RAIL fares are due to rise above inflation, train punctuality times leave much to be desired and the Royal Mail is cancelling its rail contract. The whole network can sometimes seem to be running out of steam.

We might have the answer. Today's rail chiefs should read the three books featured this week. They would soon feel reinvigorated because each volume recalls the time when Britain's railways were forging ahead, powered not so much by coal as by self-confidence.

Earlier this year, Bill Fawcett took Yesterday Once More on a tour around the historic railway buildings on the York Central site. Recently, his second volume in his History of North Eastern Railway Architecture was published. Like Volume I, this is a meticulously researched book, packed with pictures and diagrams of railway structures across the region. It takes the story on from the 1850s, when the North Eastern Railway (NER) was established.

This period covers the time when the present York Railway Station opened, and provides the definitive account of the architecture of this majestic building.

In an age which tolerates prolonged line closures, Mr Fawcett remarks on the remarkable achievement during 1872-77 when the NER "totally replaced its facilities for handling passengers, goods and minerals at one of the busiest interchanges on the East Coast Main Line, with no more than a few Sunday track possessions".

The greatest aesthetic triumph is the trainshed roof, based on Isambard Kingdom Brunel's design for Paddington Station, which opened in London in 1854. The York station roof is 800ft long and 234ft wide, with the largest span, over the through tracks, measuring 81ft.

Down the years, the roof has been modified, sometimes to its detriment, Mr Fawcett believes. "An important visual focus was provided by the end screens, carefully detailed with arching bands of round-topped windows, framed by slender wooden bars and braced by a sturdy but graceful structure of iron trusses," he writes.

"Of all the changes to befall the roof, the loss of these screens is the one really to be regretted. In 1972 they were removed, part of the bracing trusses being retained to form new screens with aluminium glazing bars, which offer no more than a rough approximation to the original, as can be judged from the one 1877 screen which survives, facing Tearoom Square."

The Royal Station Hotel, built at about the same time, was principally intended to cater for travellers, rather than visitors to the city. That reflected York station's role as the junction of several major routes. Its dining rooms "were an integral feature of any long-distance journey on the east-coast route in the days before dining cars. Until the end of the 19th century, expresses made a 20 minute stop at York, while the more well-heeled passengers dashed down a substantial dinner".

Mr Fawcett goes on to consider York's Queen Street workshops, including engine sheds where new locomotives were constructed. A serious problem was the lack of a locomotive erecting shop high enough to accommodate overhead cranes. This was solved in 1880 when an existing machine shop was built upon.

Mr Fawcett has recently learnt that the former goods station, now part of the National Railway Museum, has finally been listed as being of historic/architectural interest.

Of course, York Railway Station and the Royal Station Hotel would not have been nearly so grand had it not been for one remarkable man: George Hudson. And next month former Evening Press chief feature writer Robert Beaumont's biography of this flawed Victorian entrepreneur is published in paperback.

The Railway King: a biography of George Hudson, railway pioneer and fraudster charts his astonishing rise - and breathtaking fall. After fulfilling a possibly mythical promise to make all the railways come to York, upon which the city's present prosperity is founded, Hudson was imprisoned and exiled for suspect accounting practises.

The book's penultimate, thought-provoking chapter is entitled "York, the city that dare not speak his name". That's not entirely true, of course. Railway Street was renamed George Hudson Street in 1971 to mark the centenary of his death.

But Mr Beaumont believes the city owes Hudson a public apology and a more salubrious memorial than the "dreadful" street which bears his name. A "gleaming modern statue within York Station itself would be extremely appropriate". He also argues the National Railway Museum should rectify its "disappointing" decision not to draw attention to Hudson's role by dedicating a room to him.

Our final book celebrates another, less well documented, role of the railway: farm transport. In Branch Line To The Derwent Valley: including the Foss Islands branch, Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith have amassed a pictorial history of these long-running railway back streets.

The first section of the book looks at the one and three quarter mile freight branch opened off the NER's York-Scarborough line to Foss Islands in 1880. It closed in 1989.

It begins with pictures of the railway next to the Rowntree works. A platform was provided outside the southern boundary of the factory in 1927. There is also a picture of the "landing stage", the two platforms where crates of Rowntree chocolates were loaded on to locomotives.

The larger section of the book is devoted to the Derwent Valley Light Railway. The Light Railway Act was passed in 1896 to provide transport for the agricultural community. After long negotiations between landowners south-east of York, and local authorities, the first section of the Derwent Valley Light Railway (DVLR) opened in 1912. The full 16-mile route was up and running the following summer.

At first people travelled on the DVLR, but numbers peaked in 1915 and the last passenger service ran in 1926. It closed for freight in 1981, although a stretch of it was later revived and is now run by Derwent Valley Light Railway Society volunteers from their base at the Yorkshire Museum of Farming at Murton.

The book follows the light railway along Layerthorpe, through Osbaldwick and out to Wheldrake.

A History of North Eastern Railway Architecture - Volume 2: A Mature Art by Bill Fawcett is published by the North Eastern Railway Association, price £19.95 (mail order at £24.45 from Mrs CE Williamson, 31 Moreton Avenue, Stretford, Manchester, M32 8BP)

The Railway King: a biography of George Hudson, railway pioneer and fraudster by Robert Beaumont is published by Review, price £7.99

Branch Lines To The Derwent Valley by Vic Mitchell and Keith Smith is published by Middleton Press, price £14.95, in bookshops or post free from Middleton Press, Easebourne Lane, Midhurst, West Sussex, GU29 9AZ

Updated: 10:35 Monday, June 23, 2003