“WHY THE BRITISH LOVE THE RAILWAYS”
This is my presentation, commissioned by the National Archives, and broadcast on JANUARY 16 2026
THE HORDES marching from the station along Derby’s Midland Road on this summer day in 2025 are seemingly endless. Here are folk of all varieties and complexions – men and women, young and old.
There are mums and dads with toddlers, the elderly with sticks, the infirm in wheelchairs and babies in buggies. As well as eager-faced blokes in anoraks and beany hats.
What could the occasion be? Is it a demo? Or some kind of jamboree? Or maybe a Premier League football match?
The clue lies in the destination a couple of miles along the road – the Litchurch Lane works of the old Midland Railway.
Now operated by the multinational firm Alstom, this is Britain’s last surviving train-building factory – the final outpost of a proud tradition of great British engineering.
It reverberates with the names of mighty metal-bashing locations such as Swindon, Crewe and Doncaster.
The tens of thousands marching along here today have come to celebrate a very special occasion – the 200th birthday of the railway.
Here was the genesis of great locomotives that powered the railway industry. This confident industry created the modern nations of the world, making celebrities of oily-handed engineers like Trevithick, Stephenson Brunel, Stephenson and Gresley.
Flashback to two centuries earlier, when a quaint and eccentric-looking engine – “Locomotion No. 1” – pulled a passenger train along the 25-miles of track between the pioneering industrial towns of Stockton and Darlington.
On this day – September 27 1825 – the world’s first public passenger railway to use steam locomotives was born.
On display in Derby today, in tribute to this moment in history, is the biggest assembly of historic and modern locomotives and rolling stock ever assembled in the world.
Here are vintage steam engines, all brass polished and lovingly tended by preservationists.
Alongside them are workaday diesels, suburban electric trains, as well as flashy new digital machines at the cutting edge of the newest technologies.
The revolutionary tilting trains of the London to Glasgow main line and the Channel Tunnel Eurostar trains are coupled up alongside diminutive engines that would be at home in the world of Thomas the Tank Engine, Oliver the Engine and the Little Red Engine.
But what is so impressive about this occasion is the huge outpouring of love and reverence the British still hold for the technology invented by the early engineer heroes like George and Robert Stephensons– father and son – and Isambard Kingdom Brunel.
In a BBC television poll, Brunel was voted the second greatest Englishman after Sir Winston Churchill. Ahead of Shakespeare – quite something for an engineer.
All these years later, railways are still being expanded across the world – getting faster, more comfortable and more sophisticated all the time.
In the early 1960s, the Japanese took rail travel up to a new level with their spectacular Shinkansen high-speed bullet trains, revolutionising the future of rail travel across the world.
At the beginning of the 1970s, British designers also played a big part in the railway revolution by inventing the tilting train, which allowed carriages to go faster on the curves of old Victorian tracks.
Although the prototype had teething problems, this technology is the backbone of today’s Pendolino trains that have transformed travel times between London, Birmingham, Manchester and Glasgow on the West Coast Main Lin
Now speeds are getting faster everywhere. The Chinese are building tens of thousands of miles of dedicated high-speed tracks, with state-of-the-art “bullet-style” trains racing at high-speed across the country.
Even less-developed nations such as Uzbekistan and Morocco are getting in on the act with new ultra-fast trains
At a more modest end of the scale, British engineers have triumphed with London’s new Elizabeth line, running for 73 miles through the capital, with huge new tunnels bored beneath the streets of the City and West End.
This is heroic in scale – the most ambitious project since the building of the Tube.
When construction started in 2009, the Elizabeth Line was the biggest civil engineering project in Europe and has amassed huge passenger numbers in the short period since it opened in 2022.
It has transformed travel from east to west across the capital, including Heathrow airport, with more than 200 million journeys a year – and growing.
What is so remarkable about all this is that railways represent one of the world’s most enduring technologies – one that that has hardly changed over two centuries.
Astonishing – since so many once-futuristic technologies have been left on the scrapheap in the interim.
Meanwhile the technology perfected by the Stephensons and Isambard Kingdom Brunel in the nascent decades of the early nineteenth century is virtually unchanged today.
Steel adhering to steel with a wheel on a rail is still the gold standard for transport over the world, and now often eclipsing air travel as the favoured mode of transport in an eco-friendly universe.
Why take a plane from London to Paris when you get from capital to capital just as quickly on the clean, electric Eurostar?
