I was first given the chance to write about railways at any length in the summer of 1985 when Andrew Knight, the editor of The Economist, and Gordon Lee, the Surveys Editor, encouraged me to write a long survey called ‘Return Train’, analysing the railways’ comeback. I was particularly grateful for their backing since my findings challenged the paper’s previous ideas on the subject.
But the ideas I generated would not have been transformed into a full-length book without my agent Robert Ducas, who provided the ideal mixture of encouragement, support and discipline: Chris Holifield, then the editorial director of The Bodley Head, who forced me to think through my originally rather vague ideas into something approaching cohesion; and her successor, Jill Black, who deployed the same mixture of tact, firmness, professionalism and charm in wrestling with my sprawling manuscript. Peter Dyer designed a superb jacket which expressed my ideas far more imaginatively than I could have done, and Sarah Heneghan managed to find some splendid photographs in a ridiculously short time.
All my friends seemed to know more about the subject than I did, a superiority which I welcomed, partly because it was often true, but also because it showed that I was writing about an interesting subject. The actual research was carried out in a few key libraries: those model institutions the Library of Congress and the London Library as well as the Bodleian and the British Libraries, where the devoted staffs were clearly struggling with inadequate resources.
N.F.
Oxford, Talmont, Holloway