Spectator books of the year: Matthew Parris on a rattling great history of the railways

Simon Bradley’s compendious yet rattling The Railways: Nation, Network and People (Profile Books, £25) achieves magnificently a difficult double. Learned and deeply researched, it will not only impress railway buffs but tell even them a great deal they didn’t know; yet this is also popular history, which will engage and entertain any lay reader remotely curious about train travel in Britain.

We start (‘Seating, Lighting, Heating, Eating’) in the first-class compartment of a mid-Victorian railway carriage, move on to the horrors of third-class travel (this is not least a social history of railways) and end our journey at London’s modernised Liverpool Street station (‘The old railway ambience may have gone, but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes’). I like train travel but know little about railway history. My partner, on the other hand, is something of a trainspotter. To him, then, the last word: ‘I got to about page 240 before I spotted a single mistake.’