OF ALL the treats on my retirement from Wakefield, the most exciting was the gift, from my staff, of a day on the footplate of the “Black Five” LMS locomotive which, at Pickering Station, I’d dedicated and named after my predecessor, Eric Treacy. What is it about clergy and railways? Wilbert Awdry and Thomas the Tank Engine; Treacy, the best steam photographer of the 20th-century; Bishop Alec Graham pausing twice, on his walk home from school in Tonbridge, because the “distant signal” was against him?

All of them would have gloried in this splendid book, its title recalling Bradshaw’s monumental timetable. Simon Bradley, a co-editor of Pevsner’s Buildings of England and author of the classic social history of British railways and the story of St Pancras Station, has produced a marvellous “almanac” in preparation for next year’s bicentenary celebrations of the opening of the Stockton and Darlington Railway — the world’s first public railway.

Each chapter focuses on one year, and any number of topics from entirely different angles appear, with myriad photos: 1835 focuses on Brunel and the Great Western; 1868, “St Pancras — the Greatest Victorian Station”; 1879, “Going Underground”; 1910, “Religion and the Railways”; 1919, “In Memoriam”; 1935, “Streamlining”; 1945, “Brief Encounter”; 1963, “Dr Beeching’s Report”; 1994, “Eurostar”; and 2022, “Crossrail”.

P. ChancellorA demonstration freight train hauled by ex-Great Western Railways “4500” class 2-6-2 tank No. 4566 emerges from Greet Tunnel on the Gloucestershire and Warwickshire Railway, 7 April 1995. From the book

This random selection indicates the breadth and variety that you will encounter as you browse through the pages. Bradley notes in his introduction that “many of the great monuments of the British network — station buildings, bridges and viaducts, tunnels — remain in everyday use, thanks to a combination of historic under-investment, happenstance and deliberate protection.”

All this breathes through the pages of this fast-moving (like the railways), engagingly human, and amazingly innovative approach to social history. And you don’t have to be a clergyman, a man, or even a regular train traveller or enthusiast to be taken up into the magic of this extraordinary and very British story.

The “Brits” are past masters at understatement, self-mockery, and self-deprecation. Here is good reason for just at least a brief spell of self-admiration, reading between the lines, as it were. . .

The Rt Revd Stephen Platten is a former Bishop of Wakefield.

Bradley’s Railway Guide: A journey through two centuries of British railway history, 1825-2025
Simon Bradley
Profile Books £30
(978-1-78125-982-5)
Church Times Bookshop £27