ANDREW Martin has always been a train buff. As a freelance contributor to everything from the Daily Telegraph to the New Statesman, he has written extensively about public transport.

When he changed gear from journalist to novelist, however, this interest was marginalised. Hacks and hangers-on travelled around London in Bilton, his very funny satire on lifestyle journalism, the best Fleet Street mickey-take since Evelyn Waugh's Scoop. And there were treks across York and the North York Moors in the follow-up, a tale of amateur criminals and a professional Yorkshireman called The Bobby Dazzlers.

But these journeys were peripheral, mere plot-movers. Mercifully, Martin had reined in his passion for bus tickets and rail timetables.

So it was with some trepidation that I picked up his third novel, The Necropolis Railway. This is set in and around Waterloo Station. It follows the fortunes of a railway porter who dreams of becoming an engine driver.

This, I feared, could be it. The one where he terminated his sense of fun; the one which was about as much fun as a Tuesday afternoon's trainspotting (the pen and flask variety, not Irvine Welsh's heroin and haggis cocktail).

Happily I was wrong. Completely and utterly.

There is no doubting Martin's passion for railways in the book, nor his knowledge of the subject: he even learned how to drive a steam engine on a Yorkshire railway as part of his research. But this does not detract from the novel, quite the opposite. It enhances the authenticity of a tale which is rich, dark and brilliant.

Like its author, who moved from York to London, The Necropolis Railway's hero Jim Porter takes the trip from Robin Hood's Bay - here known as Baytown - to the capital. He is whisked away to Waterloo after an encounter with a railway company director at Baytown station.

It is a dim, clanking, fog-bound world, where the giant engines are crawled over by shadowy figures whose few words for the wide-eyed Yorkshire lad are hostile.

Soon Jim's sense of displacement becomes fear as he discovers his predecessor, who also stayed at the same dismal digs, has vanished.

To add to his sense of gloom and morbidity, Jim is set to work on the Necropolis Railway, which runs funeral services from Waterloo to the sprawling suburban cemetery of Brockwood in Surrey. It soon transpires that some of Brockwood's latest customers have arrived far ahead of their scheduled departure time, helped along by foul play.

Jim must find out who is behind the grisly deaths before he collects his own one-way ticket to the Brockwood graveyard.

Yet it is not the detective story that powers this book. I had hardly clocked it was, essentially, a murder mystery until about half way through.

That's because I had been so enjoying exploring Martin's fictional world. His brilliant eye for the humdrum detail, the sounds and smells, the advertising posters for Duke of Wellington Cigars and Stowers Lime Juice, make his London of 1903 one we walk right into (although taking the train is quicker).

The reader is with Jim at every turn. We huddle against the dim damp of his room; we feel the heat of the engine's firebox; we are deafened by the rowdy release of the local inn.

The easiest comparison is Dickens, but I never took to his unwieldy, lumbering London. The Necropolis Railway manages to rattle through the capital in 231 pages but we are never jolted from the alternate world.

Martin's characterisations are equally deft. Jim, narrating throughout, evolves convincingly from the Railway Magazine-reading puritan to disillusioned pub-goer, whilst never losing his essential goodness. Without exception, the supporting cast are perfectly drawn.

Unlike his first two books, this is not a comic novel, although it does include comic moments to counterbalance the sense of foreboding. It is a very different work. Martin has moved on to a higher literary plane entirely.

His achievement deserves to be enjoyed by the greatest possible number of readers. The only disappointment is that the journey must end. As soon as I reached the termination of The Necropolis Railway, I yearned to jump aboard for a return trip.

The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin is published by Faber and Faber, price £10.99. He is reading from the novel at Borders, Davygate, York, at 7pm tonight

Updated: 09:49 Wednesday, August 28, 2002