AS a youngster, Andrew Martin would drift off to sleep at night to the rumble of nearby wagons shunting at York railway station.

His father was a British Rail worker for 40 years, most of them based at the station.

"I wasn't a trainspotter, but because my dad worked on the railways I had free run on them, so as a teenager I would hop on at York and go down to London. It was like being an aristocrat, because you could travel first class," he says.

Martin's latest novel, Death On A Branch Line, is the fifth in his series featuring railway detective Jim Stringer. Set a century ago, the stories follow Jim, a frustrated engine driver, who ends up becoming a railway policeman. The latest is set around the old Malton to Pilmoor line, in North Yorkshire.

"It's a part of the country I used to visit as a boy and I wanted a rural setting, so it seemed ideal."

As well as being rip-roaring detective thrillers, Martin's books are a lament for a world that has all but vanished – he cites LP Hartley's The Go-Between and AG Macdonell's England, Their England, as key influences.

"The idea of a branch line is hard to imagine now. But
the destruction of our countryside is a
pre-occupation of mine
and I try to describe a world without cars and noise."

Although writing about the past can be difficult, Martin says he enjoys it.

"The more you do it, the easier it gets to write your own version of what it was like a hundred years ago. I basically remove modern conveniences, because my stories wouldn't work if Jim Stringer had a mobile phone.

"Take them away and everything is different. If you've got a life or death message that you need to get to someone in another part of the country, suddenly it's not so easy."

By setting his stories during this period, he recalls a time long before phrases like political correctness and health and safety existed.

"It was a more brutal and barbaric world back then. When I was doing my research, I came across an old railway policy aimed at chimney sweeps who were seen as dirty and told that if they had to travel by train they could, but they weren't allowed to sit down."

His protagonist, Jim, also harks back to an era that didn't follow the same rules we do today.

"Jim Stringer never fills in a form. He's more like a policeman from the Wild West. He's not like Hercule Poirot, who stays the same as a character. He grows up and gets married, has children and becomes older and more cynical. But he's also the same gauche train watcher he always was and I think there's a lot of me in him."

Despite his books having earned widespread praise, Martin stumbled on a literary career by accident. Having initially trained as a barrister, he began writing newspaper articles and was named a Spectator Young Writer of the Year.

"I didn't think I was going to be a good lawyer, but thought I might do better as a journalist," he explains. His hunch proved a good one. He wrote for several national newspapers before quitting his job at the Evening Standard to become a writer. His debut novel Bilton, about the dissolute behaviour of a lifestyle journalist, was a merry blend of Evelyn Waugh and Alexei Sayle, but it was The Necropolis Railway – the first of his Jim Stringer books – that brought him to a wider audience.

"The standard critical response is they're all the same, so I've had to avoid doing that," he says.

"Joseph Conrad once said that a novel is primarily a visual form and that's how I see it. I don't enjoy books where I don't know what the weather's like and there's no sense of place."

Martin has a six-book deal with Faber and says the last one is already written. But will that signal the end of the line for the railway sleuth? "That's up to my publisher. I'd definitely like to do another one, set in the First World War, because I think that would be interesting."