Now comes the hard bit. Does Keith Williams know what he is doing? I am not asking that in a critical way but rather as a genuine question expressed in a supportive context. After all, the poor man has been set an impossible task and he must feel that he is in one of those Escher drawings that seem to suggest a set of stairs that has no beginning...

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...