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David Welsh, "The Social Railway and Its Workers in Europes Modern Era, 1880-2023: Moments of Fury, Ramparts of Hope" (Bloomsbury, 2025)
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Dr. David Welch
Welcome to the New Books Network.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Hello and welcome to another episode on the New Books Network. I'm one of your hosts, Dr. Miranda Melcher, and I'm very pleased today to be speaking with Dr. David Welch about his book titled the Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe's Modern Era, 1880-2023, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. As this book, as the title suggests, we're going to be covering quite a period of time looking at a number of different railways across Europe. Both the physical structures, but perhaps more interestingly, the people involved too, and all sorts of ups and downs. Obviously it's a pretty tumultuous period, so we've in fact got rather a lot to talk about. David, thank you so much for joining me on the podcast.
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Dr. David Welch
Hi Miranda, thank you for inviting me. I'm very pleased to be on your podcast.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, I'm very pleased to have you. Could you please start us off by introducing yourself a bit and tell us why you decided to write this book?
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Dr. David Welch
Okay. Well, my name is David Welsh. I have been in my, I'm now retired, but I worked on the railways for, for a number of years, both on in London on the Underground and on what, what was then British Rail, nationalized rail service. I was also later a tutor for the Trade Union Congress Training workplace REPs who were RA Union members of the. Of the. As was the National Union of RA Women then and is now the RMT or Railway Maritime and Transport Union as well as as left the Driver's union and the White collar Union, the tssa. So in that sense that was one contributory factor to wanting to write something new about the railway system and its workers. I'd also done some sessions at the RMT College in Doncaster and there I kind of realized that railway workers here were not really very conversant with the European theater, if you like. And I wanted to make sure that the European side of railways, railway history was brought to an English speaking audience. And that meant what I've called from Dublin in Ireland to the Urals in Russia as was then. And trying to pinpoint what certain workforces were doing. Clearly it couldn't be exhaustive. I haven't included some countries in the survey. It's a snapshot. So that's the second reason. And I think finally I wanted to try to ensure that people were able to. Readers were able to look at what railway workers themselves had done to construct new organizations and new models of activity such as trade unions, what I called the twin sides of railway workers. Ramparts of hope, which was building trade unions long term, which of course still exist. And secondly, moments of fury or I tried to describe the kind of way in which railway workers had, if you like, erupted into quite, not necessarily violent, but action that brought them into confrontation with the forces of the state or with private employers. This was when it was violent. This was because those forces were extremely repressive. We see that particularly in France and Italy and even in Britain. So I think that's the third reason why I think I wanted to write the book. It occurred my writing started before COVID before the COVID pandemic hit and in a certain sense after that pandemic here in Britain there were a number of really big industrial disputes on the railways here. And those disputes involved very much what I would now call the social railway and we'll come to later. And that was really another factor in writing the book because those disputes were going on as I was writing and therefore kind of in some way, perhaps unconsciously perhaps fed into the writing of it and made the writing more pressing, more more direct. And that's really what has informed my. The writing, the actual physical writing of the book. And during those disputes, where I live in Norwich, I was involved in setting up an. Organize a campaign called Norfolk for the nationalization of Rail. And that campaign involved the Local union branches and many, many days spent working with them in order to defend the. The role of guards in. In on British Railways and retain their services on trains. And then finally the last stage of the book was the long standing, the long fight we had with the railway employers, the private companies that run the railways here to retain ticket offices. And, and this is, I'll come back to later was an aspect of the social railway that really hit home at the time. So I think that's probably my. The motivation behind writing the current book. If that, if that's an explanation, that's sufficient enough.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
That's a very helpful introduction. Gives us a whole bunch of things to talk about in more detail and raises or at least hints at a number of the themes examined in the book. Can you tell us a bit more about kind of the five key themes that you look at and how you decided on this sort of focus for organizing all of these comparisons?