Sure, there have been many attempts to surpass basic rail technology – magnetic levitation, trains with rubber tyres, trains on trestles, trains powered by vacuum or air pressure – but nothing has been shown to be superior or more workable.
Just as amazing is the fact that nearly all new rail construction across the world is still based on George Stephenson’s centuries-old “standard gauge” – the measure between the rails.
This is an esoteric four foot eight-and-a-half inches. Why? Because it is the dimension of the backside of a horse.
The early railways were based on primitive Roman wagon-ways – which in turn ran in the ruts in the road formed by the passage of the charioteers of olden days.
Today’s trains are truly chariots of the modern age.
Like all love affairs, our very-British relationship with the railways is a complicated psychology. At a basic level it’s obvious.
We invented the railways and pride in British trains runs through our DNA.
But like all the best love affairs, it’s a complex and contradictory relationship – which is why we all get very worked up when things go wrong.
The editor of a national newspaper once told me that there is rarely a better day for circulation than when there is some story about a crisis on the railways on the front page
And yet, statistically, relatively few of us travel on the railways at all – a tiny 9 per cent of all passenger miles in Britain are by train.
Even so, the railways have a disproportionate grip on the national psyche. We grumble about high fares on trains we never travel on, and poor food in buffet cars we have never patronised.
Leaves on the line, the “wrong kind of snow”, the stale and curling buffet car sandwich are the stuff of legend.
Never mind anecdotal stories of train drivers receiving astronomical salaries.
(We don’t seem to begrudge airline pilots being appropriately paid for taking the lives of the public in their hands.)
But beware of overstepping the mark. Deep in the British soul, the railways represent an idyll that we challenge at our peril, even if we never travel by train.
It’s the innocent world of popular nostalgic images of the railway – Thomas the Tank Engine, Oh, Mr Porter!, The Titfield Thunderbolt, and The Railway Children.
In our mind’s eye we see that country branch line with wheezing old engine, milk churns on the platform and the porter’s cat slumbering on the station seat. It is seen here at its ultimate in the image above of the Lynton & Barnstaple narrow gauge railway in Devon. It closed in 1935, but is now being rebuilt by preservationists, because lingering memories have never gone away
As the distinguished railway writer Hamilton Ellis once put it: “Surely it was always summer when we took our first rail journey?”
The railways and their staff have sometimes acquired the status of national bogeyman precisely because we care so very deeply.
Like the best love affairs, too, here is an attachment that defies explanation. “The curious but intense pleasure that is given to many by railway trains is both an art and a mystery,” wrote the historian Roger Lloyd.
“It is an art because the pleasure to be had is exactly proportionate to the enthusiasm one puts into it. It is a mystery because is impossible to explain to others.”
Lloyd says: “The connection between the sight of a railway engine and a deep feeling of satisfaction is very real for multitudes of people, but it eludes rational analysis.”
What is certain is that the fascination appears to develop at a young age and pass through the generations.
How else do you account for children who have never been on a train – let alone their parents – still thrilling in vast numbers to the implausible adventures of some quaint old steam engines with funny faces, written by a fusty provincial clergyman in the 1950s?
The pop music entrepreneur Pete Waterman, the inspiration behind Kylie Minogue and Rick Astley, told The Guardian how he started out as a trainspotter on Leamington Spa station.
He got his first plastic clockwork locomotive when he was very young, with his first track on a board over the bath.
Now in his seventies and a celebrated collector of trains – including full-size locomotives – Waterman says: “I’ve had trains for all but 18 months of my life – that’s got to be a record.”
The rock star Rod Stewart is equally famous in the world of railway enthusiasm.
In his Beverly Hills mansion Stewart has built a 1,500 square metre model railway, accurate in every detail.
He told a British newspaper: “It took me 23 years to build and it’s bigger than most people’s houses. It’s very expensive but worth it, ‘cos it’s my favourite hobby and I work on it every day.”
When the legendary rocker was featured on the cover of the British monthly magazine Railway Modeller, he is said to have told the editor that it was “better than being on the cover of Rolling Stone”.
Th crooner Frank Sinatra – regarded by many as a sexy king of cool – relaxed with his huge model railway, once he had come off stage.
Other celebrities with model railways of their own are said to include Phil Collins, Roger Daltrey, Bruce Springsteen and Eric Clapton.
