The Independent

WHEN the moon comes up, loggerhead turtles will creep on to the beach to lay their eggs. Behind us, even in these baking summer months, is succulent forest, populated by radiant tropical birds, longleaf pine, and moss-hung oak, magnolia, palm and palmetto, cypress and sea myrtle and red-berried cassina. To the north and south for […]

Black Horse Ride: The Inside Story of Lloyds and the Banking Crisis’, by Ivan Fallon, The Robson Press, £25 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

 Book review of Station to Station: Searching for Stories on the Great Western Line by James Attlee (Guardian Books, £14.99) IN the 1930s heyday of the railway – when the train companies studied the comfort of their passengers rather more than they do now – they would publish what were known as “window gazers”. These

  I’M HOPELESSLY lost in Blackpool, blundering around beneath the Tower, dodging the touts and the hot-dog sellers, looking for the remains of Blackpool Central. Once everyone would have known their way here. It was the largest and busiest seaside station in the world. But all that’s left today of the institution that was once

IT’S NOW as much part of the traditional British Easter as egg-rolling, simnel cake and chocolate bunnies. This Good Friday morning  the nation will wake up to find whole swathes of Britain turned into a public transport desert as Network Rail indulges in its traditional holday ritual of closing down the railway for engineering works.

From the Independent and i newspapers April 2 2015 IT’S NOW as much part of the traditional British Easter as egg-rolling, simnel cake and chocolate bunnies. This morning [Friday] the nation will wake up to find whole swathes of Britain turned into a public transport desert as Network Rail indulges in its traditional holday ritual

Review of Rush Hour by Iain Gately (Head of Zeus, £16.99) The Independent,November 29 2014 Here are some facts you’d probably prefer not to think about as you get out of bed in the morning. Britain’s rail commuters are allocated a theoretical 0.45 metres of space each – which they rarely get in the rush

It could hardly be more be surreal. Here I am discussing the significance of the Lord’s Prayer, that most emblematic totem of the Christian liturgy, with the most powerful woman in British Judaism in the magnificent Victorian-Byzantine setting of the West London Synagogue at Marble Arch – church-like in almost every respect, with its pews,

  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

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

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

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.

“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We are just about to change the wheels.” The English passengers aboard our service from Madrid

She had been a bright student with a good degree who had trained as a journalist, believing it was somehow an honourable career. Instead, in her first job on a newspaper she was told to dress up in a skimpy outfit and pose for a stunt in the paper simply because she had blonde hair.

“Can I have your attention please?” announces Carlos our guard over the intercom, after the train has just come to a sudden halt in what seems to be the middle of an olive grove in the middle of nowhere. “We are just about to change the wheels.” The English passengers aboard our service from Madrid

In a world dominated by anoraks, bobble hats, enamel badges and vacuum flasks, railways and fashion are not obvious partners. Most of us boys gave up finding trains sexy when we discovered girls. And most girls – of any age – have never found trains sexy at all.   So there was quite a flutter

Could there be anything less ghostly than the scene at London’s Paddington station on this bright December morning? The sun is sparkling through the glass of the newly restored canopy of Brunel’s magnificent terminus as commuters and shoppers scurry across the concourse, cheered by the prospect of Christmas. Yet waiting for me on Platform 14,

What’s the difference between a twitcher and a gricer? Answer: not much. One spots birds and the other spots trains. Unfortunately there’s not an imminent prospect of sighting either from where I’m sitting on this gorgeous spring afternoon amid the May blossom on the platform at Salhouse station on the remote Bittern Line in North

The Deerstalker Express, London Euston to the West Highlands In the unglamorous world of Britain’s privatised railways, there is one train that still recaptures the thrill of travel to romantic and lonely places. The 21.05pm sleeper to Fort William will transport you within hours to some of the most spectacular scenery in Europe. You go

Settle and Carlisle railway: Drama abounds on this magnificent ride over the “roof of England”. A masterpiece of Victorian engineering, it includes the famous Ribblehead viaduct. Cumbria Coast line: Britain’s best-kept railway secret. Sandwiched between the Lakeland fells and the Irish Sea, there are views to die for across Morecambe Bay and the Solway Firth.

There are few love affairs more passionate than that of the British with their trains. On a basic level it’s obvious. We invented the railways and pride in the great heroes of the railway age – the Stephensons, Trevithick, Brunel – runs through our DNA. But like all the best love affairs it’s a more

There are few love affairs more passionate than that of the British with their trains. On a basic level it’s obvious. We invented the railways and pride in the great heroes of the railway age – the Stephensons, Trevithick, Brunel – runs through our DNA. But like all the best love affairs it’s a more

There are few things more evocative of the British landscape than the country branch line. A little engine chuffs along a single track, a few wisps of steam drifting across the fields, the sun glinting off its copper-capped chimney. There might be a couple of elderly carriages and perhaps a milk tank or a cattle

Future historians trying to get to the heart of the early 1960s should inspect closely photographs of any major railway station in the land. Kings Cross, Euston, Crewe, York, Edinburgh, you name them. Here the platform ends were thronged by armies of adolescent boys. Adorned with enamel badges of their favourite locos, they munched on

Glamorous, sure. But would Bond have approved? As the Danube Express, Europe’s newest luxury train, pulled majestically out of the austere platforms of Berlin’s Schönefeld airport station for its maiden journey to Budapest last week, I’m thinking of the world’s favourite secret agent, and Ian Fleming’s words in From Russia With Love. “The great trains

I had somebody to find in the warren of streets and alleyways in the old walled city of Damascus. There is no mention of him in the guidebooks, but I’d heard the rumours more than once.  Would he still be there? There were many twists and turns. Through the soukh, skirting the Great Mosque, along

“Are there smoked salmon in the lake, Daddy?” Shhhh! This is my five-year old son giving away our secret ­– that we are just another bunch of townies on a trip to the countryside. But we’ve a special reason not to seem like greenhorns on this first day of our “green holiday”. This isn’t one

Railway historians will have to rewrite the record books after a train from Brussels to St Pancras International yesterday achieved the fastest rail journey ever between a European capital and London, knocking more than 30 minutes off the current timing. The 20 coach train – the first from Brussels to run throughout on the new

“It depends on whether you are going to do a big one or a tiddler,” says Jade, hooting with laughter. We’re in the middle of nowhere on the edge of the Australian outback, inspecting the Heath Robinson flushing mechanism of a train toilet. The foldaway stainless steel loo, which also doubles as a sink, is

They rolled in off the Roaring Forties, spouting and with their flanks glistening like fountains on basalt. Who knows where they had come from. There is nothing much in the 10,000 wind-tossed miles of the great Southern Ocean between here and Patagonia.   Was there trouble with the sonar? Were they sick? Why did these