A to B Vintage Transport Blogs

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If you enjoy the articles below, please do subscribe at A to B Subscriptions & Renewals. The digitial issue costs only £5.70 for four issues (16 months).
The A to B back catalogue is now a quarter of a century old and runs to well over two million words. The easiest way to search this vast database of fact (and fiction) is through our two PDF indexes. More recently, with the rise and rise of easily searched digital PDF issues, we have discontinued this:

A to B master index issues 1-99

A to B master index issues 100-120

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Transport has been our thing since… ooh, the mid-90s. Occasionally, we publish something a bit serious and in depth about cuts, inefficiency, bungling authorities and so on. The most recent of these articles is:

Rural Bus Cuts in Dorset First published in A to B 111, February 2016

The ‘Ear to the Ground’ column by David Henshaw has been published more or less regularly in A to B magazine since the late 1990s, taking pot shots at everyone and everything, from the Strategic Rail Authority to dubious fly-be-night electric bike salesmen.
Occasional nudity offended a vociferous minority of readers, and we often sailed perilously close to the wind with companies that could have wiped us out without blinking, but the results were often hilarious, and there were some grand successes. The Department for Transport changed the way it collected cycling statistics, which had become pure fantasy, the electric bicycle industry eventually moved to 24-month guarantees, and we helped to put some shocking bikes and salesmen out to graze, where they could do no further harm. In the end, no government department, railway franchisee or bicycle manufacturer would talk to us. And we patently failed with some campaigns. Railway re-nationalisation got nowhere (although the subject is still very much bubbling along), and with a wink and a nudge, we were constantly reporting that Peak Oil was just around the corner. Maybe it came and went, and nobody noticed.
There are around 100 Ear to the Ground columns, and we’re gradually digitising them, starting with the selection below, which are mostly drawn from the glory days early in the new Millennium.