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Dr. David Welch
Yes, well, it's a convoluted story, but I think the five themes that emerged emerged really from a book that was a bit of a fruit salad, I think you'd call it a chronological account that simply went on and on being added to as I looked at different countries in Europe. So I think in the end my publisher Bloomsbrace said that they would prefer something thematic and they were right because the themes replaced the kind of straight chronological narrative and gave me much more of a focus. So the first theme was called, is called Earth, Fire and Water. The Road to Peak Railway, which covers European railways in the 19th century, from the first railways in Britain in 1825 through to the creation of railways in countries like France, Germany, Italy, Russia and there. I think what I started with was a fairly conventional account of what that was. But in the end I began to question the relationship between railways and their building of railways and the technology of railways. And I, I suppose encapsulated in the. In the phrase trains were a product of technology, but railways were a product of landscape. In other words, I began to look at the railways as a. In the relate in their relationship to the landscape around them. For example, the. The question of enclosure of land by private landowners had been occurring in various ways through the 18th century and into the 20th. And railways themselves then cut through this private land to create a vista that most passengers had never seen before. So in a sense, here was one aspect of the social railway that it opened up the world that had been enclosed years before, giving a new perspective, giving very new perspectives on what railways were and what railways could do as well as transporting people. So that took me on a very long journey to find out what those relationships were. The second chapter, the second theme was what I called the Railway International, which was how railway unions were built, particularly from the 1880s onwards, and how they were emerging as an international phenomenon right across union, right across Europe, in the sense that they were. Railway unions were being built by railway workers out of nothing, effectively. So there was the whole structure of trade unions was being built. And it was a structure that was built by the very nature of railways, that they cross boundaries, they cross borders. And therefore it was significant that they became the first, in my view, the first railway, the first transport phenomenon that was international. And therefore I thought, well, this suggested something new. The third theme was what I call the Social Railway, which is the title of the book, and it's quite a complex one. But I think, to sum up at this stage, the Social Railway was very much about how railways gave a new dimension to public transportation, which had never been seen before. And that dimension brought many, many social. Brought with it many, many social aspects. For example, women traveling on railways for the first time extensively, and railways being opened up to what I've called the railway masses. The working class in those countries for the first time had transportation which they would have been deprived of in the past except by walking. The fourth theme is called nationalization and socialization. Now, this is a big one, really, because nationalization has been particularly the railways has been the most perennial issue across Europe. So the railways as a public utility lent themselves to the question that railway unions and many other commentators began to look at that it would be better for railways to be publicly owned. And, of course, nationalization was not off the agenda for many European states. In Germany, sometimes in France, in Italy. Italy was the first country to have a fully nationalized railway around 1905, and indeed, even in Russia. So nationalization was not a choice that those states didn't embrace. Except, of course, if we shall see, they were not embraced in quite the same way that we might think of them. It also touched on the whole question of going beyond nationalization to what is called socialization, the railways. And I think, probably, as we'll come back to the only time that railways were perhaps one or two. One or two occasions in Russia after. After the Bolshevik Revolution, but more, more significantly, I think, in Spain, in. During the Spanish Civil War. Finally, the final chapter, the final theme was militarization and anti militarism and fascism. And anti fascism. And here I tried to say that railways were clearly a part of the militarization of European countries. They enabled supplies and soldiers to be moved around more quickly and in the First World War they were very significant. In the Second World War they also played a significant part in moving railway moving personnel. And under the other Nazi Germany the we have what I call the Roman Empire on wheels in the sense that the Nazi party and Hitler were able to mobilize entire populations to actually work on the railway as well as moving military military personnel. The other side of this was of course anti militarism and anti fascism. And there is a tradition we can see quite clearly throughout Europe, occupied Europe, the importance of sabotage and suddenly sabotage which employers in the state had found and states had found anathema when Maori workers engaged in it now became an important part of the struggle against fascism and occupied territories. And we shall come back to that, I'm sure. So I think that basically explains what each of the chapters was setting out to do and much focused approach to a merely chronological one I hope explains.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
Yeah, that's very useful and I think we'll sort of follow that order as we talk about some of those ideas in, in more detail. So the first place I think to start is the furthest back in time, looking at the 19th century, where we have a whole lot of things changing and often under this umbrella of kind of quote, unquote, progress, that that's sort of what's happening here. What role do you think railways played in both the actual fact of things changing and also this idea of progress taking over?