For a certain demographic of young people, Ringo Starr is as celebrated for his long-standing role in narrating the Thomas the Tank Engine videos, as playing the drums for the Beatles.
It’s not just nostalgia among older folk at work here. This Christmas hordes of small children travelled aboard heritage railways on recreations of the Warner Brothers film Polar Express; many never having seen a real steam train before.
Meanwhile J. K. Rowling’s Harry Potter sagas have turned an obscure British Railways “Hall Class” engine into an international celebrity in its guise as Hogwarts Castle.
The celebrated route taken along the West Highland line by the Hogwarts Express has turned the remote Glenfinnan Viaduct in Inverness-shire into an international tourist icon.
At the same time, families young and old turn out to visit Britain’s 100-plus preserved railways which play a big part in our national leisure industry.
These little lines carry six million passengers a year, employing 20,000 staff and volunteers, and with a total mileage bigger than the London Tube network.
Others will be standing at the lineside to watch a mainline steam express train pass by.
(Though it is fashionable to moan about the modern railway, its “open access” rules permit the running of historic “giants of steam “on the main lines in the 21st century.)
Some of these trains are kept going by wealthy philanthropists such as the hedge fund manager Jeremy Hosking, who devotes much of his fortune to keeping some of Britain’s distinguished historic locomotives in immaculate condition to speed along the main line.s
Hosking operates one of the finest stables of vintage express steam locomotives in the world, including the streamlined Sir Nigel Gresley, Britannia and the famous Royal Scot.
Sir Nigel’s sister Mallard, still holds the world speed record for a steam engine of 126mph, set in 1938.
Thousands pay premium fares to re-live the Golden Age of the railways.
You can dine on four-course meals in preserved Pullman cars, with haute cuisinefreshly prepared on the train, and silver-served by uniformed stewards on starched tablecloths.
Such trips are highly popular with well-heeled folk and often sell out well in advance.
The latest such enterprise is the Belmond Britannic Explorer a high-end luxury train with sleeping cars, operating land cruises around Britain. A typical fare for two on a three-night trip could cost up to £28,000.
At the other end of the social range of railway admirers is the army of trainspotters – the legions of small boys with notebooks taking down numbers at the end of the platform.
There are fewer of them now than in their 1960s heyday, but there are numbers to be reckoned with.
Back in 1965, I joined the crowds at Paddington station to witness the departure of the very last timetabled steam service out of Brunel’s terminus, behind the handsome express engine No. 7029 “Clun Castle”.
Fast forward 60 years – and with a tear in my eye – I turned out at Paddington to see the very same engine arrive with a special train to mark the anniversary. The crowd that day in 2025 – although a bit older and greyer – was just as impressive in its own way.
Forget the cliche of a 14-year-old boy in an anorak, with a vacuum flask and tuna paste sandwiches. The first trainspotter in recorded history was actually female – one Fanny Johnson, a 14-year-old living at Westbourne Park in London.
In 1861 she neatly noted down the names and other information about trains arriving at Paddington station.
And there’s an early spotter in E. Nesbitt’s book The Railway Children of 1906 which was, of course, turned into an enchanting film starring Jenny Agutter.
But the halcyon days of trainspotting were really in the 1960s when there was no more wonderful time to be at the trackside.
By then it had become a national cult in which enthusiasts turned out in all weathers on platforms all over the land, accompanied by their “Bible” – a well-thumbed copy of the Ian Allan ABC Locospotters’ Guide.
Whether derided as rivet counters or anoraks, the spotters didn’t care so long as they “copped” – that’s the technical term for “spotted” – their coveted engine.
The guide, which listed all the trains running on the network, was a goldmine for Allan, a clerk with the old Southern Railway, with new engines added in new editions as they came to be built.
Nostalgia was everywhere in this world of glamorous steam engines, with names like King Arthur and Winston Churchill – as well as obsessive addiction, since it was unlikely the lists of numbers spotted would ever be complete.
During school holidays some stations were so full of over-excited boys that the staff were forced to chase them away.
Train drivers were like football stars – the Harry Kanes and Jude Bellinghams of the day.
A quarter of a million boys joined Ian Allan’s Locospotters’ Club. (Entry fee and badge cost one shilling.)
“All genuine spotters wear this badge”, went the slogan.) And how exclusive it was, too, with the secret language of nicknames for engines, where insiders would know their Streak from their Jinty from their Pom-Pom.
