On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  CONTENTS

  Cover

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Title Page

  Introduction: On the Slow Train

  1: The 09.05 to St Ives – the line they couldn’t close

  2: The 15.03 from Carlisle to the roof of England

  3: The 10.53 from Ryde – the Tube train that went to the seaside

  4: The 10.30 from Wrexham Central – up the line to London’s last terminus

  5: The 08.38 to Sellafield – a journey along the line that time forgot

  6: The 11.24 from Victoria – a day excursion to Nostalgia Central

  7: The 08.29 to Richmond – London’s country branch line

  8: The 21.15 from Euston – the ‘Deerstalker Express’ to the remotest station in Britain

  9: The 14.05 from Shrewsbury – slow train into the ‘unpronounceable’ heart of Wales

  10: The 08.41 to Casterbridge, via Tess of the D’Urbervilles

  11: The 08.04 from Norwich – ‘secret’ lines to Liverpool Street, via Britain’s smallest main line station

  12: The 07.06 from Formby – the stations that came back from the dead

  Further reading

  Acknowledgements

  List of Illustrations

  Picture Section

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Renowned railway writer Michael Williams takes us on twelve of today’s most captivating and historic British railway journeys – harking back to an era when travel meant more than hurrying from one place to the next in crowded carriages, before small country stations with their milk churns, porters and slumbering cats on seats were replaced by the modern world of security announcements, ‘leaves on the line’ and Burger King.

  On the Slow Train reconnects with the long-missed need to lift our heads from the daily grind and reflect that there are still places in Britain where we can stop and stare. In its pages you will find many things: a love of railways, a love of history, a love of nostalgia, a love of the exuberance of people, and a love of life.

  About the Author

  Michael Williams writes widely on railways for many publications, including the Daily Mail, Independent, Independent on Sunday, New Statesman, Oldie and the railway specialist press. He is a Fleet Street journalist, having held many senior positions, including Deputy Editor of the Independent on Sunday, Executive Editor of the Independent and Head of News at the Sunday Times. He is currently Senior Lecturer in the School of Journalism, Media and Communication at the University of Central Lancashire. He commutes regularly by train on the 440-mile return journey between his home in London’s Camden Town and his office at Preston in Lancashire.

  INTRODUCTION

  ON THE SLOW TRAIN

  THERE ARE FEW things more evocative of the British landscape than the country branch line. A little engine chuffs along a single track, a few wisps of steam drifting across the fields, the sun glinting off its copper-capped chimney. There might be a couple of elderly carriages and perhaps a milk tank or a cattle truck in tow. Nobody much comes or goes on the immaculately tended platforms. Somehow here it always seems to be summer.

  At least, that’s how we like to imagine it. Of course, Britain’s railways haven’t been like this since Dr Richard Beeching, one of the great bogeymen of modern times, came along with his axe in 1963 and shut down more than 4,000 miles of track. Back then, the comedy songwriting duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann caught the mood of the nation in their song ‘Slow Train’, mourning the closure of ‘all those marvellous old local railway stations with their wonderful evocative names all due to be axed and done away with one by one’. ‘No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat / At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street,’ they sang. ‘No one departs and no one arrives / From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives. / They’ve all passed out of our lives . . .’

  Flanders and Swann’s song was an elegy for the passing of a less hurried way of life. But fortunately, nearly half a century on from the publication of Beeching’s The Reshaping of British Railways, we have learnt to love and cherish our local railways again. Slow trains on local lines offer an unrivalled way to travel around Britain in a hurried age – and they have always been more than just a way of getting from A to B. As the historian David St John Thomas observed, the local railway has always ‘provided more than transport. It was always part of the district it served, with its own natural history, its own legends and folklore, a staff who were at the heart of village affairs, its stations and adjoining pubs – places for exchange of gossip, news and advice.

