Born at the start of the twentieth century, John Betjeman later wrote that he always knew he would be a poet. In time, he would indeed become the most popular Poet Laureate since Tennyson, but he was more than that: as a noted broadcaster and journalist, he also did much to help us appreciate the beauty all around us - in the landscape, in architecture, in churches, on the coast and on the railway. At once lyrical and humorous, nostalgic and unsentimental, and above all distinctively English, Betjeman is in the first rank of poets to have emerged from these isles in the last century.

For British Rail, the 1970s was a time of contrasts, when bad jokes about sandwiches and pork pies often veiled real achievement, like increasing computerisation and the arrival of the high-speed Inter-City 125s. But while television advertisements told of an 'Age of the Train', Monday morning misery remained for many, the commuter experience steadily worsening as rolling stock aged and grew ever more uncomfortable. Yet when BR launched new electrification schemes and introduced new suburban trains in the 80s, focus fell on the problems that beset the Advanced Passenger Train, whose...

After the Second World War, the drive for the modernization of Britain's railways ushered in a new breed of locomotive: the Diesel. Diesel-powered trains had been around for some time, but faced with a coal crisis and the Clean Air Act in the 1950s, it was seen as a part of the solution for British Rail. This beautifully illustrated book, written by an expert on rail history, charts the rise and decline of Britain's diesel-powered locomotives. It covers a period of great change and experimentation, where the iconic steam engines that had dominated for a century were replaced by a series of...