The top 10 books about trains

As the son of a railwayman, I grew up entitled to free first-class rail travel. If at all bored as a 13-year-old in York, I'd take the train to London, sitting in my trainers and jeans alongside indignant or at best bemused pin-striped businessmen.

I spent a lot of time daydreaming on trains, and hence my series of historical thrillers featuring the Edwardian railwayman, Jim Stringer. Hence also my latest non-fiction book, Belles & Whistles: Five Journeys through Time on Britain's Trains. In it, I travel on the routes of the famous trains, such as The Golden Arrow or The Brighton Belle, comparing their heyday with more utilitarian modern times. My conclusion is not necessarily that everything was better before, just that most things were.

I think my love of reading about trains comes from Sherlock Holmes stories, which often begin with a dash to the station. (Holmes and Watson leave from every London terminus except Marylebone.) The appeal of railway literature lies in what Proust once identified as the compelling melancholia of trains, each journey being a leap into the unknown. I could have listed 50 excellent fiction and non-fiction railway books, but here are 10.

1. Mugby Junction by Charles Dickens (1866)

Dickens never liked trains. He preferred stagecoaches, which are romanticised in Pickwick Papers. On 9 June 1865, his negative opinion was confirmed when he was involved in a railway crash at Staplehurst, Kent, in which 10 people died. Dickens did use trains afterwards, but always gripping the arm of the seat and feeling the carriage was "down on the right hand side". For the Christmas 1866 edition of Household Words magazine, he wrote three loosely-connected stories entitled Mugby Junction, which have often been collected as a single volume. The opening story, Barbox Brothers, includes brilliant descriptions of the vast, eponymous junction by night: "Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals … " There is then a satire on railway refreshment rooms, Dickens having been slighted a few months beforehand by the staff of the refreshment room at Rugby. (Hence "Mugby".) The third piece is The Signal-Man, a ghost story about a train crash in a tunnel. It is often cited as the best ghost story ever written.

2. La Bête Humaine by Émile Zola (1890)

A hysterical tale of psychosis and sexual jealousy – forces symbolised by the presence of some extremely dangerous trains: the participants all live or work along the line between Paris and Le Havre. There are superb descriptions of St Lazare station at night: lamps along a platform like "smoky stars"; engines emitting "a general panting, whistle blows like the piercing screams of women being ravished". One critic wrote: "Too many trains and too many crimes." To some of us, that is a recommendation.

3. The Railway Children by E Nesbit (1906)

Far from despoiling the landscape, as had been feared, the railway lines had – by Edwardian times – become honorary features of it. The children in this charming story find the country railway "a joy" and actually play on the tracks. (Not such a brilliant idea, as it turns out, but the consequences are not fatal.) The cosiness of the world they inhabit is offset with over-arching mystery: where is there father, and will he ever return?

4. Stories of the Railway by VL Whitechurch (1912)

Canon Victor L Whitechurch wrote short stories of railway police work with elegantly constructed mysteries. His main detective, Thorpe Hazell, is somewhat undynamic: "a gentleman of independent means, whose knowledge of book editions and bindings was only equalled by a grasp of railway details." But readers will seldom guess whodunnit.

5. Bradshaw's April 1910 Railway Guide (1968)

Until the 1960s the main railway timetables in Britain were known as Bradshaws, after George Bradshaw, who'd started publishing his monthly Railway Guides in 1841. In 1968, the railway publishing firm of David & Charles reprinted the one from April 1910, since it depicted our railways at their very peak of mileage. The Guardian said it was a waste of time, "like painting union jacks on chamber pots", but it was a bestseller. I love the rambling eccentricities, as in footnotes reading things like "But not on Tuesdays", "Market days only", "Change here for Loch Lomond steamer". Punch used to satirise these, with its own mocked-up Bradshaws, featuring footnotes like "Ignore this – it is only here to confuse you."

6. The Great Railway Bazaar by Paul Theroux (1975)

It must be admitted that railways tend to attract people (and by "people", I mean men) whose commitment to fact precludes any sense of humour, human character, mystery, romance. The antidote is Theroux. This book recounts a four-month journey by rail through Asia. Theroux is also a novelist, so the dialogue between him and the shifting cast of oddballs sitting opposite him is a particular pleasure.

7. The Railway Station: A Social History by Jeffrey Richards and John M Mackenzie (1986)

Along with the Oxford Companion to British Railway History, this is the railway reference book I most often turn to. It is international and lovingly comprehensive, so Lowestoft and Filey jostle in the index along with Grand Central New York and Gare du Nord. There are also chapters on the station in literature, film, paintings and postcards.

8. Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain by Christian Wolmar (2007)

Wolmar set out to "put the history of the railways encompassing both their construction and their social impact in one easy-to-read volume". He succeeded admirably.

9. Parallel Lines by Ian Marchant (2003)

The "railway of dreams" is compared with the ("largely shit") modern network as Marchant tries to comprehend rail enthusiasm. His journey by train through Britain and Ireland is apparently rambling, but is also compelling and amusing. The reader learns a lot about both British railway history and the cussed, ultimately humane character of the author.

10. Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain, by Matthew Engel (2009)

This is essentially a straightforward railway history, but with the emphasis on the comic, the "two centuries of fiasco" that comprise our railway history: from Victorian laissez-faire (ie chaos) to underfunded amalgamation and nationalisation; then the horrendous tangle of privatisation. It is fitting that Engel should encounter a buffet car attendant (as they used to be called) who suggests, "Have a bacon roll, you c---". The irony of this country having actually invented railways is not lost on him.