He played with toy trains when he was aged six and knew then that he wanted to run real trains when he grew up. That about sums up the career of Adrian Shooter, chief executive of Chiltern Railways, a company which, according to former managing director of British Rail network Southeast John Nelson, writing the foreword of a new book about the successful line, encompasses ‘all that is good about privatisation.’ The book, The Chiltern Railways Story, due to be published by the History Press later this month at £17.99, was written by Banbury resident Hugh Jones, a retired vice-principal of a college of further education and former chairman of the Cherwell Rail Users’ Group.

It tracks the bumpy ride Chiltern has had since — and even before — its privatisation in 1996, to arrive at its present status as the most profitable of all the rail companies spawned out of the former British Railways.

Mr Jones said: “I studiously avoided commenting on whether privatisation as a government policy was a good or bad thing, but for Chiltern it certainly presented the opportunity to provide the best railway company in the country.”

Contributing to the book, Adrian Shooter writes: “Since my childhood, I have always thought it would be a rather nice idea to run a railway. I didn’t quite see how it was going to happen since the railways were nationalised at the time which, by the way, I always thought was a big mistake.”

But happen it did. And he saw his opportunity to realise his dream while still working at British Railways. This book, subtitled The railway that came back from the dead, describes how the nuts and bolts were put together to form a team — ‘Shooter’s little army’ — to first win the franchise against bids from much larger competitors. Next, to woo passengers in the face of unexpected events, such as the collapse of the tunnel at Gerrards Cross in 2005, luckily when no train was inside.

“That event”, said Mr Jones, “was the low point in the company’s history. The point at which I start the book, when the only way was up.

“The high point, of course, was learning the franchise had been granted to the management team running the line in the first place.”

And what near-death experience did the line, which now runs along the M40 corridor from Marylebone to Birmingham via Banbury, undergo to come back from the dead?

Mr Jones said: “British Railways wanted to close it down and turn the lovely Marylebone Station into a bus station. Amazingly, when in Europe and in Japan they were investing in super high-speed networks, Mrs Thatcher here was advocating railway closures.”

He added that, by luck, Richard Fearn, now working for Irish Railways, managed to wrest £85m from the Government for a total modernisation plan, which in turn helped Mr Shooter spot an opportunity to pick a cherry when franchises eventually came up for grabs.

While conducting the £85m upgrade of the line in the 1980s, Mr Fearn thought of the workmen who had built the railway some 100 years before, and commissioned a statue, called the Unknown Navvy, to stand at Gerrards Cross Station.

It was paid for by donors, including musician Phil Collins and the members of Genesis, and it was intended as a memento of the people who worked on the line in the 19th and 20th centuries.

Mr Shooter’s approach to making a railway pay while working out of such a classic piece of Victorian architecture as Marylebone Railway Station, was based on the approach to travel taken by an American airline: Southwest Airlines.

He had noticed it was the only airline to consistently turn in profits, and did so by keeping things simple: no first class carriages for instance, fast turn-around times to keep cost down and, above all, frequent and reliable services.

He also managed to negotiate a 20-year franchise in exchange for a promise to invest millions in new trains, car parks, stations and services — bringing old lines back to life.

This has enabled the company to extend the line to Kidderminster and will soon lead to a new service to Oxford. And even though Chiltern Railways is now owned by the giant German state-owned Deutsche Bahn, Mr Jones said the operating team is still allowed a great deal of autonomy within the bigger structure.

But why did he start the book with the near disaster at the Gerrards Cross Tunnel?

He said: “It was such a dramatic moment, and it resulted in years of litigation with Tesco, which had a superstore above the line”.

In the book he describes how train driver Dan Gregory saw the tunnel collapse shortly before he was due to enter it on June 7, 2005. And a good deal of the rest of the book deals with how the management team dealt with the physical and financial repercussions of that event — which illustrates just how unpredictable running a railway can be, even when you have one of the best teams in the country on board.

It finishes with contributions from various people involved with the railway’s success from the earliest days, including, of course, a chapter from Adrian Shooter.

In it, he describes his work as a British Railways carriage and wagon inspector.

He writes: “I discovered in those days that Chiltern was always a piece of forgotten railway. It had been the Great Central Railway, but had then been taken over by the London and North Eastern Railway (LNER). However the LNER didn’t really want it, as it had more important railways running out of King’s Cross and Liverpool Street.

“It then became Western region, but the Western region didn’t really want it because it went to Paddington. When I took it over it had become London Midland Region ,but London Midland Region then, as now, was always focused on the West Coast Main Line, and when they had a few spare minutes they would think about the Midland Main Line out of St Pancras.

“That left absolutely nothing for Marylebone .”

He adds: “I saw the opportunity to take a railway away from the sterile yoke of a nationalised industry.”

So now he runs a real railway as he always wanted to do. He also has his own private railway on which to run his precious Darjeeling Himalayan steam locomotive.