Ian Marchant Railway Author - Interview Chat (No.1)
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- เผยแพร่เมื่อ 9 ก.พ. 2025
- So this is something brand new ... it's a half an hour video designed to be LISTENED to (like a podcast) instead of watched like a video. And the aim is to get a wide variety of people on with interesting views, and I start by asking them the same first question. "Why do you like the railways..." and seeing what they have to say.
If you can think of people that you would like to see interviewed, let me know in the comments below.
The Ghost Trains of Old England (Radio 4 programme): www.bbc.co.uk/...
Parallel Lines book (Buy it, it's superb) : www.amazon.co....
I LOVE this! As a 51 year old female primary school teacher I’m probably a fairly improbable train fan but I am, thanks to the wonderful Geoff. Never stop!
sounds reasonable
Ian was my Creative Writing tutor when I was an undergrad'. He turned me on to Sebald. Thanks, Ian. Austerlitz changed my writing life.
I'm watching/listening to this after watching/listening to the more recent one, and I could listen to you two talking all day, thank you 😊
Finally had time and enjoyed listening to you and the excellent Ian Marchant chatting in a relaxed manner. Great stuff. BTW - I always say thank you to bus drivers/railway staff/etc as it's just a polite thing to do.
Suggested future interviewees: Dr. Ben (Milton Jones lookalike), Tim Dunn, Dixe Wills, Pip Dunn
I like this. As an outsider (Oklahoma) it is very informative. Thank you Driver!
"Passion" is the word I kept thinking of when you were talking about the right people to run the railroads.
Thank you Geoff. What a lovely insight. Your work is absolute quality and very deserving of more exposure on a platform such as BBC4.
Had to pause and comment, as I am actually not watching at all, but instead listening as I get ready for bed. Sad that it’s night-time, and this is the first thing I’ve done right all day!
Wonderful! What an interesting man. Half an hour flew by in a flash. Looking forward to the rest of the series.
Great video, Geoff. Very interesting. Ian was a great guest. I really loved his book. Another great guest would be Mr Tim Dunn.
Loved this choo choo chat and look forward to more in the series.
Love "Parallel Lines" One of the best Railway Books ever written! It came out around 2003, following all the disasters etc. I'm glad to say that the Railways have definitely improved since then!
I thoroughly get what Ian means by the Railways being a "place" Waiting on stations, you do get the feeling that your in a separate world to the world outside!
I found a classic peak & off peak difference last week. Travelled on a very busy Manchester-Leeds train as far as Huddersfield. Then, after meeting a friend whose a student (in Transport Management) for a pint in the excellent "Head Of Steam", I caught a Pacer down to Sheffield, a lovely, lightly loaded rural ride in the early evening.
Mr Marchant is of course correct on all counts. My only divergent opinion is regarding the railways as one place. I'd say they are displaced places, something one of my lecturers suggested many years ago. So for instance at certain times of the day Euston is a suburb of Liverpool, and St Pancras is, or was, a bit of the East Midlands temperamentally, accent-wise and psychogeographically.
The trains are capsules of wherever they've come from, and the places they deposit their passengers briefly adopt another locale to the one they exist in.
That's really interesting. And true, I reckon. I still want to stick up for the idea of the railway as 'a place.'; what Geoff calls the pay-side. Maybe the terminii where you go out from the payside back into the world for a bit break up the continuum.
I wouldn't disagree, though from the railway's earliest days companies were keen to create their own little paradigm. Cottage orné (Hansel and Gretel by way of Derby), engine shed cathedral gothic, 3rd rail modtopia, Brigadoon chalets on the West Highland, with your Edmondson ticket good for all of them. I'd settle for trains with opening windows to sniff the local air.
Borderlands I couldn't agree more
I'm from south London and commute into Victoria but once I went in Waterloo. The station and all the trains were much cleaner, no graffiti and just seemed a lot posher. Shows that Surrey is posher than croydon
I'm American. I saw the new show titile and thought you had come over here to teach us our rail way history. I saw Choo Choo Chat and my mind turned to Chatanoogq Choo Choo. Oh well. This sounds like good thing as I prefer listening and it relates to my radio past. Thanks.
