Two of us, learning as we go.

Where this came from

There are two of us, and neither grew up trainspotting. We came to it the way a lot of people have lately: a preserved line on a day out, a photograph somebody shared, a documentary on a wet afternoon. Then the names start arriving. Beattock. Edmondson. Shed codes. It is a wonderful subject. It is also, at the start, a slightly closed one, because most of what is written about it was written for people who already know.

So we went looking for the gentle way in. A book that told you a story while quietly teaching you what a banking engine was. Something that arrived every so often and pulled you along. We could not find it. After about the fourth time one of us said somebody ought to make that, it started to seem easier to make it than to keep saying so.

Why paper, and why the post

Because the papers are the part that survived. Not the trains, most of them, but the ticket in a coat pocket, the label pasted on a suitcase, the menu from the dining car, the timetable folded down to the page that mattered. Those things were handled. They have thumbprints on them. You cannot get that from a screen, and a magazine you read once and recycle does not do it either. Ours comes flat in an envelope, ten pieces at a time, yours to spread out on a table.

Real journeys, an invented railway

Each story follows a real route on a real date, told by three people on the same train across three envelopes. The places, the distances, the summits and the way the trains were worked are all real, and we say where we found them. The railway company, though, is ours. The London & Highland Railway never existed. Inventing it lets the tickets and letters in your envelope look and feel right without us copying a real company’s paperwork or putting words in a real person’s mouth. Every piece carries a small replica mark.

Still learning, and it shows in how we work

Being new to a subject makes you careful. Every historical claim is checked against a source before it goes in, and anything we cannot check is treated as fiction and labelled as such. When we get something wrong, and at some point we will, the correction goes in the next envelope, printed, where everybody who had the mistake will see it. We would rather be told than not.

Tell us what you would like to see

If there is a line you know inside out, a year you would like us to go to, or a kind of paper you have always wanted to hold, tell us. Members can do it from the account page, and anybody can email hello@therailwaydispatch.com, which comes to the two of us and nobody else. We cannot promise your line will turn up in an envelope. We can promise it gets read, by one of the two people who decide what goes in the next one.

Who does the work

The writing, the research and the designs are done by the two of us. Everything is printed, cut, folded and finished by hand in the West Midlands, so a month’s envelopes go out together in the first week instead of trickling out as people join. There is no office and no call centre. An email gets a person, usually within a couple of days.

What this is not

It is not a club, a magazine or a forum. There is no letters page and we do not publish members’ photographs or writing. It uses no railway company’s emblems or brand names. Steam this week and the events list are free to everybody, checked weekly, and always say where the information came from.

More about the first journey, or read the opening of the first chapter.