Excerpt from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield, plus links to reviews, author biography & more

Trains, and steam trains in particular, serve as the holding pen for deep male longing. For a person over 70, the notion of 'times past' usually invokes foggy stations and whistles and the presence of grime. A great hall with men dragging tired wives around, lots of plastic bags with lots of souvenirs – it could only be childhood revisited at a railway museum; the French would have locked you away for such nostalgia.

I specifically went to hear one of the old-timers, a man named Alf Smith. Smith was 92, funny and direct, the fireman (coal shoveling and oiler) on the boiler plate of Mallard for almost four years, and 'I never had a bad day, never had a bad day'. He spoke of his driver and his train with deep respect, telling a story of how, when the pair were lodging overnight and came down for their cooked breakfast, his driver would scrape three-quarters of his meal from his plate and give it to him. 'Not once, not twice, but everyday that we was there, that's what he done. I said to him, "Joe, what are you doing?". He said, "I can get home on a bloody egg, you've got the work to do – eat it!" Mallard was part of our story. Well, it was our story. That was my engine.' His engine was being mobbed downstairs as he spoke. In the shop, the train was basking in the glory of an anniversary, which meant posters and magnets on sale, and small tins of Garter Blue paint suitable for modeling.

Speed records on trains tend to be maintained for a long time: you push the absolute limit for a few miles, and then safety concerns or a basic lack of ambition seals the record shut for decades. The London to Aberdeen run, for example, took 8 hours 40 minutes in 1895 and didn't get any faster for 80 years. In the mid-1930s it took about 2 hours 20 minutes from London to Liverpool, and we have shaved barely 15 minutes from this. But in the 21st Century the train is once more beholden to records and speed. The birthplace of the railways has come relatively late to this party; HS2, the first phase of which is due to open in 2026, will cut the journey between London and Birmingham from 1hour 24 minutes to just 49 minutes.

Elsewhere in the world, progress has been faster. In Spain in 2010, the 205 mph AVE S-112, a train shaped like and nicknamed The Duck, cut the time it takes to get from Madrid to Valencia by more than two hours, to 1 hour 50 minutes. In the same year, travellers between St Petersburg and Helsinki managed the cross-border trip in 3 hours 30 minutes, two hours faster than before the Sm6 Allegro arrived from its works in Italy. In China, the CRH380, new in 2011, travelled at 186mph to cut the journey from Beijing to Shanghai to less than half the journey time in 2010: from 10 hours to 4 hours 45 minutes. And with a certain inevitability Japan has gone a little faster than everyone: in April 2015, on a test track near Mount Fuji, its Maglev ('magnetic levitation') train, hovering 10cm above the track, carried 49 passengers at a speed of 374 mph, smoothly outgunning the French TGV. It is expected to open in 2027 between Tokyo and Nagoya, a journey of 165 miles that it should manage in 40 minutes, half the time of the current Shinkansen bullet train.

 But for the most extraordinary advance of all we need to go back to the birth of the idea of the train, and a sooty dawn in pre-Victorian north-west England.

ii) Was Ever Tyranny More Monstrous?

On the day it opened in 1830, The Liverpool and Manchester Railway revolutionized the way we thought about our lives. The fact that it linked the thriving cotton mills to a major shipping port about 30 miles away is almost incidental. The steam engine both shrunk and expanded the world; it enhanced trade; it hastened the spread of ideas; it fired global industry. And more than any other invention – save the clock itself and possibly the space rocket – the railways changed our appreciation of time.

Excerpted from Timekeepers by Simon Garfield. Copyright © 2017 by Simon Garfield. Excerpted by permission of Canongate Books. All rights reserved. No part of this excerpt may be reproduced or reprinted without permission in writing from the publisher.