British Rail: A New History

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Excellent book providing a comprehensive, fairly high-level but fascinating and compelling account of BR’s history. His successor, Robert Reid, had a direct line to the secretary of state for transport, with whom he went shooting, and was on first-name terms with Denis Thatcher.

A worthy scholarly work that sometimes it feels like British Rail telling its story in its own words. Christian Wolmar is generally regarded as the expert’s expert when it comes to the railways and his book is clearly written with great affection as well as knowledge and insight. No missing or damaged pages, no creases or tears, no underlining or highlighting of text, and no writing in the margins. Within these pages, author Neil Parkhouse has assembled a breathtaking array of colour images, collected assiduously over a period of more than ten years, which are coupled with maps, tickets, WTT extracts and other ephemera to paint a picture of the railways of West Gloucestershire and the Wye Valley as they existed mostly over fifty years ago. One of the strengths of this book is its concentration on those responsible for the day to day management of the railway network and their relationship with the various parts of central government.To calculate the overall star rating and percentage breakdown by star, we don’t use a simple average. I particularly liked the challenges to the misguided belief that BR was exclusively and permanently inefficient. While he does not spell it out directly here, Wolmar shows that the problem with the railway in Britain has always been a lack of serious and positive state engagement from the start.

The bottom line, or cost, was always foremost, with railway managers under constant pressure to make savings while starved of the investment they required to make the improvements necessary to turn the system around. We don’t share your credit card details with third-party sellers, and we don’t sell your information to others. This is a very readable history of a much loved and maligned organisation which was, and to a degree still is, deeply entwined with the lives and culture of Britain. Wolmar takes up the story from nationalisation and examines how successive governments failed to understand or appreciate the true potential of the railways.Along the way, some of the other locations which were once railway served – such as docks, quarries and industrial works – are also illustrated. In this comprehensive history, Colin Maggs, one of the country's foremost railway historians, tells the story of over 400 years of British railway history. Ultimately Wolmar demonstrates that just prior to privatisation this new breed of railway managers had beaten the not-fit-for-purpose formerly privately created and operated system into a sleek and pretty much as efficient and as effective as possible state owned business. Saddening too that the dogma of privatisation destroyed what could have become an extremely beneficial and cheaper railway… or, if not cheaper, a much better, more widely accessible railway.