Look at Japan: even though rail is fully privatised, there are a few big players and several hundreds of small ones spread out. BUT they ALL synchronise their timetables to one another, combine that with trains being always on time, and you have the perfect system.
If your journey planner says you have 2 minutes to change at one station and 8 minutes at a second station, you will get those connections. And if you don't, the next train is usually only a few minutes later :)
London to Norwich trains are Class 90’s, not bad for a non train nerd Geoff 🙂
Kieran Page And they've recently reintroduced the trolley service for all passengers!
Practically Famous I didn’t know that, I just happen to use one of the branch lines and happen to know what a class 90 looks like 😂
Kieran Page I generally visit the Wherry Lines and I head on the 90s up to Norwich. I shall be going during the summer soon hopefully I'll get a trolley service, whether I pay the prices or not is a different question!
One line I need to do loco hauled trains , short intercity route
Absolutely brilliant video - thank you Geoff and Ian. So nice to have someone revive my interest in the railways and understand people's passion. 👍
"Just listening" is how I enjoy a lot of TH-cam videos anyway, so this is rather nice to have a series dedicated to this style.
The name seems a little bit... silly? In a good way. But the content is excellent, I can't wait to see some more.
I've also got a suggestion for a guest; Chris-Eden Green. He's a railway-youtuber, with more of a focus on steam locomotives but does do a "gauge the issue" series. I'm not sure if he'd be interested, but I reckon it's be good to see the two of you together somewhere.
Great video. I listened to it in bed, on my phone and earplugs in. No image just sound. Interesting piece of conversation. I also read the book which I ordered in the UK after seeing the video, so he even has readers across the Norh Sea.
Geoff's comment about keeping the TOC control areas in a post-privatisation scenario is exactly how BR did it 40 years ago. The only way to control an organisation of this size is to break it up into manageable chunks, in some sort of hierarchy, like geographical regions (Western, Southern, Eastern etc.) and then split those up into smaller management areas: for the Western you could have London & Thames Valley, West Country, Bristol, Cardiff. BR had this and with privatisation we still have much of it. The problems have always been what BR called inter-regional services, such as trains that run from Bristol to Edinburgh , Norwich to Birmingham, or Liverpool to Leeds, BR created specialised operation groups for the larger of these but did badly on many, with privatisation the DfT also provided separate TOCs for the larger ones but many more smaller inter-TOC services are Cinderella services or have been abandoned as the TOCs focus on profitable areas.
Yay! Longer lengths of content. It was interesting to see the discussion between the two of you and and it was interesting to see the discussion on privatisation - which does have its pros but many cons.
Excellent conversation - this video inspired me to get a copy of Paralel Lines from the Amazon UK site and have it sent to me in the USA (although your mentioning the books in the All The Stations videos had me going in that direction anyway.) Please bring on another author of a good book about trains on Choo Choo Chat again soon!
Would love too see jay foreman or the geography now guy on the podcast
+1 to this! or a map men special with guest Geoff
Thanks Geoff for being the one place the pose the privatization question objectively rather than spewing opinions in anger. The one thing that annoys me about the privatization is that it isn't true privatization as it is run by monopolies that are receiving handouts from the government that they just pocket! From a personal pov we need more open access railways where the companies rent routes, track and platform from a combined local rail company funded version of network rail for each region meaning it doesn't come at the expense of the tax payer (just look how well First Hull Trains and Grand Central are doing)
I feel a new series coming on...
All the CANALS!
Really enjoyed this one, definitely a good idea!
I really like this genuinely thoughtful chat. All you need for your next interview is another genius. And your idea for a semi-united railway is possibly a state-federal system as in USA, Canada, Australia ...-- it might work, and then again . . . .
