Railways, like Romans, prefer to take the direct route. Tom Jeffreys, trekking on foot from London to Birmingham along the putative course of the HS2 high-speed line, is more of a rambler. Of course, his direction always tends north-north-west, but Signal Failure is a book about the verge and the siding, the hinterland, the brownfield, the landscape that makes way, and the noise that crowds the signal.
The HS2 project is scheduled to break ground in earnest in 2018, although “ground clearance” will be underway much sooner. Armed with Compulsory Purchase Orders and a compensation budget of at least £10bn, it will go pretty much where it wants. “A long section of this country is set to be altered irrevocably by HS2,” Jeffreys writes. “This walk and this book are my attempts to get to know it while I still can.”
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