Andrew Martin, creator of the railway policeman Jim Stringer, has spent quite a lot of time on the tracks himself, for books including Underground, Overground and Night Trains. His latest work of non-fiction, To the Sea by Train: The Golden Age of Railway Travel (Profile Books, £18.99, July 31), got a brief mention yesterday in The Observer. “You can almost smell the sea and ice-cream,” writes Alexander Larman, “as Martin wittily blends memoir and social history.”