Love the format. More please. Perhaps TOC managers for future interviews? Rail magazine? Or maybe you could just have the Marchant show, once a week...... 30 minutes wasn't nearly enough.
Geoff, my favourite TH-camr and Ian Marchant, a deeply brilliant author! A awesome combination. Ian's New Book, A Hero For High Times, is excellent. Buy It!
Choo Choo Chat...back of the net, love it.😀
Fantastic, Yep i would love to see more of this for sure
Great topics, great discussion, just what i didn't know i was looking for!!! Thanks
Great chat. Ghost Trains documentary was on R4extra yesterday, so should be back on the iPlayer for a while, again, now.
So interesting, so enjoyable. 👏👏👍😀
Ian spoke about the parallel things of our idealised past railways and our present railways. I think we should be looking to our future railways too, with things like step free access, decent shelters, street signs for every Out of Station Interchange and so on.
I remember one day in South East London, where someone did something silly on the tracks and pretty much the entire South East of London (and probably further out) ground to a halt.
We really need to build "failure modes" into our railways. There should be a plan for every station in the country being closed and every bit of track. The engineers should be able to shut down power in small sections, without killing the entire network. Line controllers should be able to create emergency terminuses on the fly, and keep trains running on the good bits.
If we have better disaster planning (and regular disaster exercises) most of the trains should continue to move and the disruption should be confined to small isolated sections where the problem actually is.
And the last part of the solution (for working out how to deal with "failure modes") is to figure out what the alternatives are and have staff and PA announcements that redirect anyone who needs to cross the troubled sections. If we can automate that, as much as possible, we can give the savvy passenger the ability to rescue themselves.
Move to a railway network that plans to have disasters and we will all dig ourselves out of the situation.
I really enjoyed this one Geoff, already looking forward to the next one too. Rest assured too - you're not the only one who says thanks to bus drivers - up north this is very much commonplace.
Your suggestion about keeping the current destructured TOCs work too - enough people currently run the railway that the railway currently works.. no reason why it couldn't work the same as is, but instead of lining the pockets of proprietors, ticket prices could be reduced.
As for making a video on the Cardiff-Holyhead train? Do it! The menus published online let you ensure you'd travel on a week when you liked the food - I had the steak, it was excellent.
One interesting point to note surrounding the discussion of missed connections at 23:00. I am a fairly frequent traveller on the 20:30 Hull Trains King's Cross to Hull service. The train connects at Grantham with the last EMT service to Nottingham, and if the HT service is running a few minutes late, the guard will often call the guard of the EMT service and ask it to wait, helping lots of people get home a lot quicker.
Don't know of any other examples of TOCs working together this way...
Sound engineers don't change light bulbs, that's lighting's job.
Interesting chat with Mr. Merchant and his views on railways.
I view Passenger railways as public service, and deserve full support of the government. There also should be cooperation and coordination between various lines to ensure a seamless travel experience for the passengers.
Picking up the idea of densifying services instead of thinning them out: It was in the late 80s or early 90s that half-hourly services on a connenction between the south-western german town of Karlsruhe and some villages 15 miles into the country were not profitable anymore. But instead of thinning them out to hourly services they densified it and let it run every twenty minutes. Result: success. Still running greatly.
There has been a recent suggestion that you can see a time in the future when some services in the UK may become so frequent that we will stop producing a timetable with a train running every few minutes.
me: train talk
you, an intellectual:
Ha! I was watching random ATS this morning and watched the episode where you shared the ride with Mr Marchant. I guess I fall into the "rosy cheeked" passenger a tourist from someplace with almost zero rail. I think the rails of UK are brilliant while the strap hangers in their work-a-day world are in their 7th circle of hell.
Can you please add these to podcast apps/soundcloud or something so I can listen to it while I’m commuting
Fascinating idea for videos. A few interesting concepts too, object-oriented ontology for one!
Oh, a new Geoff Marshall video, I shall totally totally watch this.. #"A sailor went to C-C-C..."
