This is the only scholarly work ever to investigate this topic, despite its huge significance for understanding a key leisure experience shared by most male Britons in the second half of the twentieth century. It offers radical interdisciplinarity, showing the virtue of pursuing a topic across tightly policed borders between different academic disciplines. It takes railway enthusiasts' life-world seriously, unpacking and critiquing the contemporary popular cultural stereotype of train spotters as a British object of ridicule. It benefits from a light and witty authorial touch, while never less than authoritative.