The Great British Railway Disaster

Rail privatisation broke up British Rail into 100 component parts – and in the process created a whole series of anomalies that confused and irritated passengers. This book, written at the beginning of the privatisation process, is a series of amusing incidents which arose because of the way that the railways were fragmented. Why, for instance, were travellers finding connecting trains on branch lines long gone when the main line service was later, when previously they had waited? Why were some people paying more for the same journey because they bought their ticket from a machine rather than a ticket office? And why had stations suddenly gone ex-directory?

This book is a collection of stories taken from the ‘Mad’ column, written by Christian Wolmar, which ran every week in the Independent on Sunday for two years. There are a host of great tales, ranging from why a fire was left to on a platform because the equipment to douse it belonged to Railtrack and not the train operator, to why broken down trains were taking much longer to rescue because if the nearest locomotive belonged to a different company, it would frequently not be used. It is not surprising this book has a large following amongst those interested in the industry.