Pausing this at 11:15 to say that I bought Ian's book Parallel Lines at the Brighton toy & model museum last week & read it while traveling on the Eurostar to Paris & also on the train between London & Newcastle & then went to a talk by Simon Bennett.
I met a German sound engineer once...
I met a Chech one too.
Great idea for a series. Why not interview a few of the commentators from Rail Magazine like Editor Nigel Harris, or Correspondents Christian Wolmar or Barry Doe I'm sure you could rely on some trenchant opinions on privatisation/nationalisation from them!
Its 29min 59 sec..You owe us 1 second Geoff.....seriously, great stuff.
re 28:50 The Chinnor and Princes Risborough railway is currently building it's own platform at Princes Risborough station which would allow it to connect with mainline trains serving Marylebone. Chiltern have run a bus link in the peaks between Chinnor and Risborough for the best part of twenty years so there's clearly a demand. It would be interesting to see if the reinstated train service could one day supplement or even replace the bus.
Virgin have had the West Coast franchise since privatisation came about! And Class 90's are the loco's used to haul BR Mk 3 carriages on the Liverpool Street-Norwich line.
Calling All Stations would be nice to see on this series. That could include some tube chat in it too!
Virgin West Coast have had the franchise since the start
Great video :-)
Totally agree with Ian regarding the nationalisation issue. However, in Switzerland the dozens of private railway companies - in truth mostly funded by the cantonal (county) governments - and state railway systems do interlink. Even the postbuses that serve communities not linked to the rail system link with the trains. So it is possible - just needs the will, which right now is not there. Great chat, really enjoyed it.
More of these!!
Your proposal reminds me very much of the structure in Germany with regional transport associations. Regional and national trains are strongly differentiated, however, and you have just the one main operator that tends to do the intercity ones
I have gone blind in one eye (a case of Iritis) and is hard for me to keep the other eye open at times. My hearing, on the other hand, has improved greatly.
Choo-Choo Chat, it is then.
Yes 'The RAILWAY', with RAILWAY Stations NOT train stations
If you did these on a train they could be called 'Chatting on the Choo-choo'
Too much noise for us hard of hearing!
Perhaps a chat about Open Access rail and how the best uk rail operator ‘Wrexham and Shropshire’ was neatly disposed of?
This is great!
Could you do a feature on the Beeching Cuts and their impact on the railway network?
I recall the Beeching cuts. One of the greatest acts of cultural vandalism ever. They could at least have preserved all the track beds ( as cycle paths etc ) for possible future use and out of some respect for the sweat and toil that had gone into their creation.
The next great act of cultural vandalism was the decimalisation of our currency and the virtual outlawing of imperial measurement.
Over the past decades our corrupt establishment has torn the heart out of our culture.
That "Appalling Pendelino stench..." no longer officially exists. In reality, of course, it does..
Geoff, you should definitely try to interview Juan Browne off of the Blancolirio channel. Been following him since he started covering the Oroville dam issues, it might be an interesting conversation on the difference and or similarities on our countries aging infrastructure, I've even seen him talking about a train or two..
Do a Choo Choo Chat with Ben Goldacre from Least Used Finstock (Oxon)
I enjoying listing to the video Geoff
You should I interview Christian wolmar
A fine conversation thank you, Take the best bits of privatisation and Nationalisation and marry them up, fund the railways properly make sure profits to back into the infrastructure, restore a proper National management and staff structure, establish a programme of apprenticeship and skill sets.......more please.... Christian Wolmer...??
Network Rail has one of the largest apprenticeship schemes in the country. As for management the BR graduate training school was one of the first casualties of privatisation. The last graduates can be seen the current and recently retired leaders of the TOCs. No replacement leaders have been trained since the 1980s with the government ignoring the problem. Perhaps our future managers will be foreign - if they are allowed to work in the UK post brexit.
This was a really enjoyable listen! There are two themes/perspectives I would be really interested in seeing on here, although they are slightly outside your usual topic zone and I can't think of particular people off the top of my head.
