Things are getting better. No, really, they are. The railways have largely been out of the news lately, apart from the awful death of two trackworkers (see other article), with the timetable change in May passing off smoothly. Now there is independent confirmation from the regular Transport Focus passenger survey that the perception of the railway is at last getting better. Indeed, the picture painted by the survey, published...

We are prisoners of history but we don’t have to be. When writing my various books on the history of the railways, it is always noticeable the extent to which the development of the railways in Britain was different than in the rest of Europe. In this country, the railways were built in haphazard way with no overall plan. The British railway network was created through a process of...