For the past two years I’ve been on an odyssey to determine the best and worst of our national railway system. The results will be published in my new book The Trains Now Departed, out from Penguin Random House on May 7. You can argue over the good and bad bits of the railways. But my overwhelming finding has been that there is enormous goodwill and warmth on the part of British people towards the railways. Yet modern governments and railway firms fail consistently to harness it. What’s gone wrong?
