A very successful book, that shows you can write a story that is superlative after superlative, and little in the way of nuance, and present it so the text appeals to the specialist while it remains pictorial enough to appeal to his or her spouse. This is the story of speeding trains – from the building up to the Mallard, and the whole decades that have gone since, with electric, diesel, combinations of the same, hesitant and expensive maglev experiments, etc. I don't think the specialist (and I'm certainly not one) will dislike this for dropping all the 4-10-6 and 0-2-0 style technical classification every time, that would make this potentially unreadable to the layman. Instead we still get a lot of, as I say, superlatives, from the fastest Spanish high-speed train (not even set in Spain, that one) to the fastest train in a tunnel, to the fastest in general, timetabled use, to the fastest doctored, streamlined, edited, one-off, given extra padding and disabled safety features.

And as I repeat, this is a story – it's actually incredibly narrative for such a book, and yet sensible with it. It is, let's face it, generally about boys with their toys seeking a touch of extra grunt and a way to get round curves faster, but it's written in a way that is certainly not dry, and yet still not making these engineers out to be gung-ho saviours. It is what it is – trains trying to be faster – and whatever the country concerned, however incremental the record breaking, it's all surprisingly interesting. And the captioned visuals are so wonderfully researched and presented, they're a superlative all of their own (until the page they repeat themselves). This is a top-notch train book.