A Book of Railway Journeys

by Ludovic Kennedy

  When the first American steam locomotive went chugging across the plains of Nebraska and Wyoming, the Indians called it The Iron Horse. Others have also thought of it as a living creature, puffing and panting, groaning and sighing, whistling and clanging through the night. Its successor, the diesel, is altogether more discreet, yet still to be thought of as something more than inanimate steel and wood. But are trains masculine or feminine? We give them brave, heroic names like the Flying Scotsman, the Hiawatha, the Yorkshireman, the Empire-Builder—yet there are some, like Fanny Kemble and Stephen Spender, who speak of an engine or even a train as “she”; who find affinity between the womb and the steel cylinder in which they are carried. Perhaps it is this that makes a train crash seem more unexpected and unnatural than a car or air crash; as if a bomb had flattened the family home.

  The literature of train travel is huge, and in making selections for this anthology I have followed no other criterion than what has informed, amused, delighted, or amazed me; nothing has been included because of any belief that it “ought” to be. The reader will note that in the section on English train journeys, most extracts are pre-World War I—indeed, some are pre-Boer and even pre-Crimean War. That is because the best accounts that have come my way have been of that period. Outside fiction, there are no outstanding descriptions of modern British train journeys. On the other hand, there are two outstanding writers in English of modern foreign train journeys: Mr. Peter Fleming in the second quarter of the twentieth century, Mr. Paul Theroux in the third. I make no apologies for including so many extracts from their books: these are, in their different ways, what accounts of rail travel should be.

  I have also included chapters on train travel in the two most powerful countries in the world today, the U.S.A. and the U.S.S.R. The history of the United States is largely the history of its railroads: from the opening of the West during the 1860s, through the Civil War to the boom years of the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries and the coming of what has been called the crack varnish—luxury trains like the Sunset Limited, the Southern Crescent, the Santa Fe Super Chief. These, too, were the days of the millionaires’ ultimate status symbol, the private coach, about whose often eccentric owners Lucius Beebe (himself a former eccentric owner) writes so wittily.

  After the last war, the jet plane and the motorcar almost killed off the American long-distance passenger service; and E. B. White’s lament about the run-down of the trains in Maine was echoed elsewhere. However, since the government-financed Amtrak took over the system in 1971, things have been marginally improving. Eight hundred new coaches have been ordered, and with gasoline less plentiful and increasing in cost, the number of train passengers has been steadily rising. In October 1979, for the BBC, I made a trip from New York to Los Angeles by way of the Broadway Limited, the San Francisco Zephyr, and the Coast Starlight. It was a nice, lazy, rather bumpy journey in which I was taken through some splendid scenery, met some unusual people, ate and drank to my satisfaction, and rarely arrived anywhere on schedule. Between San Francisco and Los Angeles, the Starlight travels roughly the same distance as does the Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh; and takes eleven hours for the trip compared to the Scotsman’s five.

  Train travel in Russia, on the other hand, and particularly on the Trans-Siberian Express, seems to have exerted a powerful pull on the minds of many American and European travellers. The numbers of those who have travelled on the Trans-Siberian and written accounts of it grow year by year. One can see the attractions of journeying by train from Europe to the Pacific, especially when the route takes one through the heart of the most closed society in the world. Yet no account I have read suggests that this eight-day journey, in which the train’s clocks are kept rigidly on Moscow time, is other than a nightmare of prolonged discomfort, wretched food, dubious travelling companions, monotonous scenery, and suspicious officials. By way of corrective I have included accounts of two journeys rather more peculiar to Soviet life—those of Marie Avinov in the thirties, and Alexander Solzhenitsyn in the fifties, both adrift in the Gulag Archipelago.

