Nige Tassell

'A beautifully observed and sympathetic tour of modern Britain that runs on the tracks of our years.'David Quantick 'Charming…The accounts will make any fan of railways want to experience these delights for themselves.' – The Independent All aboard for a one-of-a-kind journey by train to some of the most obscure parts of Britain On the 200th birthday of the world’s first passenger-carrying railway, Nige Tassell sets out to ride Britain’s railway network all the way to its lesser-travelled-to corners, its seldom-visited outposts. From Wick to Penzance and many points in between, he stays on until the end of the line. He is the last man sitting. The sixteen final destinations he visits offer sixteen different stories. By delving into their histories, by speaking to their people and by having a good old-fashioned nose around, Tassell reveals much about places that rarely have light cast upon them – from ferry ports to abandoned resorts, from tiny hamlets to towns being reclaimed by the sea. It's a journey that takes in Harry Potter, Muhammad Ali, goths, Alan Bennett, Vera Brittain, Viz comic, Alex Horne, Nigel Farage. Vikings, John Betjeman, Aneurin Bevan, Tyson Fury, Charlotte Rampling's dad and the weepy judge from The Great Pottery Throwdown. All human life is here. So grab yourself a window seat for an odyssey that tells us much about Britain today. All aboard, all aboard.

In the early 1980s, the pop charts were dominated by musicians tarted up in Day-Glo colours, who fought it out for coverage on our TV screens and magazine pages. Dexys Midnight Runners did things differently. They were surly. They were serious. They were ambitious, but success had to come on their terms. They were a disciplined outfit, a gang with a defined purpose: to make music so pure that it couldn't fail to elicit a deep emotional response from anyone within earshot. And they managed it. This motley crew - in woolly hats and donkey jackets for their first coming; all dungarees and copious body hair for the second - gate-crashed the charts, scoring number-one hits around the globe. But being in Dexys wasn't all sunshine and roses. Many members came, many members went. Some returned unexpectedly as being part of this particular gang was a way of life; it was everything. Nige Tassell, author of the Penderyn Prize-shortlisted Whatever Happened to the C86 Kids? employs his skills of detection to go off in search of the dozens of members who - for however brief a period, and to whatever level of success - have been a part of Dexys Midnight Runners. These are the people who gave the band its sound, its soul, its substance. But whatever happened to them?