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Dr. David Welch
Well, railways clearly did play a significant part in building economic growth, in fueling economic growth and the movement of people within domestic economies. It's certainly clear that railways were beneficial in that sense and they helped to build individual states. They were part of state building, particularly in Italy. But in fact, what I was doing in the book was trying to look at the ways in which railways were not an unmixed blessing, really, in a sense that what I wanted to do was to show that railways were part of social change, but the ways in which they were part of social change. Bringing travel, bringing freight across borders, allowing people to travel to and from work. That was accompanied by background in which there was acute social conflict. So, for example, in Britain, the railways emerged from the 1820s at a time when there was acute social discord, particularly in the 1830s and 40s, the advance of Chartism in Britain. In France, railways emerged as a social tool of. Of the state, Napoleon iii, for example, a very centralized railway system. And at this time, throughout French railway building, there was immense social conflict around trade unions, around local communities which fought back against the state and suffered immense repression, I suppose, culminating in the Paris Commune in 1870 and in Russia. What I wanted to point out in the book was that railways began to develop really after the abolition of serfdom, but as they were directed mainly by the state, they became seen by many as, if you like the epitome of state power under czarism. And that, in a sense, was the background there in Italy. Railways were very much built to enable the Italian state to. To be built after the 18. After the 1860s. And of course, that unleashed considerable repression of workers and working class organizations which faced state power effectively. So in that sense, railways were worth an emblem, became an emblem or of state power itself. I'd also say that when railways were built, for example, in Britain, they cut through and created a new kind of landscape. I mentioned before the question of enclosure. But what most commentators never seem to have talked, most historians have not really talked about was the fact that railways themselves brought together wood, so the felling of trees. And Britain imported much timber from the Baltic Metal you had to make the railway tracks to make, and bricks, the building of brick stations. And in a certain sense, all of that is a relatively untapped part of what railway building was all about. It required a huge workforce to build those things, predominantly railway nappies. Those are called the navigators. And this was very much a part of a state which allowed the private development of railways, unlike other European states, other states. And this meant that the social background of what the railways were, the social backdrop, was much more significant, I thought, than previously given credit for. I think that. So in that sense, what I was trying to say was that there was clearly economic development. Railways were part of economic development and became very significant for states. But at the same time, we should not neglect the fact that they were a part of the structure of society, of societies which were deeply repressive on the whole, deeply repressive, particularly of trade unions and working class organizations, and were able at all times to mobilize railways, increasingly to mobilize railways to prevent the building of trade unionism, the Ramparts of Hope barcode, and also to use railways to transport troops, to repress uprisings, riots or other even more peaceful activities. So in that sense, that's what I felt was the most significant, if you like, underside of what economic development did. Is certainly true that railways were a powerful and significant force for economic development. But I think most historians of the economic development of railways have pointed to the fact that they were not always the most conducive force for economic development. They were often a subsidiary force. So I think that's what I was trying to say. Obviously, by the 20th century and after the First World War, railways became more and more a social product. After the Second World War, they became part of what has been known as a social wage. Therefore, their economic role changed significantly. I Think from one of. In other words, the, the, the, the, the. The capitalist system was now forced, after, after World War II, into a compromise with social forces and with the working class. And railways were part of that compromise. They were part of that historic welfare compromise that people expected to be there. It's interesting that H.G. wells, much earlier, before the First World War, said railways, railways, people expect railways to be there all the time. Generations of people expect railways to be present in their lives. They expect to grow up, they expect to die with a railway system around them. And in fact, his point of view prevailed. We still today have a railway system that exists, but has not been superseded by the motorcar. Although in fact, railways were projected, as in their own time in the 19th century, as almost kind of, by some, as almost a technological panacea, in much the same way that the motor car was later on in the 20th century, forgetting, of course, that one of the undersides of railway development was their impact on the environment. And so, in a sense, that I would conclude by saying that climate change, that we now associate with partly with motor vehicles, internal combustion engine, was something that railways themselves inaugurated with steam and smoke and the pollution that came from railway trains, from locomotives. So therefore, that's what eventually led me to consider the whole question of climate change today. I don't know if that answers your question.
