Michael Joseph £30
You can tell Christian Wolmar is really keen on trains when he enthuses about the ‘acrid burning smell’ the brakes used to make on the Seventies 125s. He found it ‘not entirely unpleasant’. The problem took 15 years to sort out.
Extraordinary details keep breaking in on the half-century of Britain’s nationalised railways, 1948-97. The book might have been dry, had the author kept to his declared aim of showing how British Railways’
