and while it is good to know these events took place simultaneously, it might have been a better plan to take the origins of the eventual big rail companies in separate sections to make reading easier. 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. He discusses early horse-drawn and gravity-operated lines as well as steam, electrical, and diesel-powered ones.

From 1923 all the way to the 21st Century, the author details the rise and fall of British Rail, showing the major financial struggles, changes in leadership and the attitudes of both government and the population at large. Such an insightful look at the history of the state owned company from its nationalisation of the big four train operators in 1948 to privatisation in the early 1990's.

I was hoping for character studies of the major players, the political and financial machinations, the feuds but Maggs has stuck to chronicling it seems every construction and evolution. I particularly liked the challenges to the misguided belief that BR was exclusively and permanently inefficient. With his nasal tones and maniacal bellows of excitement on station platforms, Bourgeois is either the apex of the breed or a strangely committed satirist of it. If you are a registered author of this item, you may also want to check the "citations" tab in your RePEc Author Service profile, as there may be some citations waiting for confirmation.

It's not that the railway management itself was without faults - particularly in the way that the old regions, reflecting the four private companies that were taken over, tried to still do things their own way. No maps, diagrams or photos to illustrate the text, which is made all the worse for poor descriptive writing. Managers had, after a number of years in the immediate postwar period and particularly after the 1965 modernization, learned to respond to political flak and efficiently defended the organisation. The first half examines the newly nationalized industry through postwar austerity, arguing that it suffered from an “inheritance” of materials from World War II that made managing the “asset-heavy industry” difficult (55). There is a short selling up of the events of privatisation showing it reflects badly on the final incarnation of British Rail.But through its 50-year lifetime, British Rail transformed our transport system, and for a time provided one of the fastest regular rail services in the world. Certainly not the one engineered by George Stephenson – one of the first was laid down at Wollaton, near Nottingham, open by 1610, long before Stephenson's birth in 1781.

And I would have liked to have seen more detail, for example, of the seating, food provided in the dining cars and suchlike. Excellent book providing a comprehensive, fairly high-level but fascinating and compelling account of BR’s history. When requesting a correction, please mention this item's handle: RePEc:bla:ecaffa:v:42:y:2022:i:3:p:567-570.As Christian explorers, British Rail deserves credit for bringing the railways into the twenty-first century, as they faced an enormous challenge from the rise of motorised transport and changing travel patterns. T wo years ago, Mick Lynch, a red-in-tooth-and-crankshaft trade unionist, might have seemed the last of a dying breed.

Past and present are welded together as smoothly as steel track; conflict belongs firmly in the past. Today, 25 years after the privatisation, the Conservative government has quietly conceded that privatisation was a failed and damaging move and the Johnson government proposed what is effectively re-nationalisation for parts of the network. Wolmar is the high priest of railway studies and it is to his credit that he sets aside his own convictions to offer a delays-and-all perspective.

As he notes "Britain's railways over the years have been constantly targeted by Whitehall" perhaps most significantly by Marples and his advisory committee which led to the infamous Beeching report. What Wolmar does communicate very effectively is the supreme difficulty of running a railway, with its huge fixed assets, astronomical overheads and susceptibility to changes in government, technology, the energy market and the natural environment. Despite an obvious flair for the social history railway, Wolmar sticks closely to his main subject, the operational structure of the organisation which existed between 1948 and 1994, British Railways. He itemises the poor decisions taken by BR that left the railways in Britain lagging behind their continental equivalents. That question might be answered next year, when Great British Railways, a new body set up to superintend the rail network, is launched.