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HIDDEN CORNERS
reading
between the lines Andrew Martin tracks down the best railway titles in the Library’s collection I was once browsing in S. Railways &c. when another reader came up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen you up here before. Lovely and quiet, isn’t it?’ His remark implied that anyone browsing those shelves must be doing so for extra-curricular reasons – in order to unwind and get away from it all – but I’ve made a good part of my living from writing fiction and non-fiction about railways. That, I admit, may appear perverse. The modern, de-glamorised network might 20 THE LONDON LIBRARY MAGAZINE
have been designed to divert mainstream writers away from the subject of railways. It’s as if signal boxes, dining cars, buffet cars, porters, named locomotives (as opposed to anonymous ‘power cars’ , at the head of worm-like ‘multiple units’), manned country stations, marshalling yards and compartments were all too interesting to be allowed to continue. Yes, rail use is rising, but only because of the increasing numbers of people commuting in garish, overcrowded multiple units into our big
cities. The train operators claim the credit for these rising numbers, and it is difficult to argue with them, given the complicated accounting of the modern, fractured railway. One author who takes the privatised railway of 2016 as easily in his stride as that of 1900 is Christian Wolmar. In the introduction to his book Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (2007), he writes, ‘I set out to put the history of the railways encompassing both their construction and their social impact in
