- “Dishonesty Is The Second-Best Policy and Other Rules to Live By” by David Mitchell
- “Michael Palin In Venezuela” by Michael Palin
- “Happiness: Lessons From A New Science” by Richard Layard
- “The People on Platform 5” by Clare Pooley
- “Encyclopaedia of Narrow Gauge Railways of Great Britain and Ireland” by Thomas Middlemiss
- “Moscow Coup: The Death of the Soviet System” by Martin Sixsmith
- “The Secret Diary of Adrian Mole Aged Thirteen and Three-Quarters” by Sue Townsend
- “The Growing Pains of Adrian Mole” by Sue Townsend
- “Adrian Mole: The Collected Poems” by Sue Townsend
- “How To Live Like A Stoic” by Tom Hodgkinson
- “The Sacred Diary of Adrian Plass aged 37 3/4” by Adrian Plass
- “This Present Darkness” by Frank Peretti
- “Don’t Sleep, There Are Snakes” by Daniel Everett
- “Brutal Scotland” by Simon Phipps
- “Idler XXX: Thirty Years of The Idler, A Visual History” by Tom Hodgkinson
- “We” by Yevgeny Zamyatin
- “British Railways Mark 1 Coaches” by Keith Parkin
- “Meditations” by Marcus Aurelius
- “The Story of Railways” by Richard Bowood, illustrated by Robert Ayton (Ladybird)
- “Riders” by Jilly Cooper
- “The Dark Half” by Stephen King
- “Everything In Color” by Stephanie Stalvey
- “Final Destination: Riding Britain’s Trains to the End of the Line” by Nige Tassell
- “Willie, Willie, Harry, Stee” by Charlie Higson
- “Bill Bailey’s Remarkable Guide to Happiness” by Bill Bailey
- “West Highland Landscape” by Colin Baxter
- “How God Becomes Real: Kindling The Presence of Invisible Others” by T.M. Luhrmann
- “On The Slow Train Again” by Michael Williams
Date Started: 26th September 2026
Date Finished: 4th October 2026
3/5 stars
Picked this up in a charity shop, and was keen to give it a read as I’m looking at writing a railway-related travelogue myself. It’s been bit of a theme in my reading of late.
The author has picked a decent variety of interesting train journeys around Britain here, and has described them in an accessible, readable and generally quite decent style, but I did have a few annoyances. The ones that really jumped out were lazy demonisation of Dr. Beeching, and related to that, a constant harping on about a “golden age” of railways I’m not convinced ever really existed. It felt like there were a few too many lazy generalisations on these fronts. I don’t think anyone has ever really written about Beeching in a fair and unbiased way, and this book occasionally falls into the tedious trope of portraying him as an evil man gleefully shutting lines for the fun of it. That’s always been a very long way from the truth. There’s too much nostalgia in the book too, and I find that annoying. But…to balance that, there’s lots of interesting information on places to go and things to see, and it’s a generally uplifting and varied read.
It was written in 2010, and it feels like the world has completely changed since then – some of it feels quite out of date, especially as railway nationalisation is now well advanced, and certain types of train described here are now either very rare or extinct. The railway has changed surprisingly quickly in that time. I wouldn’t bother going out of your way to secure a copy, but it’s worth a read if you find one.