Michael Williams:
author & journalist

Michael is a journalist, academic and author – writing, blogging and broadcasting on railways and the media. He is also a travel writer, having covered the world for a variety of publications. Read more…

The Trains
Now Departed

Michael Williams’s most recent book The Trains Now Departed: Sixteen excursions into the lost delights of Britain’s railways is published by Arrow Books. Find out more about Michael’s other books, including ‘On the Slow Train’, ‘On the Slow Train Again’ and ‘Steaming to Victory’.

Remembering a Churchillian moment 60 years on

January 26, 2025

SIXTY years ago this month as a schoolboy I huddled on London’s freezing Strand with my father to witness Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral cortege. No sooner than the gun carriage bearing his coffin had passed by, I rushed to Clapham Junction to see the funeral train on its way from Waterloo to the Churchill family home in Oxfordshire, hauled by the magnificent “Battle of Britain” class locomotive No. 34051 “Sir Winston Churchill”.I snapped this pic of the train at speed […]

MICHAEL'S BOOKS