Eleven Minutes Late, Matthew Engel (2009) Macmillan 9780330512374 paperback 335pp £8.99 An amusing and perceptive journalistic survey of Britain's railway network and its history

How to explain the affinity that exists between a great many cyclists, and the railways? In lots of respect they could not be more different as means of transport. One is collective, the other individual. One absolves travellers of responsibility, the other invests them with responsibility. One is high-tech, the other low. Both are Victorian inventions, but they bookend a very long reign.

Bicycles and trains do complement each other as means of transport, of course. And, in the days when nearly all trains would carry bicycles for free, it seemed as though there was official sanction for this natural synergy.

But the characteristic that makes cyclists feel most at home on the trains, I suspect, is an odd sense of standing together against the majority culture - represented, in this case, by the private car. Most of us ride bikes because it is fun - but in the back of our minds is a notion that our logistical preferences are somehow more rational. The self-righteousness that can occasionally be heard from both bicyclists and railway enthusiasts comes from believing that we have considered all transport choices from first principles and drawn a different, smarter, conclusion to the herd.

Matthew Engel's enjoyable exploration of the history of Britain's railways and their current state is sufficient to cause even the most committed railwayphile question whether there is any context in which the term 'smarter' can be applied to our rail network. His main argument is that at no time since George Stephenson unveiled his steam-powered miracle has anyone in charge ever really decided what was the main purpose of Britain's railway system?

As a result, Engel argues, the rail network spread its tentacles about the country with no clear sense of what it would carry, nor why. Since then the network has been hacked back and then ossified with no better idea of its mission. Although clearly the author loves train travel, he finds very little to actually cheer about in this book. At heart, he seems to think that Britain bumps along, never really getting its act together because of something intrinsic to our national character.

Doing this, he misses out plenty of heroics - the High Speed Train of the 1970s (the train that saved British Rail, as some have called it) merits hardly a mention, for example. Nonetheless, by the end of the book he had persuaded me that Britain's failure to ever draw up and execute a national rail plan is actually evidence of our essential humanity. If nothing else it distinguishes us from the obviously vile Germans, who devised their railways with military ends in mind.

Engel hangs his tale hangs around an account of his circumnavigation of the rail network, which provides an amusing, if generally depressing leavening to this history. He didn't take a bicycle with him - which is probably just as well. The difficulties of getting a bike onto most trains these days are such, that even a writer in search of vexatious railway experiences might have given up the ghost before he had enough material for a book.

Tim Dawson Feb 10

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