Eleven Minutes Late

There are great pleasures to be found in Matthew Engel's book, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain. It's deftly balanced stuff, combining stylish, wry levity with belt-and-braces history. I've not finished it yet, but I'll damn well recommend it.

Here he is, on the first of his major trips, from Penzance to Dundee non-stop:

At Bristol, we got a fresh crew, and I regarded them the way an old lag looks at a new screw. I'd been going for four hours now, a third of the way. Who did they think they were, coming in and taking charge? I'm a lifer, me. This is also the way railway staff regard each new franchisee. One guard I met in the north, who had been in the same job for twenty-five years, tried to list all the different companies that had ordered him around, and the different-coloured uniforms he had worn. He gave up in despair.

As Engel writes in his prologue:

I love trains. I hate trains. This is a book about trains. This is not a book about trains. It is a little about me. It may be a lot about you. This is a book about the British.

I also loved this passage, written in a style which pays knowing homage to the commentators and journalists of the Victorian age:

In 1868 the Midland Railway, determined to compete with its rivals to the east and west, pushed through a new line south from Bedford into its awesome new cathedral at St Pancras. Then it marched north to conquer Scotland by building the Settle and Carlisle line through some of the bleakest landscape in the kingdom at a terrifying cost of men and treasure.

To Amazon, or the library, with you.