The UK’s Victorian railway faces 21st century challenges

Britain likes to pretend it has a modern railway. Most weeks, the network does its best to expose that as a polite fiction. In the space of seven days, Britain’s railways can showcase world-class engineering — and then collapse under the weight of Victorian design, extreme weather and decades of strategic neglect. We talk endlessly about transformation, but when it matters most, the system still behaves like a museum piece, and freight is left paying the price says UK Editor Simon Walton.