  Luckily for us, many secondary lines didn’t die at the hands of Beeching and are still here to offer the modern traveller some of the greatest journeys in Britain – and sometimes the world. There is no longer any talk of shutting Dreamingham-on-the-Marsh or Sleepytown-in-the-Wold. On the contrary, a report from the main train operating companies in 2009 urged the reopening of fourteen branch lines that had been closed by Beeching. Meanwhile passenger journeys in Britain are up by half since privatisation, and while the little old steam engines and wizened porters may be gone, many of the lines and stations that survived the cull have prospered as never before.

  Even though we hear a lot about high speed rail lines expanding all over the world, the pleasures and delights of relaxed rail travel have never been more appreciated. In almost every way, the slow train journey is more pleasurable than a fast one. Think of Edward Thomas’s poem ‘Adlestrop’, in which his express train stopped ‘unwontedly’ one June afternoon at an Oxfordshire country station. What he saw and heard was nothing special: the hiss of steam, an empty platform, a man clearing his throat. Yet suddenly a blackbird sang, summoning up for Thomas a profound sense of the timelessness of the English countryside. Or perhaps the most evocative slow train journey of all, Philip Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’, written on the afternoon train from Hull: ‘Not till about / One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday / Did my three-quarters empty train pull out / All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense / Of being in a hurry gone . . .’

  Both poets were foreshadowing the now-fashionable concept of ‘slow’, which has gained momentum since the establishment of the Slow Food movement in Italy in the 1990s. Now there is even a ‘Manifesto for Slow Travel’, which declares that it is ‘about deceleration rather than speed. The journey becomes a moment to relax, rather than a stressful interlude imposed between home and destination. Slow travel re-engineers time, transforming it into a commodity of abundance rather than scarcity.’

  The great railway journeys of Britain are often the slowest – a single railcar dawdling along a Cornish branch line, a stopping train making its leisurely way through the remote heart of Wales, a vintage steam engine at the head of a Pullman train on a secondary line, its passengers enjoying a proper meal in the style of the traditional dining cars of old. How often have we peered from a local train trundling over city rooftops into back gardens and windows, catching momentary and mysterious flashes of other people’s lives?

  This is not a book for rivet counters or number spotters. Nor does it claim to be a history of the railways or a conventional tourist guide, although every one of the journeys can be precisely followed just as I travelled on them – simply by buying a ticket on a regular service. Rather, the book attempts to distil the flavour of Britain as glimpsed from the windows of slow trains and especially through the voices of the people in the communities they serve. Here are timeless journeys through spectacular mountains and pretty seaside villages, through gritty industrial landscapes and gently rolling hills, through city and suburbs. I have chosen them because each is special in its own right.

  Since publication of the first edition of this
book, the philosophy of slow travel was given an unlikely boost by the eruption of an Icelandic volcano in spring 2010. The ensuing ash cloud grounded flights across Europe, arousing fury and frustration among air passengers. But there were joys discovered by other travellers, who returned home with tales of scenic rail journeys on lines they never knew existed. As the essayist A. P. Herbert once observed ‘Slow travel by train is almost the only restful experience that is left to us.’ This new edition brings my journeys up to date, and includes changes suggested by readers, for which I am hugely grateful.

  Settle back into the cushions, either of the train or your armchair, and enjoy the ride.

  CHAPTER ONE

  THE 09.05 TO ST IVES – THE LINE THEY COULDN’T CLOSE

  St Erth to Lelant, Carbis Bay and St Ives

  Everybody has dreamt of a land where the sun always shines and has never proved harmful, where it is always warm, but never enervating, where we may bathe in the winter and take active exercise in the summer. We had to have a name for this Elysium, so we called it the Cornish Riviera

  THIS MORNING I am officially standing in Paradise. Well, actually I’m on the platform of St Erth station in Cornwall, the remotest junction in the most westerly part of England, with the Great Western Railway’s famous 1934 guidebook The Cornish Riviera in my pocket, from which this quote is taken. It’s a bit chilly even on a July morning in this Elysium, but we must believe what we are told because the book is published with the imprimatur of ‘Sir James Milne, General Manager, Paddington Station, London’. As every schoolchild with any knowledge of the railway system knows, GWR stands for God’s Wonderful Railway.

