Peter Hughes, one of the contributors to Last Call for the Dining Car, set out to make the longest continuous rail journey from Britain — 8,000 miles from Wick, in the north of Scotland, to Vladivostok, on the Russian shore of the Sea of Japan. He was hours away from finishing when he met a [...]

Our package on the book is now up on the Telegraph site, combining a shortened version of my introduction, a few extracts and a greatly extended playlist of songs about trains (and the tube). Thanks again for all the suggestions.

Once a fortnight — shame it’s not more often — Laura Barton writes the Hail, Hail, Rock’n’Roll column on the back page of The Guardian’s Film & Music section. Last Friday she was reflecting on what the river, the road and the railway have given to rock music.
That set me thinking about what I’d choose [...]

The demolition this week of “the Jungle”, the migrants’ camp near Calais, reminded me of a piece I’ve included in Last Call for the Dining Car: The Telegraph Book of Great Railway Journeys, which is due out from Aurum on October 22.
Trawling the archives and making a choice has consumed all my free time over [...]

This may be premature as it’s only August, but I think I’ve read my book of the year. It’s Me: The Authorised Biography by Byron Rogers. I can’t remember when I last read anything that gave me so much pleasure or made me laugh aloud so often. There were passages, too, that moved me closer [...]

There’s no getting away this week from reminders of our parliamentarians’ expenses — even in the Telegraph’s dusty archives. Leafing through cuttings from February 1959 in search of material for an anthology on great rail journeys, I found a report of a Lords debate in which peers complaining about “the rigours of travel on British [...]