The first one is railway accessibility. Being disabled doesn't stop you from liking railways, but it does make travelling a frustrating experience. Are railway operators doing enough to improve accessibility? What can we reasonably expect to change in the short term and long term? After #righttoride on buses, will wheelchair users ever be able to turn up and go? What about loops and dot-matrix displays for people who are Deaf/HoH? This is a topic which surfaces periodically, but it is almost always brought up by disabled people. It would be great to so a more mainstream railway TH-camr like yourself provide a platform for these issues.
Secondly, an even more sensitive issue: the link between mental health and railways. What are national rail doing to combat railway suicides? And from the other side of things: what about the drivers who are confronted with this?
Geoff sit back and listen ? Yea right. Great video regardless!
Good listening geoff.
Suggest guests- Micheal Palin, David Brewer - the original All the Stations Man.
Interesting comment about rail replacement bus from Preston to Carlisle!! In the so called bad old days of British Rail the Scottish Services were routed from Preston via Blackburn, Hellifield and the Settle and Carlisle to Carlisle, southbound services the reverse. Saved the need to untrained with luggage and you kept your seat. The option was used a little in early privatisation days but the uncomfortable rail replacement bus was cheaper but was prone to traffic jams. The route was a little longer but more comfortable, and saw a rise in passenger use as train buffs had a non stop ride on the S&C!!!!
Like Ian, my first memory is of a steam train. A trip to Liverpool from Wrexham on a line that has disappeared, buying tickets from a ticket office knocked down where the waiting room had a coal fire.
Or a direct one to Wrexham from Bidston, on the Wirral. No direct trains though.
Very interesting! I agree with what you say about "The Shop" on Virgin Trains. It annoys me how they say "you can find the shop for delicious hot and cold refreshments". It's not up to them to tell us they're delicious, it's up to the customer to decide whether it's nice or not. Talking of not nice refreshments I think coffee on Eurostar trains is awful!
11:45 Great comment, Ian! Geoff, I hope you already understood that, seeing as you have enthused so much about that familiar non-Euclidean Tube map.
That's a got point actually. I live in north Wales and everyone says cheers to the bus driver when they get off, but when I went to london I got looked at like a mad man for saying it to a london bus driver.
Re: Why the last train is not held at Newport for the connection. Lots of reasons. Means overnight maintenance can start on time. Late start = No work possible or late finish. Plus some manual signal boxes on the route may need to close for the night or run out of hours.
Loving choo choose chat
If you have any contacts in Scottish transport department, would be interesting to hear about their model - which is somewhat different, but not as different as may be - and whether they want full nationalisation as they have done with water and hope for with power
13:30 Too right. Commuter life is not great oh and voyager trains on cross country are the worst experience I've had in a long time
18:30 The Pullman from Paddington to Penzance has the Pullman experience and it's great. A step back in time to when train travel was something special
Good Listen, maybe the obvious, Drivers; Signalmen/Women; Station Masters; etc. Enjoyed Very Much.
People that I would like to see on Choo Choo Chat : Ben Goldacre, Ben Aaronovitch (I don't know if he likes railways but he follows you on twitter so...), someone from the Isle of Wight and that person that use to shout at you in ALL CAPS on All The Stations because they think "GEOFF IS SO IGNORANT AND DISGUSTINGLY GIVING OUT INCORRECT INFO..."
on amtrak cross country is from say Boston MA to San Francisco CA. all amtrak daytime routes have a buffet car.
In the UK our pseudo-privatisation system means that the rail operator has to pay a fee to use the track, the amount is based on how hard each coach hits the track and on how fast it travel with quicker being cheaper. So the cheapest train costs less if it climb hills quickly, doesn't spend long in platforms, and is light in weight - buffet cars are heavier and with fewer seats, the costs per seat is higher. As a result buffet cars are going which I think it terrible.
