlier this year, after the chaos over Network Rail engineering failure at Kings Cross I wrote in the Daily Mail about how the strategy was wrong http://dailym.ai/1xsBmZ9 Not surprising with latest news from government that there is to be a review!

Here’s my interview in the South China Morning Post about my life on the line… http://www.scmp.com/magazines/post-magazine/article/1823397/why-train-travel-sexy-again-according-writer-michael

A smashing letter from Radio 1 DJ Andy Peebles, who bought The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways after hearing me talk about it on the Judy Spiers show on BBC radio. He tells me he loved the trains of East Anglia as a boy near where he lived

A GLOWING review by leading railway writer Andrew Roden of my new book ‘The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways’ in ‘Steam World’ – Britain’s best-selling historical railway magazine – which has made it ‘Book of the Month’ in the July issue. Here are some of the quotes from

ANOTHER nice newspaper review of The Trains Now Departed – this time from the Westmorland Gazette. It was in this beautiful part of the north that I walked over the old tracks of the Stainmore Railway – once the highest main line in England http://bit.ly/1HlzBnc And so far, The Trains Now Departed has received all

BY AN accident of geography, I happen to be a near neighbour in London of Michael Palin – a great railway enthusiast and  charming man. And, by another coincidence, both he and I have No 1. bestsellers on Amazon – he in ‘Railways Pictorial References’, with his book The Golden Age of Railway Posters http://amzn.to/1FZWPe4 and

How tragic that so much of London’s wonderful railway heritage has been lost. Here’s my article this week for the ILovePrimrose Hill website http://bit.ly/1IC6hrs   THE hordes of people who cross the Bridge Approach from Primrose Hill to Chalk Farm tube station would scarcely notice it these days. Yet behind an anonymous façade at the

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