Editor’s Intro

AUGUST is bad-news month for rail passengers. It is the month that the retail price index (RPI) for July is announced, which then triggers the base figure for next January’s rail fare rises. From next January regulated fares will rise by an average of 1.9%, and with many overcrowded trains, delays and ongoing industrial disputes,…

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IS there a problem with television and film companies when it comes to railways? They either get key facts badly wrong or they present the programme in a patronising way. We should have been delighted that the BBC had decided to feature railways as part of a three-day ‘Trainspotting Live’ series, but the quality of the…

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THE country has decided in the recent EU referendum that it wants to leave the European Union. We are out! I have to admit it isn’t the result that I expected, even though the indications were that it would be a close vote – and it was. Although The RM takes a non-political stance, the…

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WHETHER it be politics, sport or whatever, it’s strange how everyone loves the underdog. Football is a case in point. For those who follow the ‘beautiful game’, a team considered mediocre and relatively unglamorous has suddenly been propelled into the limelight. Leicester City’s meteoric rise from bottom of the Premiership at the start of April…

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IT’S a Friday afternoon, 20 minutes before the office closes when people begin to drift away for the weekend. The phone rings in the office of a railtour company hundreds of miles away. It’s Network Rail HQ, which says “sorry, but you cannot use Flying Scotsman on the new Borders Railway on Sunday as we…

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