Railway history you can hold.

Where this came from

Most of what is written about the railways was written for people who already know them. Beattock, Edmondson, shed codes: wonderful words, and a closed door if nobody explains them. We wanted the other kind of book. One that told you a story and taught you, on the way, what a banking engine was and why the man in the signal box mattered. One that arrived every so often and pulled you along. One you could hold. We could not find it, so we make it, two of us, in the West Midlands.

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 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 as a parcel, six pieces at a time, yours to spread out on a table.

Real journeys, invented narrators

Each story follows a real journey on a real date, told by three people who were part of it, across three parcels. The places, the trains, the times and the way the railway was worked are all real, and we say where we found them. The people who tell it are ours. Making them up lets us write what a signalman or a fireman might have thought without putting words in a real person’s mouth. The printed pieces name the routes, stations and times, but carry no company crest, initials or lettering, because we are not going to copy a real company’s paperwork. Every piece carries a small replica mark.

Checked before it is printed

Every historical claim is checked against a source before it goes in, and the sources are listed on the back page of every story booklet. 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 parcel, 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 a parcel. We can promise it gets read, by one of the two people who decide what goes in the next one.

Who does the work

Fathi Hassan and Ali Shami. 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 parcels 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.

Letters, photographs and the free pages

There is no letters page and we do not publish members’ photographs or writing. Steam this week and the events list are free to everybody, checked weekly, and say where the information came from. We post what we are making as we make it on Instagram, TikTok and Facebook.

The business

The Railway Dispatch is run by Fathi Hassan and Ali Shami, 17 Central Avenue, Rowley Regis, B65 8BA.

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