In the spring of 2007 Matthew Engel finally flipped. After years of getting cross at the vagaries of Britain’s railways he decided he had enough. He wanted to know WHY.

How did the British invent railways, and then go on to run them so badly?

How come the nation was so obsessed with trains – weaned on Thomas the Tank Engine, dotty about preserved steam engines – and yet the system was a national joke?

So he set out to explore. He travelled the country from Penzance to Thurso. And he explored the history of Britain’s bizarre relationship with its trains. He found he was half John Betjeman, revelling in the hidden charms and the eccentricities of the network, and half Victor Meldrew, in a perpetual grump about its wretchedness.

The railways, he concluded, were the ultimate expression of Britishness, representing all the nation’s ingenuity, incompetence, nostalgia, corruption, humour and capacity for suffering.

Engel-Betjeman found a train still serving afternoon tea with Individual Pots of Strawberry Jam. Engel-Meldrew found it was about to be abolished.

Engel-Betjeman found gorgeous branch lines on perfect summer evenings. Engel-Meldrew was surrounded by mobile phone-shouters, feral teenagers, demoralised staff and mutinous commuters. And he met, beyond question, the rudest man on the railways.

Engel the historian found a pattern of disaster dating back to Day One in 1830, when the politician William Huskisson was killed by a train. From then on, he found it tempting to conclude, the political class has been taking its revenge.

Almost every decision – or more often indecision – taken by British governments since then has turned out to be wrong, he says, except one: the Victorian cock-up that miraculously helped save Britain in two world wars.

He talks to politicians like Sir John Major and John Prescott, railwaymen and experts. Nationalization was a disaster, he concludes. Privatization was a bigger disaster. Labour’s refusal to reverse that decision was worse still. And the demon-figure of Dr Beeching was a disaster too – but not for the reason generally supposed.

He searches literature, art and psycho-sexual textbooks to try to explain why the British are different from other nations, who somehow think the railways are simply a means of transport. Whereas the British managed to transform “trainspotting” from a national craze to an all-purpose insult.

Eleven Minutes Late is a paean of love and a polemic of despair. A eulogy and an elegy. And wonderfully funny.

Matthew Engel was born in Northampton in 1951. He has spent his working life in journalism, covering an astonishing range of subjects.

On the back pages, he has covered more than 70 different sports including underwater hockey and the European tiddlywinks championship – as well as four Olympic Games, three soccer World Cups and about 150 Test matches.

On the front pages, he has reported the fall of the Berlin Wall, the Gulf War, the September 11 attacks and the last seven British general elections.

For 12 years he edited Wisden Cricketers’ Almanack, the so-called (though never by him) Bible of cricket and remains as consultant editor.

His other books include Tickle the Public, a much-praised though little-bought history of the popular press, Extracts from the Red Notebooks and now Eleven Minutes Late.

He lives in Herefordshire with his wife Hilary and daughter Vika. Much of Hilary and Matthew’s time is now devoted to the Teenage Cancer Trust Laurie Engel Fund, in memory of their son Laurie who died in 2005 aged 13, which is helping build a new unit at Birmingham Children’s Hospital.

The best-remembered of all Matthew’s articles was his story of Laurie’s illness, the last story he wrote for The Guardian, his newspaper for 25 years.

He is now the least fiscally-aware columnist on the Financial Times, reporting from places near and far in his fortnightly column Dispatch, writing occasional political sketches and even more occasional pieces about sport.

http://www.matthewengel.co.uk/