Steam trains make a comeback under the guise of heritage

So far as most of us are concerned, steam trains vanished in a puff of smoke back in the 1960s, around the time much of the railway network itself disappeared. Other than a few survivors pulling day-trippers along short stretches of track, the received wisdom is that steam is over. Yet the reality is different. True, there is little or no chance of steam trains replacing electric and diesel trains on our modern rail network. But if steam remains history, it is an unusually active and extensive variety of history. Steam has made an impressive comeback under the guise of heritage, to become an enormous national asset. There are an awful lot of those day-trippers. Steam trains (and some rescued diesel locomotives) are now pulling 13 million passengers back in time each year.

Rescuing steam has often meant restoring track as well as rolling stock, because the two are intimately intertwined. Ever since Dr Beeching’s axe descended — and Beeching is the inevitable villain of this volume — doughty enthusiasts have been reversing his cuts. Steam trains are travelling once again along 500 miles of preserved and re-laid track, which runs in parallel to the modern network. At some points the preserved lines even connect up to the modern network, in a surreal mash-up of present and past.

Andrew Martin is a novelist as well as a railway enthusiast, and in what is patently a labour of love he has brought his talents to bear upon this singular resurrection. If his subject matter is a markedly linear mode of transport, he frequently leaves the tracks behind for forays into human hinterlands. Preserved railways are a truly British obsession — there is nothing to match our collection anywhere else in the world.