Gravy Trains

This book contains a collection of stories from days gone by and the time that I spent working for British Rail. Some of these stories are unbelievable but I can assure you that that did happen well most of them anyway. There are descriptions of how people went through their working days on the railway, some on the footplate, some working in signal boxes, some on platforms, some on the permanent way and of course managers. Also contained within this book are stories from the Railway cat fraternity as life on the railway would be sad indeed without cats. This book examines the way that life has changed within the railway community over the last 50 years with the transition from privatisation through to nationalisation through to privatisation. The railways were transformed but at the end of this transformation nothing really has changed as you will see within the stories. The world has gotten faster, the railways too have gotten faster but because of the railway infrastructure, it still takes the same amount of time to get from A to B as it did 50 years ago. The only real change is that today the railway is run not by railwaymen who knew their trade but by faceless managers who haven't got a clue how to run a railway but boy do they know how to make money. It indeed a modern world.