  Again because the literature on the subject is so great, I have included a section on various train journeys undertaken during the last war. During those five years, trains were used as perhaps never before, certainly never on that scale. They were deployed to carry troops and ammunition to the front, evacuees to safety from the enemy’s bombs, Jews to their deaths in concentration camps, leaders like Churchill and Hitler to conferences on war strategy. Peter Fleming’s hilarious account of how he and his colleagues captured an ammunition train in Greece is, in its way, as gripping as James Leasor’s story of how Franz von Werra became the only German prisoner of war to escape from an Allied train and find his way back to Germany.

  In the fiction section, the biggest problem was what to include and what to omit. Many readers will be sorry not to see particular favourites: Poisson d’Avril, perhaps, from The Further Reminiscences of an Irish R.M.; Axel Munthe’s story of the two coffins; the meeting of Vronsky and Anna; Maugham’s The Hairless Mexican; Alice and the Ticket-Collector; Max Beerbohm’s A. V. Laider. Some I rejected because they were too long, some because they made little sense when taken out of context, some, to be blunt, because they did not have the same appeal for me as for those who recommended them. Among the poetry excerpts I shall no doubt have my knuckles rapped for omitting T. S. Eliot’s Skimbleshanks; but the Cat of the Railway Train has never been for me. What is left is a very small selection from a very large body of literature; but I hope, nonetheless, agreeable.

  When I first floated the idea of the book, several hundred people volunteered suggestions for inclusion. To all of them, whether I have followed their recommendations or not, my grateful thanks; particularly to Mr. Benny Green who sent me a tape full of useful tips, and to Mr. Roy Fuller, a most generous guide to poems on railway travel; also to A. K. Astbury, T. A. Shearer, Margaret M. Sherman, John Skelton, Mary Stewart, and Maurice Stewart. My researcher, Annabel Craig, deserves an especial word of thanks. During most of 1979 she kept me supplied with a steady flow of photostated writings of railway journeys, culled from a variety of books found in a variety of libraries; and so steeped in the subject did she become that in 1980 my publishers called on her to make the initial selection of the book’s admirable illustrations.

  Finally, my thanks to my editors, Philip Ziegler and Hilary Davies in London and James Wade and Charles McCurdy in New York, from whose skills and suggestions the book has greatly profited.

  When I was asked to give three short talks about what the BBC called “my experiences,” I said that I would talk about railway trains. I find it difficult, at this moment, to understand why I said this. I suppose I thought that most people had in their hearts the same sort of soft spot for trains that they have for dogs and sailing ships and policemen, and would therefore listen with indulgence to even the most trivial anecdotes about them. But is there anything in this theory? It remains to be seen.

  PETER FLEMING

  The railroad track is miles away,

  And the day is loud with voices speaking,

  Yet there isn’t a train goes by all day

  But I hear its whistle shrieking.

  All night there isn’t a train goes by,

  Though the night is still for sleep and dreaming,

  But I see its cinders red on the sky,

  And hear its engine steaming.

  My heart is warm with the friends I make,

  And better friends I’ll not be knowing,

  Yet there isn’t a train I wouldn’t take,

  No matter where it’s going.

  EDNA ST. VINCENT MILLAY, Travel

  Almost anything is possible in a train.

  PAUL THEROUX

  *1 William Stafford, Vacation.

  BRITAIN

  The First Railway Journey

  The Stockton and Darlington scheme had three times to present itself before it received the sanction of Parliament. The app
lication of 1818 was defeated by the Duke of Cleveland, because the line threatened to interfere with one of his fox-covers. Certain road trustees, also, spread the report abroad that the mortgagees of the tolls would suffer; and to meet this objection, Edward Pease had to disarm opposition by a public notice that the company’s solicitors were ready to purchase these securities at the price originally paid for them.

  In 1821, however, the Bill passed; and on Tuesday, the 27th of September, 1825, the line was opened. “The scene on the morning of that day,” said Mr. Pease, fifty years afterwards, “sets description at defiance.” Many who were to take part in the event “did not the night before sleep a wink, and soon after midnight were astir. The universal cheers, the happy faces of many, the vacant stare of astonishment of others, and the alarm depicted on the countenances of some, gave variety to the picture.” At the appointed hour the procession went forward. The train moved off at the rate of from ten to twelve miles an hour, with a weight of eighty tons, with one engine—“No. 1”—driven by George Stephenson himself; after it six wagons, loaded with coals and flour; then a covered coach, containing directors and proprietors; next twenty-one coal wagons, fitted up for passengers, with which they were crammed; and lastly, six more wagons loaded with coals.