Unless I remember wrongly, WCML has always been Virgin. Cross Country Birmingham to Bristol was also Virgin in the early days.
What is that station they are in?
Why did you not go to northern Ireland in ure all the stations?
Back in the day why were there so many passing loops in stations and along the lines and now they have decreased in number why?
Geoff what you are basically saying is that we have nationalisation but they make it different regions based on the current franchises and that they are managged individualy. It's like they are wanting the government to take over VTEC so possibly thats what should happen with every franchise and keep it different areas but at the top everything go backs into funds for the whole country
But there will always be interfaces between the regions, wherever you put the boundaries
I'm of a similar mindset to Geoff about the whole running a semi-nationalised service by area. In my mind it would make great sense to slowly handover services to local 'TfL'-style bodies that can run services in a way that suits the local communities. Personally I don't think a single national run railway would be a good thing for financial reasons and for ease of actually running servcies in making them right for the local community that uses them, similar to the idea that it's harder to run a massive company with 1000s of employees compared to a smaller company in one place, if that makes sense (basically what Geoff said). I'm not actually old enough to know what BR was like but my parents have told me in the past that it wasn't a great service and I wonder if this large body aspect might have helped contribute to that. I may just be talking rubbish but to me the idea of a smaller Transport for South West etc bodies makes more sense as the money from it goes straight back into the local services (as well as possibly not needing as much central funding as a large national body) and it'd possibly be a lot easier to adjust services as required. I suppose a couple of problems come from where services cross large areas (as someone who lives 30 miles outside of London on Thameslink, I am not thrilled at the prospect of TfL possibly taking over services because they are obviously very London-focused and so I worry that towns further out of London might get overlooked) and express services (e.g. HS2, ECML etc - but I suppose you could have an authority that just focuses on the long-haul express services). That's my two cents on the topic :-)
(Also, yes more services so people can actually use them, 100% agree)
Get an interview with Jezza Corbyn.
To answer all the questions, who's to blame. There's only one answer, the Department for Transport.
I would love to find out why UK government does such a bad job of running nationalised industries, whilst the governments of France, Germany etc. succeed and prosper and even make a profit out of the UK services that our government is apparently incapable or running sucesfully.
Geoff, love the vids! But this isn't the first time i've heard you mispronounce it, it's "A-ber-ist-WITHH"
Thanks. 😆🏴
You two are just the same person, cloned and dropped into different points on the space time continuum
We in Weymouth normally say thank you. I always do
as do we in bournemouth and poole, mostly
muzza307 I've been to both poole and Bournemouth and been on the buses. I very rarely here it
Great video / podcast. Thingy. The problem is those in power don’t listen to the little people..
Why not interview that lady off "All the Stations". Doesn't she work for the London Transport Museum? :-)
One of the things I hated most about privatisation was all the public address systems being reprogrammed to squeeze in the name of the ToC. I need to know the name of the service I need to get on, the time it is leaving and the platform to go to.
Suddenly, the automated systems were speeding up the words to fit in "Virgin Trains" or whatever.
If people run rail franchises, the franchise names should really have been set by the government, so that the same service keeps the same name forever. The franchise operator should just have their name on the bottom of signs inside the trains.
I think Virgin was the first, it just introduced the pendelinos in the early 2000's
1st franchise on wcml is virgin trains west coast
As a railway employee one thing I have quickly had to learn is there is absolutely no logic to how the railway works. It's incredible how much money is wasted daily.
Oh there's logic, but it's focused on what really matters - making a profit for the TOCs.
Privatisation controls those areas that matter to making a profit, however with the current system the best way for a TOC to make a profit is to not run any trains at all. so long as problem is the fault of the state owned Network Rail, then tax payer money (needed for writing plans, risk-assessments and contracts on upgrading the infrastructure) can be wasted by giving it to the TOCs in compensation for loss of share-holder profits. In fact better still is to not sell tickets for the trains that are not running as the TOC still gets a fixed amount of compensation for even less work. A wonderful system.