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Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's definitely a lot of links between that history and today. I'm glad you made that clear. Another thing you mentioned earlier that I wonder if we can talk a bit more about is the sort of extent to which we should understand the railways in different countries and the people who work on them as being linked rather than sort of separate in their own little silos? You talk about the social railway, the railway international. How did all these different people sort of come together at the beginning of the 20th century? And do we see really these links, or is that kind of, you know, fantasy that we might wish we could see? But how real was the railway international and the social railway?
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Dr. David Welch
Yes, I think that's a very good point, actually. It's hard to. To say exactly the relationship between the social railway and the railway international. I've taken the route the idea of a railway international as a kind of starting point for saying that when railway unions were growing and developing before the First World War, and that is the point where railway unions went from being what we might describe as fairly moderate in their approach to the employers or whether they were private or the state in that period, they went from that point to a much more militant standpoint we see that in the strikes in France around 1911 and the strikes in Britain around the same time, which were extremely extensive and extremely violent in some respects state violence against railway workers and some degree of sabotage in both cases, both in France and Britain. Now by 1914 you really did have. Why would the railway. The Railway International was in a sense composed of this new surge of railway activity. This new surge of reunions which were not traditional ones were influenced predominantly by syndicalism. Now syndicalism, as you probably know, your listeners will know, was a very powerful force. It eschewed parliamentary, parliamentary role for achieving revolution. It based itself very much on independent self activity by workers. And railways were a central part, became a central part of that in a sense that syndicalism wanted to were railways to be run by workers themselves, although it was not together clear what role passenger communities would have in that, in that, in that setup. And in Britain the most famous advocate syndicate, Tom man was very much linked to the railways. Railway unions and railway unions formed a major part of what became known as the PLEBS an educational school for workers that were set up in an offshoot in Oxford. So the Railway International therefore was powered by the syndicalist view. And the syndicalism spread was not just found in Britain, it was found in Ireland, in France, in Italy and in Russia. And this is prior to the Bolshevik Revolution. And syndicalism in a sense was truly international partly because syndicalist didn't believe in borders anyway and rich for a sort of international community, a federation of European states, although it's questionable whether they thought that the state would have any role in blurring into anarchist ideas. So in a sense that was the motivational force behind what I would call the Railway International. And after the second, after the First World War when the Railway International had been in a sense it emerged in some senses much more clearly during the First World War in a sense that railways were built and run by the military, what so called light railways in France, on both sides of both the. The Allies and, and Germany and Austria, light railways to bring provisions and soldiers to the front and a very movable front now in that sense and we see that very much in Germany towards the end of the war as Germany began to collapse, the Railway International began to emerge much more linked to the Bolshevik Revolution and in Germany the attempted Spartacist revolution uprising and German railway workers became a link in the forefront of the post war world in the Weimar Republic. And in that sense the Railway International had deep, had Achieved deep roots in many European countries. It's difficult to say exactly what those roots were. There was very little organizational outcome, but it was in the nature of syndicalism. That organization was, if you like, a weakness in what they did. It was temporary, it was fleeting. It didn't always cohere very much. After the First World War, clearly there was a. There was a reversal of the International, except that railways did become a significant part of the thinking of the Comintern, the Third International itself. And railway workers were seen as a significant force in terms of building revolutionary parties, Communist parties in European states, in Russia or the new Soviet Union. Railway workers became. Were again in the forefront of the overthrow of the tsar. They were often, it seems, not always Bolshevik inspired Bolshevik members or. But were more likely to be Mensheviks. But the Railway International, in a sense, took a very deep root in the early Soviet days. And its main focus was that workers themselves were running the railways. Now, this didn't necessarily appeal to the Bolsheviks and who needed desperately to bring about a more coherent and structured railway system. So in that sense, the Railway