As the world speeds up, as technology takes over, it is worth remembering how we used to live. This three-book series is a nostalgic hymn to an era when life was slower: a meandering ramble through the British countryside by bicycle, automobile and train. Take an amble across the countryside with this book, which celebrates a time when our railway network was more than a permanently delayed omnishambles of overcrowded and overpriced trains. Country stations and lonely halts, milk churns and coal yards, enamelled signs and platform clocks these are the fragments of a more leisured age, from a time when the local station was a well-loved institution at the heart of so many communities. Here are gas-lit rural stations, oil lamps on level crossing gates, enamelled signs, waiting room fires, timetables and luggage labels. Less a clattering, steamy ride into the past than a touchstone for joyous memories of such a vital and well-loved institution, The Slow Train harks back to a more measured, considered era.

Peter Ashley is an aficionado of British culture, responsible for the Unmitigated England trilogy, Preposterous Erections (his book on folly towers) and London Peculiars (one of the first books in ACC Art Books' bestselling London series ). Peter is renowned for his passion for the oddities that make this country unique, as Jonathan Meades has said, "He is the gatekeeper to several generations' memories."