  “Off started the procession, with the horseman at its head. A great concourse of people stood along the line. Many of them tried to accompany it by running, and some gentlemen on horseback galloped across the fields to keep up with the engine. The railway descending with a gentle incline towards Darlington, the rate of speed was consequently variable. At a favourable part of the road, Stephenson determined to try the speed of the engine, and he called upon the horseman with the flag to get out of the way,” and Stephenson put on the speed to twelve miles, and then to fifteen miles an hour, and the runners on foot, the gentlemen on horseback, and the horseman with the flag, were soon left far behind. “When the train reached Darlington, it was found that four hundred and fifty passengers occupied the wagons, and that the load of men, coals, and merchandise amounted to about ninety tons.”

  ANON

  THE NINETEENTH CENTURY

  Stockton to Darlington, 1825:

  Stephenson on the sparkling iron road—

  Chimney-hatted and frock-coated—drives

  His locomotive, while the Lydian mode

  Of Opus 132 may actually be

  In the course of making. At twelve miles an hour

  The century rushes to futurity,

  Where art will be mankind-destroying power.

  How can the music fail to bear the dates

  And quirks of fashion time must prove

  Grotesque? Especially as it celebrates

  Avuncular and bust fraternal love.

  Yet somehow an anachronistic god

  Has lasted beyond his final period.

  ROY FULLER

  Those in favour...

  The increasing powers of Steam which like you I look on “half proud half sad half angry and half pleased” in doing so much for the commercial world promise something also for the sociable, and like Prince Houssein’s tapestry will I think one day waft friends together in the course of a few hours and for aught we may be able to [tell] bring Hampstead and Abbotsford within the distance of “will you dine with us quietly tomorrow.”

  SIR WALTER SCOTT

  I rejoice to see it, and to think that feudality is gone for ever: it is so great a blessing to think that any one evil is really extinct.

  DR. ARNOLD

  And those against...

  I see no reason to suppose that these machines will ever force themselves into general use.

  DUKE OF WELLINGTON

  Nothing is more distasteful to me than to hear the echo of our hills reverberating with the noise of hissing railroad engines, running through the heart of our hunting country, and destroying the noble sport which I have been accustomed to from my childhood.

  MR. BERKELEY, M.P.

  Your middle-class man thinks it is the highest pitch of development and civilisation when his letters are carried twelve times a day from Islington to Camberwell, and from Camberwell to Islington, and if railway-trains run to and fro between them every quarter of an hour. He thinks it nothing that the trains only carry him from an illiberal, dismal life at Islington to an illiberal, dismal life at Camberwell; and the letters only tell him that such is the life there.

  MATTHEW ARNOLD

  from S. LEGG (ed.),

  The Railway Book (1952)

  Liverpool to Manchester, 1830

  The opening of the line took place on the 15th of September, 1830, when the Duke of Wellington, Prime Minister, Mr. Peel, Home Secretary, Mr. Huskisson, and a number of other distinguished persons, were to pass in the first train with the directors. A gay cortège of thirty-three carriages, accompanied by bands of music, started from Liverpool, amidst the acclamations of a countless multitude of observers, and with all the splendour of an ancient pageant. But soon the enjoyment of the scene was marred. While the engines were stopping to take in water at Parkside, Mr. Huskisson, with some other gentlemen, strolled along the line. As they were returning to their seats, another train of carriages came up. All ran for shelter; but, unhappily, Mr. Huskisson hurried to the side of the train, and, opening the door, attempted to enter; the door swung back at the moment—he fell to the ground, and was in an instant overthrown and crushed beneath the wheels of the advancing carriage. His thigh was fractured and mangled, and his own first expression, “I have met my death,” proved too true, for he died that evening in the neighbouring parsonage of Eccles. The train passed on to Manchester without further accident; but the contemplated festivities were forgotten amidst the gloom occasioned by this tragedy.