International found itself located now in forms of communist nationalization, nationalization by the state, but run, run publicly owned and directed towards building Soviet power, building like a socialist state. So the Railway International itself became significant part of what railway workers were involved in after the Second World War, as I've said before, railway workers, railways themselves became much more of a public utility throughout Europe. We see, in a sense, we see that the Railway International was incorporated into the new welfare systems of the Western states. And of course, in Eastern Europe, they were incorporated very much into the Stalin. Stalinist system. And even new railways were built. The only European state that didn't have a Railway before 1945, Albania, had one built by the state there. So the Railway International itself was, I would say, difficult to pinpoint exactly an organizational level across Europe that spanned the entire continent of Europe. It's more. The Railway International was more of an ideological impetus, more of an ideological force. Now, the. The social railway, I think, has a number of components. One of them is that it was, in my view, I've argued that it was very much a kind of way in which railways were incorporated into or became part of, if you like, a counterweight to capitalism. Now, what Engels, I think, called the invading socialist society. And that's the first element of what a social. What the social railway was about. The second one was that it included a public gaze that increasingly the people who use the railway, including the working class, had no other option than to use the railway as it was, in other words, with rigid hierarchies, with first, second, third and fourth class travel, with quite military precision and military kind of background to the railway. Now what the social railway did was to kind of challenge that. And we see that in many of the artistic and cultural elements. We see artists across Europe portraying the railways in their relationship to people. In, in Germany, for example, we have paintings which portray individuals in their relationship to railways. In France, with the Impressionists, post Impressionists, we see railways appearing in many, many art forms and in poetry and of course in novels. I mean, we've only got to take Tolstoy, Dostoevsky, in Russia and across Europe during the First World War, Oli Babus. And we see the people who use the railways ceasing to be anonymous, ceasing to be pure numbers on a spreadsheet, if you like. And so therefore the social railway became a very much a part of the way that I think people saw railway travel and of course, began to articulate alternatives. So, for example, in Britain and France we have examples where there were calls for railways to be incorporated into the state as a national utility. In Germany, even where there were those who thought that railways were too important to be left to private enterprise, particularly from a military standpoint. And then in the next thing, was that what I would call the role of women. Now, women did work on railways, particularly in Britain, a small but significant part of railway work, railway clerks, for example. But in the First World War they assumed a much bigger role. And in Germany, obviously, and in France, so this is women working on the railways. But also I would argue that women who were able to use the railways really for the first time with a certain degree of freedom. I'm not saying that there weren't difficult, very many difficulties for women traveling on, particularly on their own, but I would argue that women became more able to articulate an alternative gender alternative to what they had been confined before. So in that sense also the working class as a whole became, and not so much, although they were portrayed often in, in literature and cartoons, etc, as always in a group of people. It was as though the. The middle class were only aware of working class people as a group. So they were grouped together in third class, fourth class, very uncomfortable. And what happens in the early 20th century is that that begins to change that working class people, their image that they had becomes much more positive and moves away from that sense of always being clumped together as a social group, separate to the more respectable travel that the middle Class expected. This is not to say that those class distinctions died. They remained right through until, my ma argue, to the present day. So the social railway itself, I think, is composed of all those things. It's also composed of the idea that railway communities, whether we think of France, Paris or Britain, for example, with Swindon railway communities, which were composed of workers, workshops and repair shops. I'm thinking now of Ilford in London or Stratford in London, where I worked. And so railways encompassed a very wide number of different tasks and jobs hierarchically, of course, but this made communities until the beaching period in Britain after the Second World War, after the beach, in carts, communities, railway communities were found even in the smallest village. And I would take the example here of some of the novels by Raymond Williams, whose father was a railway signal worker and who portrayed his father's life in the 1920s. And in that sense, what Williams got hold of was the fact that railways were an essential