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I went today to the 71st anniversary memorial service for the victims of the Bethnal Green Tube shelter disaster, which I wrote about in my new book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’. It was the worst single disaster in Britain during WW2. (The picture here shows the Pearly Kings and Queens […]

  Just read a brilliant book called The Invention of News by the historian Andrew Pettegree. Heartened to see another book saying that quality news can survive – a point we made in our own book The Future of Quality News Journalism, published by Routledge last autumn. Here’s an extract from my chapter about the

    Very pleased that the new  edition of my book  ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’ is to be published on March 27  by Arrow Books. It’s specially updated for the D-Day anniversary this June. The Sunday Express called it: ‘Gripping as a fictional thriller’. The BBC said: ‘An elegant evocation

Delighted with the cover of the new revised edition of my book ‘Steaming to Victory: How Britain’s railways won the war’. It’s out from Arrow Books in March in time for the anniversary of D-Day, when the Queen will be travelling to the Normandy beaches to mark the 70th anniversary of this most historic day

Social media work as a great means of communication  for all generations  and all kinds of people- as this little film shows. It was made by my journalism students at the University of Central Lancashire.

With the World War 1 commemoration under way, let’s not forget World War 2, with two major anniversaries in 2014. In June, the Queen goes to Normandy to mark the 70th anniversary of D-Day, and September is 75 years since the start of the worst war the world has ever known. The new edition of

My talk today to the boys of Hereward House school about my life in journalism and what the future holds for the media was great fun! What an intelligent lot!

Astonishing how the production of newspapers moved from a world virtually unchanged since Caxton to today’s apps for smartphones and tablets in just 50 years. The film in this link is about the Buffalo Evening News in the United States in the 1960s when even the old “hot lead” type seemed “modern”. What a contrast

A very nice review of Steaming to Victory in the journal of the Friends of the National Railway Museum, which describes the book as “highly recommended” and “very readable”. It’s a big year for the railways in wartime in 2014 – in June it’s 70 years since D-Day and in September it’s the 75th anniversary

After Tube 150, there’s an important new rail anniversary coming up this year – 175 years of Derby as a rail manufacturing centre. Famous for the great products of the Midland Railway that pulled the express trains into St Pancras, including the legendary Midland Compounds (above). Derby remains today as the only centre for designing

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 finest

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

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

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…’

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

  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

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

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