I dropped a subtle hint about this book to my wife ahead of my recent birthday, and she came through with the goods!
Very interesting, and highly readable – I’ve nearly finished it within two days.
I must say though, Chapter 9 has destroyed one of my wistful reminiscences about the good old British Rail era.
Roger Ford, the veteran columnist in Modern Railways, once wrote an account in the magazine about travelling in an Inter-City restaurant car on the ECML, when the steward presenting the dinner menu whispered something along the lines of “chef has baked a steak-and-kidney pie, sir, which isn’t on the menu”. This dish was apparently only on offer to “regulars”, and Ford has repeated the story several times since, in the sense that this was a welcome diversion from BR's corporate uniformity to be applauded and enjoyed - an opinion I agreed with.
At that time, the late 1970s and early 1980s, I was making regular (but not necessarily frequent) business trips via the WCML into Euston which allowed me to eat breakfast and dinner in restaurant cars. I quite fancied the prospect of becoming a member of a select club of Pullman passengers who got to enjoy conspiratorial, a-nod’s-as-good-as-a-wink privileges - and especially if it resulted in me getting to eat a nice steak pie. Anyhow, I obviously never became enough of a regular*, because I wasn't offered anything out of the ordinary on any of my trips. Maybe this was because we were travelling from Runcorn, and the Liverpool catering crews would never be involved in anything dodgy.
Until reading An Inspector Recalls, it had never crossed my mind that, while chef may well have baked a pie, and the pie was probably very tasty, the proceeds of sale would never get anywhere near the accounts department of British Rail. And if I had had opportunity to enjoy an Inter-City “special of the day”, I potentially could have found myself accessory to an investigation by BTP’s Sausage and Sandwich Squad.
* - The reason I may not have clocked up enough miles to become a “regular” is because the more senior manager who usually travelled with me, and had the final say on travel arrangements, decided there was much more kudos as a thrusting 1980s “executive” in flying to meetings rather than travelling by train. Therefore, although we travelled from Runcorn to University College, London (a five-minute walk from Euston), we had to get out of bed earlier and have a company driver take us for a much longer car journey to Manchester Airport (and guess who had to be picked up first and dropped off last). Then get a BA Super Shuttle to Heathrow (no cooked breakfast, Frank Cooper’s marmalade - or steak & kidney pie - on the plane), followed by a ridiculously expensive black cab from Heathrow which got stuck in traffic in west London, all to take us around the corner from Euston station. Clueless and egotistical senior managers – another theme covered in An Inspector Recalls!
