YOU GET THE TRAINS YOU DESERVE

"Eleven Minutes Late" by Matthew Engel Matthew Engel’s distinguished career in journalism, mainly with the Guardian, includes some fine accounts of train journeys, one of them on an early Eurostar. He has now written a book about British rail which is both paean and polemic. Engel’s chats with fellow passengers have much to say about the national psyche. He sketches the history of trains snappily, with a requisite dose of cynicism: it is, of course, largely a tale of political short-termism. British society and its railways, Engel argues, reflect one another, though we are too proud to admit it. While there are a fair few grubby toilets, it’s not all Victor Meldrew.

Engel expends generous prose when he sees beauty, as in an ode to Sheffield station. He believes in trains as the future, which adds feeling to a wry travelogue. The passages on the Beeching reforms, which could have launched a real age of the train, seethe with indignant pathos. And there is enough humour to thaw out the drier topics for the general reader. A book to get stuck with on the delayed 17.03 to Crewe.

~ JAKUB FIGURSKI

"Eleven Minutes Late", by Matthew Engel, Macmillan, out now