Train books through the years

Before the railway ‘Grouping’ of 1923, Britain had over a hundred railway companies, each with its own story, many of which were captured in official histories. In the 20th century, railway books also thrived in the children’s market.

The Wonder Book of Railways, designed “for every train-minded boy or girl”, went through at least 20 editions between 1900 and 1960.

In Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015), Simon Bradley recalls his 1970s trainspotting boyhood:

“Every public library then had a shelf-load of books by post-war authors such as C. Hamilton Ellis, L.T.C. Rolt and David St John Thomas, lively and engaging writers who leavened technical description with human interest and historical understanding.”

Striking this balance - between technical detail and engaging storytelling - is the key to railway writing. Without the facts, railway enthusiasts lose interest; without the storytelling, you won’t reach the general reader.

One early writer who achieved this perfectly was F.S. Williams. In Our Iron Roads (1852) he describes how railways respond to an accident on the line:

“A telegram flashes into the passenger station that there has been an accident. Two copies are immediately sent, one to the locomotive superintendent … the other to the traffic inspector of the district. A list of the names and addresses of the skilled men, twelve in all, who form the break-down staff hangs up, framed and glazed, on the wall of the office; these are at once summoned.”

Accommodating rail books for different audiences

As trains lost ground to cars and planes, railway writers shifted their focus. They tended to look back in time, catering to ‘Generation Steam’ - those nostalgic for the era of steam locomotives, which ended in 1968.

While the market is shrinking, it remains lucrative for now. Many in this generation are comfortably retired, with the money to buy books and the time to read them.

That said, the best railway writers don’t just dwell in the past. The railway histories written by Christian Wolmar come right up to date, and his name is as likely to be attached to a railway news story as a history book.

Most of my own non-fiction has a then-and-now structure. In a chapter in my book, Belles and Whistles (2014), for instance, I compared a modern-day trip from London to Brighton aboard an efficient but bland Electrostar multiple unit, with the same journey aboard the Brighton Belle (1933-1972).

Researching when writing books about trains

I do a lot of research, but there are not as many railway archives as there once were. A few years ago, I visited a London public library that I knew kept back numbers of The Railway Magazine.

I requested a volume from 1911 and when I returned it, the librarian said, “You’re the first person to have asked to see The Railway Magazine for five years. We have the most volumes since it started. Would you like to have them?”

A week later, I was gratefully taking delivery of about 20 boxes of handsomely bound copies. Though, I should add that The Railway Magazine still publishes as a successful monthly.- it’s just no longer at the heart of British culture.

In reading railway history, I came across some facts so extraordinary that they demanded to be made into fiction. 25 years ago, I first read about the line that carried both the recently deceased and mourners from a small private station outside Waterloo to the huge and beautiful Brookwood Cemetery in Surrey.

Both mourners and the deceased could go either first, second, or third class. When I mentioned to a publisher that I’d like to write a novel about this, he asked, “What kind of novel?” I replied, “Well, it’s not going to be a romantic comedy.”

It had to be a historical thriller. The Necropolis Railway (2002) was the start of what became 10 novels featuring an aspiring railwayman who turns railway detective, Jim Stringer.

Choosing to write railway books

People thought it was eccentric of me to write railway novels. After all, there’s always been more railway fact than fiction.

The great Victorian novelists saw railways as imposing a deadening uniformity rather than stimulating the imagination. In Dombey & Son (1848), Charles Dickens described the coming to London of the London & Birmingham Railway:

“There were railway hotels, office-houses, lodging-houses, boarding-houses; railway plans, maps, views, wrappers, bottles, sandwich-boxes, and timetables; railway hackney-coach and cabstands; railway omni-buses, railway streets and buildings…”

Before cars, railways featured in fiction mostly as a backdrop or device. Crime fiction was the genre that took railways most seriously.

Victor L. Whitechurch created the character of Thorpe Hazell, a railway expert and amateur detective who appeared in a series of short stories later collected as The Thorpe Hazell Mysteries. A wagon containing a valuable painting is removed from the centre of a goods train. How was it done? The answers are always operationally plausible.

Railways continue to make compelling crime fiction settings, often transporting people to places they perhaps shouldn’t be. Take the million-selling The Girl on The Train (2015), by Paula Hawkins, for example.

Writing books about trains for readers who love trains

Railway readers do like facts, and most of my railway novels triggered letters from a railway enthusiast who was always polite: “Much enjoyed the latest ‘Stringer’, Andrew. A few pointers…”

He’d generally begin his gentle admonitions by saying that the engine depicted on the cover didn’t exist in the year the story was set. But this was a small price to pay for being able to escape into a dreamworld of gaslit, steam-shrouded stations, remote country branches, and mysterious great-coated characters brooding in first-class compartments.

Where once I felt slightly guilty about my interest in an apparently declining transport mode, the recent focus on railways’ environmental benefits has cast them in a new light.

Railways have a future as well as a past - and so do railway books.