Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding. But Michael Williams is unafraid to state the obvious fact about Britain’s railways, which is that they were far more attractive in the past:
It is sometimes tempting to wonder if, deep in every railway operations HQ, there is a department whose sole job is to think up ways of corroding the experience of passengers. Here are seats that don’t line up with windows, garish plasticky train interiors, an incomprehensible fares system, a cacophony of endless announcements….
In The Trains Now Departed Williams celebrates ‘the best of what is gone from our railways’ in 16 vivid, highly readable chapters. One concerns Verney Junction, formerly the furthest outpost of the Metropolitan Railway. Nominally part of London Underground, Verney was located — as Williams puts it — ‘in a field’ in rural Bucks.
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