  But there is another special reason for being here today. Michael Flanders and Donald Swann proved remarkably prophetic in their song ‘Slow Train’. Ultimately, most of the little stations and lines they sang about closed down, but there was a major exception – the branch from this unspoilt little Victorian station to St Ives, seven miles from here along the Hayle estuary. ‘From Selby to Goole,’ they sang, ‘from St Erth to St Ives. / They’ve all passed out of our lives.’ But they didn’t all disappear, as it turns out. The little cerise-coloured Class 150 diesel railcar humming in the bay platform is proof of how much has changed in nearly half a century since Beeching, and just how wrong the former BR chairman got it. Not only has it outlived the good chairman, it is one of the few rural branch lines in the UK to make money.

  These days, with St Ives transformed from a backward pilchard-fishing village to a cool international resort, with its own branch of the Tate Gallery, the railway has resumed the same central place in the town’s life as it had when it was built in 1877. If only Flanders and Swann could have lived to see it. Passenger numbers have more than doubled in less than ten years. And not only that; we are in for a visual treat. The St Ives Bay line may be only four and a quarter miles long, but many regard it as the most scenic short railway in Europe.

  But first a flapjack and coffee served by the homely lady in the privately run buffet by St Erth’s little bay platform. A notice on the wall proclaims it to be No. 4 in the Guardian’s list of Britain’s top ten railway station cafes. Pelargoniums and petunias tumble from hanging baskets outside and there are lupins and zinnias in the platform tubs. At one time I might have arrived here aboard the most famous train in the land: the Cornish Riviera Express. Leaving Paddington sharp at 10.30 in the morning behind a burnished King Class locomotive, all shining brass, copper and Brunswick green, the Cornish Riviera was the one train above all that inspired young boys to become railway enthusiasts – probably first encountering it on a summer Saturday, trailing tin buckets and spades along the platform, heading for sunny destinations such as St Ives, Falmouth, Newquay and Weymouth. Until the end of steam in the 1960s, I might not even have needed to get off at St Erth to change for St Ives. The ‘Limited’, as it was known, was so busy it ran in several portions, including one direct to St Ives. The Great Western’s managers reserved the company’s very best Dreadnought coaches for the train, with the biggest windows, the widest aisles and the plumpest cushions the company possessed. I have a faded 1950s picture of the Paddington train, ten coaches long, being huffed and puffed along the branch by three little Prairie Tanks – one at the front and two pushing at the back. Boys in their best blazers and girls in freshly ironed Ladybird dresses fill the carriages, waiting to jump straight onto the beach, which sits alongside St Ives station.

  These days, rail travel is not quite so commodious. The current operator of the line, First Great Western, has retained a decent enough respect for its heritage to keep the Cornish Riviera title, along with the names of the other great Cornish trains of the past – the Royal Duchy and the Golden Hind. But these trains are just normal services – bog-standard high speed trains indistinguishable from any other. But there remains one service that can match up to the glamour of the old Great Western in its heyday. I have arrived at St Erth this morning aboard the Night Riviera, the last remaining sleeping-car train running entirely within England. Like the St Ives branch, this too nearly died, when withdrawal was proposed in 2005. But it was saved when passengers organised an 8,000-name protest petition. It may not have had one of C B Collett’s famous Kings or Castles on the front, but as I set off on my journey from Paddington to St Erth last night I couldn’t deny a quiet thrill (not often found on the British main line these days) when I saw a powerful locomotive backing down onto the train – a rare thing on a passenger service nowadays. This was the Class 57 diesel Tintagel Castle, burnished up in the green livery of the old Great Western. Sentiment dies hard at Paddington, even in the modern corporate world. I got chatting with the driver, who told me that the forty-year-old Tintagel Castle had been built only a decade or so after the last steam Castles had emerged from the Swindon works – and so the provenance of locomotives named after castles on this line has been almost unbroken since the first ones were built in 1923. Perhaps the only difference is that the elderly diesels used on the Night Riviera these days – unlike the products of Swindon in the steam age – are prone to breaking down. But last night the journey on the 23.45 from Paddington was faultless, and I slept soundly.