constituent part of local communities, similar in some ways to mining communities. But again, the social railway opened up those communities, those railway communities to the outside world. They were not isolated, they were not singular and they were. They. They were the same thing throughout Europe. Everywhere you went in Europe, Italy, France, Germany, Britain, Russia, those communities were the same. Despite the differences of language and heritage and community background, they all were directed towards the creation of a railway that people felt committed to, that provided secure jobs. My father, for example, was a telephone engineer on the London Underground for 28 years after the Second World War. A secure job, not well paid, but with pension and a member of a union. And all these things were. Seemed to be guaranteed by the employer by London Transport. So in that sense, and I would be taken by him to. To work sometimes on a Saturday morning. People worked on a Saturday morning in those, in those days in the 1950s, and I would be taken by him and the railway workers, railway branch officers, nur branch officer would often come to our house. So in a sense it's that link between workers and their job. I'm not suggesting that other workers don't find their jobs feeling or satisfying. But railways, there is such a thing as a kind of railway community. If you have worked on the railways, you will know what that means. There is a sense in which the railway gives people a sense of purpose, of belonging. And in the days when again I worked on British Rail, you had what they call the Brsa brsas, which were cafeterias or canteens or bars. We should remember that prior to the present period, it was relatively easy to drink alcohol while you were on the job. Fortunately, that is no longer the case. So in that sense, those BRSAs were a symbol of that kind of railway. They were very much located in a particular place. The one I knew was in Stratford. And the social railway, in that sense was a very important part of local communities because it provided employment for the surrounding area, such as Stratford, or in Paris, or in cities like Turin and Milan in Italy. In Russia and the Tsarist period, railways offered peasants an opportunity to progress, to move up the social ladder by being able to work on the railways, to transfer from one railway company to another, but also played a part in their ideological development, in their political development, in the sense that they gave those workers came into contact with political ideas by their travel, by their moving around from company to company, and often was a school for, if you like, class struggle, a school for those who became involved in agitation against the tsarist regime and put them in the forefront of the Russian Revolution. So I think, I hope I've kind of talked enough about railway I'm Scott.
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- [53:24]
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- [53:55]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's a lot of connections there across different countries across time, which is really interesting. And the community aspect definitely comes through clearly. I do wonder, though, perhaps as a conclusion to our discussion, the book obviously goes from 1880 to 2023, which is a lot of time and especially in the last sort of 20 or 30 years thinking, for example, in the UK, a lot of these practices of how railways are run and what it's like to work in them has changed a lot. Right. As you mentioned, you worked in British Rail. That's not what it's called anymore. So those things you were just telling us about with the social railway, to what extent have they been able to survive into the 21st century, given how much has changed?
- [54:43]
Dr. David Welch
I think in more recent years, since the Second World War, the social railway has took on a much more significant role as a public utility. In Europe, the post war era, railways were almost entirely, except in Spain for a time, publicly owned. So that goes for the Eastern bloc as well as the West. Now, what has happened in recent years under European Union directives is that one major part of railways, freight has been transferred to the private sector. Now, this has been a real, I think, a real problem for the social railway, in a sense that now our railways can transport freight and the companies can make a. Private companies can make a profit. Now, in Britain, this was particularly significant because we had the first real tranche of privatization from the early 90s here. And the whole structure of British Rail was dismantled and turned over to private companies. Both the infrastructure and the basic running of the railways, the trains, the stations were all handed over to private enterprise. This is. Now, this has been, I think, but most experts would argue, a massive step backwards, a massive failure in running a railway. It's a fragmented, very much very expensive railway. The private companies, about 13 of them, are able to have ruled the route for this time. And I think this has been a real challenge to what I've called the social railway in the sense that it has returned to private hands and the impetus behind it has been not as a public service, but as a private enterprise and a private profit motive. Now, that doesn't mean to say that in fact, when the Tory government introduced privatization, it did