Bradley’s Railway Guide, Simon Bradley, Profile, £30.

If you alight at Platform 5 of Slough Station, you might meet a dog called Railway Jim. Jim lives in a glass case these days: he died in 1896, and, with his startled gaze, he’s not the most prepossessing example of Victorian taxidermy. But he’s the last in situ survivor of Britain’s railway dogs. In the 19^th century, rail workers’ charities employed dogs like Jim to carry collecting boxes among passengers at major stations. Their high point came in 1899, when the Queen-Empress Victoria asked to be introduced to Tim, the Paddington Station terrier. The low point? Merthyr station’s work-shy mutt Twister was reported in 1907 to ‘lie down when his collecting box is put upon him’. He barely paid for his own keep, a recurring theme in Britain’s long, passionate, but often frustrated relationship with its railways.

It’s a charming anecdote, but for Simon Bradley, author of this compendious and fascinating dive into 200 years of British railway history, it’s a glimpse of a more complex tale. The dogs were initially sponsored not by the majestically-named railway companies of the age – the Great Western, the London and North Western and all the others – but by a railwaymen’s trade union. Their purpose (to raise money for the orphaned children of railway employees) reflected a bleak reality in a century where profit margins were tight and regulations were few. In the 1870s, says Bradley, more than 700 railwaymen were killed at work each year. ‘Overall’, he notes, ‘more railwaymen were killed in that decade than the number of British and colonial troops who died in the numerous imperial wars during the period.’

Still charmed? Bradley’s achievement – a great deal harder than he makes it appear – is to give thoughtful and often eye-opening context for every topic he examines. Railway books tend to be a bit like translations – beautiful or accurate, but rarely both. A niche publishing industry caters to serious enthusiasts: my own bookshelves contain a monograph on the Darjeeling Himalayan Railway’s ‘B’ class locomotives and at least two slim volumes on the sand quarry railways of Bedfordshire. You won’t find these in Daunt or Foyles. What you will find are (often sketchy) coffee-table histories as well as a growing sub-genre devoted to the cultural history of railways, aimed at a wider readership (and in the hands of writers such as Christian Wolmar and Andrew Martin, deservedly finding one).

Bradley bridges the divide with the aplomb of a Brassey or a Brunel. This beautifully illustrated volume is sufficiently detailed to satisfy enthusiasts, and readable enough to captivate anyone who is curious about – well, essentially, the entire social, economic and cultural history of modern Britain. Bradley’s Railway Guide (the title plays on Bradshaw’s Guide, the now-defunct directory of railway timetables) adopts the ‘100 Objects’ model of historical storytelling, devoting a chapter to each year from the opening of the Stockton and Darlington railway in 1825 to its bicentenary next year, and choosing a single object or image that illuminates a far broader narrative about railways and the nation they effectively created.

Bradley’s eye for detail is acute. As well as poor moth-eaten Jim, a ticket, a travel poster and a cigarette card all provide jumping-off points. A still from Brief Encounter opens out into a reflection on the UK rail network in wartime, and illustrates the infinite small ways in which lives were shaped by the railways (without steam locomotives, there’d have been no ash for Trevor Howard to remove from Celia Johnson’s eye). Railway timetables meant that, for the first time, clocks across the British Isles had to be synchronised. By the late 1840s an ultra-reliable pocket watch was set each morning at the Admiralty in London, then dispatched via train to Holyhead and on by packet boat to Dublin so that Ireland, too, could run on Greenwich Mean Time.

A grand narrative gradually emerges from all this juicy detail: the story of a technology that began by imitating 18^th-century aesthetics (Stephenson’s Rocket was painted in the colours of an express stagecoach) and ended up by transforming almost every aspect of modern Britain. The illustrations (one per chapter) are superbly chosen and Bradley avoids the obvious, finding images of the big set-piece moments (the abolition of Brunel’s broad gauge, the end of steam, the Tay Bridge disaster) which will be fresh even to readers (hands up) who have read an unhealthy quantity of railway history.

Bradley takes us right up to the present, and he’s particularly good (and admirably undogmatic) at untangling the complexities of the post-privatisation network. If you’ve ever wondered why riding a Pendolino feels weirdly like being inside an aircraft, you’ll discover the reason here – and indeed, why it takes longer to commission a fleet of commuter trains in the 2020s than it took to build the entire London to Birmingham main line in the 1830s (Stephenson never had to debug software).

As joint editor of the Pevsner Architectural Guides, Bradley is strong on railway infrastructure, writing with lightly worn authority and flashes of quiet wit. He’s clear-eyed about the network’s failings (historic and otherwise), but he evidently loves his subject, and as an art historian his perspective is refreshing. The current fashion is to try and cut Victorian giants like Brunel down to size, but Bradley sees him as an essentially Romantic genius, a mind of ‘restless brilliance’. Dismissing the 1930s fad for streamlined trains, he observes, ‘is like remarking that not all British film stars of the 1930s were as beautiful as Vivien Leigh’. Fixate on their utility, and you’ll see only part of the picture.

Above all, Bradley understands that railways are about more than machines (however beautiful) or logistics (however useful). They’re a culture, a world; a miniature civilisation in their own right, teeming with human experience and bound together by those shining ribbons of steel. This book embraces politics, art, religion and stuffed animals. E Nesbit, Eric Gill, The Kinks and Charles Dickens are as important a part of Bradley’s Railway Guide as Stephenson, Gresley and Beeching. Like any true railway enthusiast, Bradley knows that to travel hopefully is better than to arrive. And though he ends in 2025 on a (necessarily) open question, the real joy is in the journey.