It's the first Chat Shit Get Banged of 2025 and I was delighted to invite Gareth Dennis on the show!
Gareth is the author of How Railways Will Fix the Future, published by Repeater Books.
In a review of the book, Steve Dawe writing for West England Bylines said,
Gareth Dennis uses current, historical, and global contexts to chart how the railways can assist in the climate emergency and social justice.
Despite 29 global conferences on the climate, and thousands of illustrative academic papers, climate policy failures remain. As Gareth Dennis observes in this book, a third of global end-use emissions are from transport. As a step away from the climate emergency, he offers a railway renaissance focussed on this country particularly, with emphasis on public ownership.
Many observations also reference what he calls “private individualised transport” as part of the wider pattern of inequalities and pollution in our society. He attempts to quote “describe how railways fit into the future, but also how they can act as a lens through which to filter and understand what future we want to see, allowing us to think clearly about our relationship with organised labour, with technology and with democratic principles.”
Gareth is an engineer and writer, specialising in transport systems and policy. As well as his day job as a railway design engineer, he is a writer for the railway and national press and regularly appears on television and radio explaining engineering and transport ideas to a broad audience. He is a lecturer in rail infrastructure, safety and sustainability and presents a weekly video podcast called #Railnatter on YouTube that I highly recommend.
He points out that only half of the 20% of households with the lowest income in the UK have access to a car. He argues dealing with car dependence is part of reducing poverty, pollution, and inequality.
This was a satisfyingly *wide-ranging talk, that not only covered engineering but politics, music, film, the big ideas and the small too.
There's some bombshells and some fighting talk 💪🏿
Gareth is convinced and cited evdence that engineering has contributed more to the world than medicine. I feel that needs an octagon, a referee and a bell to sort out.
During the interview, my longest so far at 90 minutes, there is a reference to the hashtag #RailwaysExplained and slavery. Further reading by Gareth here: Slavery and the Railways, Part 1: Acknowledging the Past and here's the full quote from the 2020 thread I read out,
Last night's #RailNatter, we talked about #BlackLivesMatter and how it is crucial to keep up the pressure and for all of us to learn about our colonial past.
Here's a really important #RailwaysExplained about how Britain's railways only really exist as a legacy of slavery…Back in 1833, the UK government abolished slavery and decided to compensate former slave owners - not the people who had been held as slaves - to the tune of £20m…
That's more than £19bn in today's money, and represented 40% of the government's budget at the time.
Around half the money stayed in the UK despite only 3000 of the 47000 compensated slave owners living here, meaning that very wealthy individuals received huge payouts.
People like George Hibbert and John Gladstone received the 1833 equivalent of tens of millions of pounds each.
Former slave owners needed somewhere to invest this money, and the embryonic but exciting new technology of railways seemed like a solid bet…
Lines like the Liverpool and Manchester and the Great Western Railway were substantially funded using their compensation.
*A Cargo Cult: Its use as a metaphor (in the sense of engaging in ritual action to obtain material goods) based on stereotypes of cargo cultists as "primitive and confused people who use irrational means to pursue rational ends.
Typically (but not universally) cargo cults included: charismatic prophet figures foretelling an imminent cataclysm and/or a coming utopia for followers—a worldview known as millenarianism; predictions by these prophets of the return of dead ancestors bringing an abundance of food and goods (the "cargo"), typically including a bounty of Western goods or money, rooted in pre-existing aspects of Melanesian society, as a reaction to colonial oppression and inequality disrupting traditional village life, or both.
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Have a great weekend. Til next time.
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