Mention an interest in railways and most people will assume you are a trainspotter – that’s rather unfair, because as Christian Wolmar comprehensively demonstrates in this excellent book, railways have shaped our lifestyles, our towns and cities, our working habits and much else, not to mention making a huge contribution to our survival in two world wars. This is a book about railways, NOT about trains – while the development of steam power necessarily gets some attention, Wolmar does not dwell on the details of what pulls our trains – instead the focus is on the development of the railway network and the huge social and economic effects of a truly revolutionary form of travel.

Britain is the land that invented railways, and they have shaped us in so many ways. There are some fascinating facts and figure in this book: before the railways came, over 200,000 cows were kept in London to provide fresh milk every day; whole areas of London owe their existence to invention of commuting, made possible by the railways, while many other places – Swindon, Crewe – owe their size and population to their roles in the railway system. The physical geography of so much of our country has been shaped by the railways – cuttings and embankments, viaducts and tunnels, our thriving city terminii and abandoned rural lines closed under the Beeching axe and now used as footpaths and bridleways. So too our society – railways enabled a new attitude to travel, to holidays (the growth of seaside towns owes everything to the railways), to industry and agriculture.

My childhood fascination with trains (yes, I did have a model railway!) had, like many, given me a love of live steam and some knowledge of the pre-nationalisation railway system between the wars – this was the time of the Big Four, the LMS, LNER, GWR and SR railways, whose locomotives and liveries are famous. I also knew of the genesis of the railways, with the Stockton & Darlingon and Liverpool & Manchester railways, and George Stephenson. Between those two periods there was a gaping void in my knowledge, covering the railway boom and the development of the network up to the Great War. It explains so much even about the network today – while we have so many terminii in London and why they are where they are; why services in Kent are so awful (route planning and track construction on the cheap); why there are two routes from Southend-on-Sea to two different stations in London; why it takes so long to get to Northampton. We are in almost every sense using the network bequeathed to us by the Victorians and the Edwardians. Alone in the UK, the new Channel Tunnel rail link, High Speed One, can be thought of as a 21st century railway.

As someone who commutes on 20th century trains, running on 19th century train routes, run by a company that’s part of a messy and botched privatisation, I feel I have a vested interest in our railways, and Fire & Steam taught me a great deal. It’s a wonderful book, but it’s absolutely not an exercise in nostalgia – Wolmar does not pine for the days of steam, recognises that the pre-Beeching network was too big, and does not fall in to the trap of slagging off British Rail. Anyone reading this book will come away with a renewed appreciation of the scale and importance of our railway network, and, I hope, with a burning sense of frustration that we can’t recognise its social and economic importance and invest in it in a way that it deserves.

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