“Trainspotting was democratically cheap, requiring minimal equipment,” says railway historian Simon Bradley.
“Notebook, pencil, ABC. Like birdwatching, the payback came from a mixture of application, observation and luck; it encouraged both co-operation and good-natured rivalry.
“Spotters,” observes Bradley, “did not usually form gangs or beat each other up. They also developed an early taste for independence and a working knowledge of cheap public transport.’
Yet trainspotters did get a metaphorical battering in the years that followed. “The trainspotter became everyone’s favourite wally,” says Nicholas Whitaker in his book Platform Souls.
“With blacks, gays and women all off the right-on comedian’s agenda, here’s a man you can titter at in safety, political integrity unblemished.”
The mockers had a field day. Some may remember the Jasper Carrott sketch about meeting a trainspotter at a party so boring that he only had to utter three words and Carrott would fall asleep?
Or the bespectacled and acne-covered “Timothy Potter, Trainspotter” from the adult comic, Viz magazine, who was so bad at trainspotting he was forced to collect phone numbers instead.
Yet despite all this, the hobby has survived. There are estimated to be around 200,000 people trainspotting today compared with a million in its heyday.
That may seem quite surprising, since many trains now look like boxes on wheels, are painted in identikit corporate liveries and run to a computerised timetable.
However, a love of railways remains the ultimate in nostalgia for those who started trainspotting when young.
Trainspotters don’t need to defend themselves in the face of criticism. As the historian Roger Lloyd wrote in his book The Fascination of Railways: “I have never met a lover of railways who felt the slightest need to produce any justification for his pleasure.”
“A lot of folk got addicted to it in their formative years and have been reluctant to give up,” says Chris Milner, former editor of the Railway Magazine. “And they have the money to travel rather than standing around on a draughty platform.
“The internet has changed everything, with spotters just as likely wield an ipad as a greasy notebook,’” he says, adding that spotters can use the web to follow trains round the country without leaving an armchair.
“And there are still plenty of unusual things to spot – especially the locomotive-hauled trains that still run on some routes. And trainspotting is certainly no more boring than fishing!”
As the poet Ian Macmillan (“the Bard of Barnsley”) puts it:
It’s a life filled with moments that ring like a bell,
With elation the thrill of the chase;
It’s a smile from your dad that says ‘Yes, all is well’
As he matches the grin on your face.
This is a hobby that never will pall.
Tomorrow’s a spotting day. Well, aren’t they all?
“I’ve loved travelling since I was a trainspotter with my map and my notebook,’ the legendary broadcaster and Monty Python star, Michael Palin, told me.
The former politician Michael Portillo got the bug, too – seemingly endlessly roaming the rails for his Great British Railway Journeys television series.
The two Michaels – Messrs Palin and Portillo – reflect a big demand for railway shows on TV. Eco-conscious tourism, crowded roads and the pursuit of “net-zero” make rail travel increasingly fashionable.
For the latest television rail show at the beginning of 2026 the “Hairy Biker” Si King has abandoned two wheels for the love of the rails, with a series on great British railway stations.
Now social media is helping elevate trainspottting to a new cult status. Never mind old blokes in khaki gilets, there is a new fresh-faced star of the internet called Francois Bourgeois making loco-watching fashionable. So successful has he been that he has been signed up by TV’s Channel 4 to prepare to go into space. From train numbers to space flight. Wow!
The love of trains is a pleasure available to all of us.
Despite the ravages of the branch line closures of the 1960s we can still choose to explore our wonderful national network on lines which offer some of the greatest journeys on the planet.
I was commissioned by a major book publisher to spend two years travelling on slow trains around some of the delightful railways in the remotest parts of Britain.
Despite the ravages of Dr Beeching’s famous axe in the 1960s, this is a world full of charm. Many lines were reprieved through the efforts of dogged campaigners in local communities.
It was the bleak period of closures in the 1960s that led paradoxically of a revived fascination with the railway – valuing what we might have lost.
A campaign by the poet laureate Sir John Betjeman saved the magnificent Gothic St Pancras station from closure – although it was too late for the equally splendid Euston, with its grand Doric Arch, whose demolition in the 1960s was deemed a national tragedy.
The National Archives have in their possession some wonderful pictures of the early era, including one of the concourse at the old Euston, with all its thrilling energy.
By contrast, the present-day concrete Euston station is as soulless and dull as an airport terminal.
