Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain

The thought of a purchasing and travelling the length and breadth of the UK with a week-long rover ticket (1st and 2nd class access) to most people would be anathema, yet this was the challenge Financial Times journalist Matthew Engel set himself. His fixed schedule was to journey from the most southerly station, Penzance, to the most northerly, Thurso. Beyond that his itinerary was flexible and he wandered on a whim. One would assume reading the jacket notes that the thrust of the book is travelogue and the travails of being a long-suffering passenger (sorry, customer) on British railways - even the title hints at this. In reality, a commentary on the week-long travel occupies very little of the book; for the most part it is a potted history of rail and a polemic on the virtues of privatisation.

The much chronicled story of the first railway fatality gains prominence and railway safety is a recurrent theme throughout the book. MP William Huskisson was crushed under the wheels of George Stephenson's locomotive Rocket in 1830, largely due to his own incompetence, arrogance, and toadying to the Duke of Wellington. From that point onwards, the railways and railway safety get short shrift from the pen of Engel. There is too much analysis of Victorian politician chicanery during the original construction of the permanent way, most of which reads like undergraduate regurgitation. To compound this, Engel's prose is stilted, verbose and humourless rendering the process of reading his work at best onerous.

Engel wastes no time in telling the reader he is no rail enthusiast, in fact he is quite dismissive of those who are; he is adamant rose tinted nostalgia and romance for the days of steam and the golden age of schoolboy trainspotting (1950s and 1960s – the very era he was growing up) will not influence his judgement. He correctly points out that trains are logged as 'on time' even if they are 5 minutes late (local trains) or 10 minutes late (longer journeys) – but he misses the point. The operating companies face fines for late running admittedly, but it is calculated on total journeys over the month, and therein lies the nub of the issue. It is relatively easy for the companies to run trains on time during the day when there are fewer services to interfere with their schedule and they are carrying fewer passengers. But during peak times when the railway is at its most chaotic, trains frequently run significantly late. This does not impact their overall performance because the statistics are unfairly skewed in favour of the more numerous off-peak trains. In addition, canny operators pad the timetables with abnormally long scheduled times between the last two stops on a line to give themselves leeway. For instance, the journey from the terminus Barrow-in-Furness to suburban halt Roose is 4 minutes, yet incredibly the journey from Roose back to Barrow-in-Furness is an astounding 10 minutes! It is difficult to believe the regulators aren't aware of this subterfuge yet nothing is done.

Engel's biggest beef is with rail privatisation. There can be no argument that the system ultimately unveiled by John Major's Conservative government as a parting gift before being voted out was ridiculously Byzantine and made millionaires out of middle-manager opportunists. But look what it replaced – an enormous governmental payroll with demoralised staff delivering a filthy, unreliable and dreadfully depressing product running on ageing and creaking infrastructure. Engel interviewed John Prescott, presumably in the hope he would support his own viewpoint, but in fact Prescott admitted that wholesale changes were required in the industry after decades of underinvestment and underachievement.

It is hard to understand the motivation for Engel's trip but more difficult to explain why his narration became derailed and bogged down in a book purporting to be a travelogue.