so in the belief that it would curb the trade unions and reduce their effectiveness, if not reduce their, if not eliminate them from the industry. So it's in a sense tribute to the social railway that they didn't manage to do that. I mean, in Britain, the RMT Union, particularly, in a certain sense, rebuilt itself under the impact of prioritization, renewed its ideological position, changed its Tactics in terms of recruitment, because obviously many, many jobs were outsourced. Cleaning, catering were outsourced to private companies, and the RMT then had to start to recruit those workers. So, in a sense, privatization did not lead to the removal of or the reduction of the role of the unions. And in fact, the rail unions became the foremost defenders of the social railway, in a sense that they defended railways by fighting for the retention of guards and conductors on trains. Successfully fought that over a number of years with the industrial action and political campaigning, and they were successful in that. So that was a major victory for what I've called the social railway, in a sense, that it also brought about a strong community campaigning element to support that. And we had that, particularly in Norwich, where I live in Norfolk. And I was pleased to say that through Norfolk, for nationalization of rail, we were able to support the retention of guards over many years. Secondly, and most recently, the companies, the private companies in Britain decided to remove ticket offices, to close them entirely down. Across the whole of Britain, this provoked a huge campaign by the unions and by communities, and summarized by a placard in Bristol held up by a young woman saying, people, not machines, because of the impact on people with disabilities, the impact of people who did not have access to technology, smartphones or whatever. And again, that campaign was victorious. Effectively, the Conservative government stepped in and told the companies to reverse their position and retain. So in that sense, the social railway triumphed again. And that in Britain alone, anyway, across the rest of Europe, passenger services have remained in public hands and the trade unions in European. In Europe have remained. Railway trade unions have remained very central, for example, the CGT in France. And so in that sense, railways are in a kind of what I would call a transitional moment, whereby we are now seeing, in Britain anyway, under the present labor government, we are seeing the reversal of privatization. The local railway service, here called Greater Anglia, run by a Dutch firm, is going to revert to public ownership in October this year. And several other companies have also been returned to public ownership. So therefore, we are seeing a trend, I think contradictory, yes, but a trend towards a significant defense of the social railway. And that will apply across Europe as well as the EU EU directive attempt to open up railways to private enterprise. So in that sense, I think we are now at a stage where railways are open to a new phase. And that new phase is also very much important because of climate change. We're now seeing wildfires raging in parts of many European countries, including Britain. They have the danger of flooding and temperature. Temperature, right, Temperatures rising. This is going to have an impact on railways. And it's important that railways retain their social aspect in a sense that we need to, we will need to redirect our railways and rethink the role of railways in terms of providing transport of different nature, as is already happening in Latin America, in Mexico, for example. So I think climate change is going to be one of the most significant things that railway workers and railway unions will have to address, and they will have to address it in relation to the powers of the state. So the state, again, as has always been so important in the development of railways, state ownership has never been off the cards in Europe. In European railways, right from the middle of late 19th century, railway, state owned, state ownership of railways has been a significant part, the most significant part of what railways have been, how railways have been modeled and developed. That is going to become even more important now with climate change.
- [64:42]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
There's a lot of continuities in what you've been describing for us that things that might seem like, oh, the 1880s was a long time ago. There's nothing similar between then and now. Actually, it's sounds like there's quite a number of ways in which railways have similarities across time.
- [64:59]
Dr. David Welch
Yes, yes, you're absolutely right. Now the similarities are very much there. So.
- [65:03]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
So we shall have to see what comes next, I suppose.
- [65:06]
Dr. David Welch
I think that's where we're at at the moment, a very significant transitional stage.
- [65:11]
Dr. Miranda Melcher
Well, so for any listeners who want to know more about the history of where we got to, to get to this transitional moment, they can of course read the book we've been discussing titled the Social Railway and Its Workers in Europe's Modern Era, published by Bloomsbury in 2025. David, thank you so much for coming onto the podcast to tell us about your book.
- [65:31]
Dr. David Welch
It's my pleasure. I really enjoyed talking to.