  My connection to St Ives is waiting cosily tucked into the bay platforms, a little lower than the main line, as if in deference to the grown-up expresses that race by, though in reality this is to accommodate the gradient of the branch line as it falls away northwards towards the Hayle estuary. Could there be a more perfect little station? Virtually unchanged since it was built in 1852, with granite buildings, wooden canopies and semaphore signals (authentically ‘lower quadrant’ in the GWR style), it looks for all the world as though it has been transplanted from a model railway exhibition. With half an hour to go till departure, I buy the local morning paper, the Western Morning News, whose headline reads, ‘Future bright for delightful railway lines’. Although the future is less bright, I think, for newspapers like this one, who are undergoing their own Beeching axe all over the country as declining circulations put the parish pump out of business and the Internet takes over. Who would have bet, back in 1963, that the St Ives line would prosper, yet newspapers, like this once-mighty daily paper of Devon and Cornwall would face oblivion?

  ‘There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train like this one from St Erth to St Ives,’ wrote Paul Theroux in his 1983 book The Kingdom by the Sea. ‘You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.’ My Class 150 unit is in authentic branch line tradition, using hand-me-down vehicles that have seen better times elsewhere. It wears the livery of Arriva Trains Wales and is well off its home territory, but is comfortable enough and the windows are clean. The signal clatters, and we are off down the branch, slowing to pick up the ‘staff’ from the signalman. Funny how the old terms persist – the branch is operated on what is still known as a ‘one engine in steam’ basis, which means that so long as our driver has the old-fashioned baton, no other trains can gain access to the line.

  A f
amily of shelducks and a couple of tiny egrets flap away as the train pootles along the edge of the salt flats. But the rural spell is shattered at the next station, Lelant Saltings, when literally hundreds of people push their way aboard. ‘Have you ever seen the state of the roads in St Ives?’ the conductor explains. ‘There are buses and vans scraping each other’s mirrors off and running over the toes of the tourists. It’s gridlock hell. So a lot of people head for the park-and-ride up here.’ And off he goes, his ticket machine whirring, selling four-pound fares to people who probably don’t travel on trains from one year to the next.

  But I have to interrupt him for the request stop at Lelant – an original little wooden wayside station, its chocolate-and-cream Great Western Railway-style paintwork reflected in the clear tidal waters of the Hayle, which laps at the edge of the tracks. The building was long ago sold off as a private residence, and its owner, a large red-headed man called Peter Jeggo, is sitting in the garden watching the birds across the bay. This is one of Britain’s greatest ports of call for migrating flocks, where dunlins, sander-lings, ring-tailed plovers and bar-tailed godwits drop in to take their supper. Jeggo, now retired from his job in London as a supermarket operations manager, sells Cornish cream teas and offers the benefit of his knowledge of the history of the line to anyone who cares to listen.

  ‘Look at this.’ He takes me indoors to show me the original plans for the station, framed on the wall. ‘These date from the year before the line was built in 1877. There’s a first-class ladies waiting room, a second-and third-class one and a general waiting room. Can you imagine? Three separate waiting rooms in a tiny station in the middle of nowhere?’

  The building of the line was a grand gesture by a consortium of the Great Western, Bristol and Exeter and West Cornwall railways, who saw in the failed mines and uncertain fisheries of St Ives little prospect of success but were persuaded in the vague hope the town might become a tourist resort. The directors of the railway put on a brave show. On the morning of 24 March 1877 the directors’ train, consisting of a saloon and six composite carriages drawn by the locomotive Elephant, left Penzance station to make the inaugural journey to St Ives. According to the Cornwall Telegraph, bonfires were lit, tar barrels were set ablaze along the coast and a national holiday was declared. But not everyone in Lelant was happy, particularly about the behaviour of the navvies who built the line. The newspaper reported that there was ‘drunkenness, to a lamentable extent. Last Sunday, from about half past two in the afternoon till late at night, drunken men were rambling about the roads much to the disgust of the decent inhabitants.’ To make matters worse, a number of skulls were found along the course of the line, with jawbones full of teeth which the navvies extracted to keep as talismans against getting the toothache themselves.