By the 1990s, Wolmar argues that British Rail was an excellent industry, one that “did not deserve the fate it suffered” throughout the privatization process (329), and that it was government intervention that slowed British Rail’s development toward the end of its life. It goes a long way to dispel the popular image of British Rail in politics and the media as a bloated state run agency, providing poor service and value for money. In this comprehensive history, Colin Maggs, one of the country's foremost railway historians, tells the story of over 400 years of British railway history. The bottom line, or cost, was always foremost, with railway managers under constant pressure to make savings while starved of the investment they required to make the improvements necessary to turn the system around.

Of course this is important, but it is given too much detail sometimes, where some of the niceties of the experience of being a rail traveller in the BR period could have had more coverage. I thought this book would be quite dry and a slog to read but this turned out to not be the case at all. Born into postwar austerity, impoverished, and exploited by a hostile press, British Rail became a punchline, dismissed and swept away by Conservative government.Local people will also find much to enjoy here, as the pictures show far more than just the railway, illustrating much of the surrounding area as it used to be. For instance, the engineering drawings for a sophisticated artificial leg, which are going to be manufactured at the Crewe locomotive works for issue to injured employees, are featured on the first spread, and on the following page, the architectural sketches for a church in Crewe, which was paid for by LNWR to serve the local community of railway workers, are featured.

The opportunity for the UK to have a high quality integrated service was lost as the railways were broken up. You can change your choices at any time by visiting Cookie preferences, as described in the Cookie notice. The pandemic decimated passenger numbers and revenue, while the one blue-riband project, High Speed Two, has become a political plaything, its route being sliced and diced according to the exigencies of Parliamentary arithmetic on any given day. British Rail was the last big state run company to be privatised and as the author states Mrs Thatcher was reluctant to be responsible as she knew that most people had a strong attachment to it. Overuse and underinvestment during the war years, not to mention the depredations of the Luftwaffe, had left the railways in a threadbare state and the Big Four effectively bankrupt.It's not that the railway management itself was without faults - particularly in the way that the old regions, reflecting the four private companies that were taken over, tried to still do things their own way. Today, 25 years after the privatisation, the Conservative government has quietly conceded that privatisation was a failed and damaging move and the Johnson government proposed what is effectively re-nationalisation for parts of the network. The majority of pages are undamaged with some creasing or tearing, and pencil underlining of text, but this is minimal.