  ANON

  Manchester to Liverpool, 1835

  6 found all of us in our omnibus on our way to the much talked of railhead. On reaching this office, as soon as you have paid your fare, you are commanded to walk upstairs to the coach rooms—this movement is just like going up the stairs of Queens Street Chapel.

  Reaching the top, there you behold a range of coaches of large dimension fastened close to each other. Some are closed like our Leeds coach, and others are open on the sides—in order to have a view of the country, as I thought, and of their manner of proceeding. We all took our place in an open one, which resembles an omnibus. Before starting, I took a survey of all around, first placing my little ones safe. The steam carriage which propels each train is something like a distilling wagon and have each a name of no inviting character, for instance, Fury, Victory, Rapid, Vulcan, Tiger and so on.

  A few minutes after 7 we started, not very fast at first, but, in less than five minutes, off we went like a shot from a gun. No sooner did we come to a field than it was a mile behind us, but this was nothing in comparison with meeting a long train of carriages from Liverpool. I was never so frightened in my life than at this moment; I shrank back completely horrified in my seat; I do not think the train was more than 2 seconds in passing, yet it was as long as Holywell Hill. We were then going at a full 34 miles an hour, consequently they passed us at double that time.

  It is impossible to form any idea of the rapidity of moving. Several other trains passed us, but as I was aware of their approach they no longer alarmed me as at first. The first 17 miles we went in 32 minutes. I am much disappointed in the view of the country, the railway being cut through so many hills you have frequently for miles only clay mounds on each side of you—consequently no splendid prospect can attract your attention. Even when the railway is on a bridge or at an elevation above the usual track of land, you are not charmed by that diversity of prospect which is to be met with in ordinary stage coach travelling. That has a decided superiority over this new work of man.

  I was an hour and a quarter going the 33 miles, the latter part of the journey being performed at the slow speed of 20 miles an hour. Previous to entering Liverpool, you go through a dark, black, ugly, vile abominable tunnel of 300 yards long,
which has all the horrors of banishment from life—such a hole as I never wish to go through again, unless my time is as precious as it was the other day.

  Charles Young to his sister Jane, written from Castletown, Isle of Man, 6th August, 1835.

  FROM A RAILWAY CARRIAGE

  Faster than fairies, faster than witches,

  Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;

  And charging along like troops in a battle,

  All through the meadows the houses and cattle;

  And all of the sights of the hill and the plain

  Fly as thick as driving rain;

  And ever again, in the wink of an eye,

  Painted stations whistle by.

  Here is a child who clambers and scrambles,

  All by himself and gathering brambles;

  Here is a tramp who stands and gazes;

  And here is the green for stringing the daisies!

  Here is a cart run away in the road

  Lumping along with man and load;

  And here is a mill, and there is a river;

  Each a glimpse and gone for ever!

  ROBERT LOUIS STEVENSON

  Lackadaisical attitude of early passengers

  Neither the companies’ servants nor the public had yet learned to treat railway trains with the necessary caution. Engine-drivers fancied that a collision between two engines was much the same thing as the inter-locking of the wheels of two rival stage-coaches. Passengers tried to jump on and off trains moving at full speed with absolute recklessness. Again and again is it recorded, “injured, jumped out after his hat”; “fell off, riding on the side of a wagon”; “skull broken, riding on the top of the carriage, came in collision with a bridge”; “guard’s head struck against a bridge, attempting to remove a passenger who had improperly seated himself outside”; “fell out of a third-class carriage while pushing and jostling with a friend.” “Of the serious accidents reported to the Board of Trade,” writes one authority, “twenty-two happened to persons who jumped off when the carriages were going at speed, generally after their hats, and five persons were run over when lying either drunk or asleep upon the line.”