Photo by Ian Forsyth/Getty ImagesIs there a better way to celebrate the 200th anniversary of passenger rail in Britain than a nine-hour “extravaganza” on BBC Radio 3? His stentorian annuncios have the crispness and limpidity of the Highland brooks and streams he shoots past. Trains, he waxes, have “something sentient” about them – “they seem to breathe like humans, sighing as they ascend the gradients. (Though Train Tracks is, ahem, available on BBC Sounds where it can be repeated, paused, rewound, skipped or sped up. Train Tracks, and the stories of regular people metronomically keeping the country running, are a salve to the image of a nation in spluttering distress, which the various right and hard-right political factions are reliant on projecting.