Yes, I remember Adlestrop. I’m old enough. As a nipper, en route to family holidays in the Cotswolds, I even passed through this, the most famous village railway station in the world — though, unlike in Edward Thomas’s poem, the train didn’t stop (“unwontedly” or otherwise) for me to hear all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire chirruping in euphonic polyphony.

I also remember Grogley Halt, Tumby Woodside, Marston Magna, Maddaford Moor, Wootton Bassett, Edington Burtle and Rumbling Bridge. Not because I passed through them all in short trousers (what did you think I was, a prepubescent trolley service?), but because a mad uncle gave me an illustrated gazetteer, Railway Stations of the British Isles, for my sixth birthday, and I spent hours — no, actually years — poring over those weird and wonderful station names.

I wish I still had it because it beautifully chronicled the railways in all their pre-Beeching glory. Some 21,000 miles of tracks! Almost 6,000 stations! And nearly every village in the realm connected to every other one by an intricate spider’s web of branch and main lines, ingeniously threaded through hills and over rivers by some of history’s greatest engineers.

The railways were a Victorian marvel invested by early 20th-century Britain with an aura of romance. In novels such as Buchan’s The Thirty-Nine Steps, poems such as Hardy’s Midnight on the Great Western and Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings, and films such as Brief Encounter, trains and stations weren’t just locations. They were metaphors; characters in their own right. In their heyday they exuded the very spirit of the nation — a nation that still had an Empire and a sense of destiny. So of course, after the debacle of Suez and the collapse of national self-confidence, we set about destroying them. In just two decades 9,000 miles of track and 4,000 stations were obliterated: a blitz endorsed by Tory and Labour ministers.

It was a sustained orgy of heritage desecration, institutionalised myopia and contempt for public opinion that made what Ceausescu did to Bucharest look like the work of an enlightened democrat. The saving in subsidy was tiny. But the price — urban gridlock, rural isolation, car dependence and the erosion of village life — was vast. We are still paying it.

Little wonder then that, as The Times reported on Monday, train companies want to reopen 34 lines axed by Beeching in the 1960s. They claim that these lines can now attract thousands of commuters, so vexatious has motoring (and parking) become on our clogged highways.

Well, good luck to them. One problem they face is that the green lobby — which might be expected to support the plan — could be hostile, because many disused lines have been turned into popular cycleways or footpaths. Another is that the country is so broke that the notion of spending half a billion quid to revive the world of Thomas the Tank Engine (as the proposal has already been caricatured) seems as remote as daily flights to Mars.

But if we don’t feel rich or idealistic enough to reinstate axed lines, may we at least restore some of the romance, charm and glamour that used to be associated with rail travel? Do all journeys have to be so stressful? Must all stations be dull and dingy, and all station buffets franchised to bland multinationals? And do transport staff have to be so grumpy?

These questions were prompted by an entertaining book just out. Piccadillyland is unlike any other novel. First, it was written by dozens of authors, some long dead. And second, it’s free — at least if you travel on the Piccadilly Line. Transport for London has commissioned it, as part of its commendable Art on the Underground programme, to celebrate the Piccadilly Line’s centenary. And the compilers, Emma Rushton and Derek Tyman, have done a clever job. They have combed thousands of novels for mentions of the Piccadilly Line and then woven hundreds of disparate paragraphs into a surreal new narrative. Of course it doesn’t tell a logical story, but it hangs together via an intriguing tangential logic. And you can have a lot of fun trying to identify each author (all is revealed at the end).

Some are obvious. Rankin’s Rebus, Mortimer’s Rumpole and Dexter’s Morse all travelled on the line. But there are also snippets of Will Self and Fay Weldon, Iris Murdoch and Nick Hornby, George Orwell and Tom Clancy, Jeffrey Archer and Agatha Christie (a gruesome bit of electrocution at Hyde Park Corner station, from The Man in the Brown Suit). Rushton and Tyman even quote from a novel called Piccadillyland, by Rushton and Tyman . . . a nice postmodern touch.

That made me think. If this one Tube line is mentioned so often in fiction, there must be thousands of references to the entire Tube network. And if you added all the mentions of mainline British railway stations in literature, you could probably publish a book longer than War and Peace. Call me fanciful, but to me this suggests that the British have an intense desire not simply to use their railways, but to feel pride in them — and, yes, even to love them, despite all their aggravations.

Railway companies need to nurture that. Many of us are forced to give them a good chunk of our waking hours, and a lot of dosh as well. What they give in return is often shoddy, unreliable and dispiriting. We should be getting fine design, comfort, mystique, even glamour. Journeys should be pockets of tranquillity in frenetic lives, not exhausting scrums. And all stations should aspire to the calm, cool beauty of Grand Central in New York. Even Stalin realised that. The finest architecture in the Soviet Union was the Moscow Metro.

The recently restored St Pancras station in London is a promising new beginning. It is elegant yet unpretentious, grandiose yet welcoming, bustling without having that terrifying Dante’s Inferno atmosphere that you encounter in the whirling vortex of London Bridge or the subterranean gloom of Birmingham New Street. But of course St Pancras was designed to impress the French, pouring off the Eurostar. On the Continent they still expect train journeys to be stylish and chic, as well as very fast. Only in Britain do we tolerate high fares, tortoise speeds and soulless squalor. How sad that — as with cricket, parliamentary democracy and state education — we now trail the world in something we invented.

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