Come to the author event in the village where Janine lives! Kirby Muxloe’s new bookshop hosts Janine talking about her new book, Railworkers 200.
At Gray and White’s bookshop in Kirby Muxloe, you can meet the author, hear about the stories the book tells, ask questions and join in conversations, all with a few nibbles! And, of course, you can buy a signed copy of the book!
We will also hear about the campaign to put Kirby Muxloe back on the railway network through the reopening of the Ivanhoe Line, closed by the Beeching Axe.
And there may well be a bit of railway-themed poetry too, including one about Kirby Muxloe's very own closed station (pictured).
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The railway industry is two hundred years old this year, 2025. That is two centuries of hard labour from railway workers, laying the tracks, building the trains and stations, digging the tunnels, maintaining and repairing the infrastructure, driving the locomotives, operating the signals, keeping passengers safe, providing information, selling tickets, feeding workers and passengers, dealing with emergencies and cleaning up after everyone else.
This book records two hundred years of railway workers and their struggles. It educates the reader about the work they did (and do), the conditions that they did (and do) it in, and their struggles to improve their conditions of work.
It sets out the development of railway trade unions, and the fights that they have fought, won and lost, from the nineteenth-century safety campaign, through the great 1919 national railway strike, to modern battles with railway employers.
It records rail workers’ interventions into politics: the railway trade unionists who set up the Labour Party, the railway workers who went into politics, the impacts of nationalisation and privatisation. And it asks what we can learn from that history to guide railway workers and trade unionism in the future.
The book draws on primary and secondary source materials, including contemporary coverage, records of trade union conferences and branches, union publications, unofficial publications such as workplace bulletins, Parliamentary debates, and more. The author worked on London Underground for more than 25 years and is now a railway writer.
Mainly set in the UK, the book also touches on some international experiences. As Karl Marx pointed out, the railways grew first in the countries with the most developed modern industry. This included the USA, Belgium, France and Britain. The railways enabled the capitalist class to transport its goods and the working class to build its movement of resistance. Class struggle under capitalism travelled by rail.
RMT, ASLEF and TSSA have all published books about their particular union’s history. This book is fiercely pro-union, and supports industrial unionism – the strategy of all workers in an industry, regardless of job role, being organised in one union. But it is not tied to the officialdom or the unique perspective of any one of the unions.
Also check out other Arts events in Glenfield, Literary Art events in Glenfield, Workshops in Glenfield.
