Gillian Tindall

Track Changes

The Railways: Nation, Network and People

By

Profile Books 645pp £25 order from our bookshop

Almost forty years ago, when steam trains had precipitately vanished, along with a third of Britain’s entire railway network, stations and shunting yards, I wrote an article for a Sunday magazine called ‘The Down-Train to Childhood’. It centred on a Sussex branch line, by then axed, that I had known in the early 1950s. I had put ha’pennies on the rails to get them squashed into pennies, watched milk churns expertly hauled in and out of the open guard vans of slowly moving trains, and scared myself enjoyably by standing close to the track when a squat, black tank engine came puffing down. (I’m sure it scared the drivers too. They used to hoot at me, which I took for a cheery greeting.) Back then, they were commonplace experiences. Now they are unimaginably remote.

Sign Up to our newsletter

Receive free articles, highlights from the archive, news, details of prizes, and much more.

Follow Literary Review on Twitter

  • Last Tweets

    • The mystery of Jack the Ripper's identity has long been agonised over. But what do we know about his victims?… ,
    • A piece of Literary Review history from way back in 1983: John Haffenden talks to the great Iris Murdoch. ,
    • Britain’s only travelling lit fest, the Garden Museum Literary Festival is heading to Houghton Hall, Norfolk, for a… ,
    • 'The 19th-century German sage is not my idea of a pleasant travel companion' goes hiking with Friedr… ,
    • If you want ideas about what to read next, sign up to our free email newsletter, and get book reviews, archive mate… ,
    • 'The heroic male nude could not, I think, be used today to signify civic pride and glory', as Michelangelo’s 'David… ,
    • 'Munch’s later works show us a man liberated from the torments that gave rise to some of the best-known early works… ,
    Follow Us