But thanks to the campaigners against Beeching, we still can travel past the magical lochs, mountains and valleys of Scotland’s West Highland line, recently voted the most scenic in the world. Or over the spectacular high fells and splendid viaducts of the Settle & Carlisle in the Yorkshire Dales.
At the other end of Britain, you can take the slow train from St Erth to St Ives on the western tip of Cornwall, with surely the most beautiful seaside views from any railway in Europe.
Or the spectacularly remote Heart of Wales line between Shrewsbury and Swansea, which runs through so many marginal rural constituencies that no politician has ever had to nerve to try to close it.
It is a curious paradox that many folk who take pleasure in the serenity of these country railways revert into “angry commuters” on a Monday morning.
Maybe understandable, since there is not much joy when you are lined up on the platform on a dark morning for the 07.03 Thameslink service from Waterloo to Three Bridges – officially Britain’s most overcrowded train.
So, will our fixation with the railways endure into the next double century? It is certainly all-change for the network now. Keir Starmer’s Labour government is in the process of re-nationalising the network in a radical reorganisation.
Privatisation of the railways, under the Conservative government of John Major in 1994 was never popular.
The trains were parcelled out to private companies who had to bid for franchises, betting they were going to get their money back through fares. Meanwhile, they had to pay for access to the tracks via a state-run company, Network Rail.
Mostly, it was deemed a failure and all too bureaucratic, with several companies running out of cash, or having to be taken back into state control because their performance was so dismal.
However, there were high points. The entrepreneurial flair of Sir Richard Branson and his Virgin Trains helped transform the customer experience of travelling on the West Coast Main Line, linking some of Britain’s major industrial cities
What had often been dull and surly service under the old British Rail, was transformed by enterprising staff in bright uniforms staffing the new tilting Pendolino trains to Birmingham, Manchester, Liverpool and Glasgow,
Some of the excitement of Virgin Atlantic air travel rubbed off on the railways, which had not seemed glamorous since the 1930s.
Now it is all changing again. A new nationalised entity called Great British Railways will take over the trains in England, with legislation currently going through Parliament.
However, the jury is out on how effective it will be.
Railway travel is still regarded by many folk as too expensive, and the fares system as over- complicated for ordinary passengers to understand.
The rail unions remain restless, costs continue to rise and hoped-for efficiencies haven’t materialised to a great degree.
Although ministers announced the first freeze in fares for 30 years at the end of 2025, it seems unlikely that prices for the passenger will ever be greatly reduced in real terms – with little sign of major fare reform on the horizon.
At the same time, the efficiency of modern family cars and the improvement in road coaches provide economical and increasingly luxurious opposition to trains.
Meanwhile the dream of a new high-speed network to rival those of our European neighbours, such as France and Spain has vanished.
The so-called HS2, which was planned to link London with Birmingham, Manchester, Sheffield, Leeds and Glasgow on 225mph trains, has been brutally slashed back to a stump in the Midlands.
All the talk is of poor cost-control and budget over-runs. Some of the excesses have been characterised by £100 million spent on a special tunnel in the Chilterns to protect local bats.
With costs ever- spiralling, it is still not clear when HS2 will ever be finished, let alone open to the public.
Despite all this, I believe that the passion of the British love affair with the railways remains undimmed.
This Christmas I travelled on a special train from York to Newcastle hauled by the Flying Scotsman, – the most famous locomotive in the world and the first ever to run at 100 miles an hour.
It was especially poignant for me, since exactly 60 years previously s a schoolboy I had rushed out to my local station to photograph her when she was rescued from the scrapyard and returned to the main line.
This century-old loco – with her polished brasswork and gleaming Brunswick green paint – is an old lady these days, but she was still able to race like a greyhound along the East Coast Main Line.
Muffled up in scarves and coats in the freezing weather thousands turned out along the lineside, waving to speed her on her way.
So great were the crowds that the track authorities were forced to issue advance safety warnings in the local media.
These folk weren’t so much trainspotters as ordinary Brits with pride in our national heritage.
In those euphoric moments, all the gripes about the shortcomings of the railway were forgotten.
The ghosts of the great pioneering visionaries of two centuries ago were surely proud that the flame of this very British love affair with the railways still burns intensely.
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Michael Williams’s railway books include On the Slow Train, On the Slow Train Again, Steaming to Victory
and The Trains Now Departed. All are published by Arrow, a division of Penguin Random House
