Lucky old Ryde. It is one of the smallest towns in Britain to have three stations of its own, and St John’s Road is the nerve centre of the railway – the Crewe, the Doncaster and the Swindon of the island, rolled into one. Literally, since almost all Britain’s great Victorian railway works of the past have been closed or sold off, and Jess Harper and his engineering team at Ryde – the works building still bearing the insignia of the old Southern Railway – are the last on the national network still maintaining their own rolling stock. And they reckon they know more about old Tube trains than even the people at London Underground; after all, they have been keeping them going for forty-five years.
Back in 1963, when Beeching proposed closure of the entire Isle of Wight network except for the section between the Esplanade and the ferry terminal at the end of Ryde pier, he was mainly influenced by the fact that the rolling stock on the island was ancient and would have to be replaced. The carriages dated from before the First World War, cast-offs from the London, Brighton and South Coast and London, Chatham and Dover railways. The little Victorian O2 Class 0-4-4 tanks were already hand-me-downs from Waterloo suburban services when they were transferred from the mainland by the Southern Railway in 1922. Although the little engines ran what in 1966 was the most intensive single-track service in Britain, hauling holiday trains up to ten coaches long, they were literally worn out, with cracked frames and wonky bogies, and the pumps that operated the Westinghouse brakes had to be encased in metal sheets to stop them spitting scalding water on unwary passengers. The Isle of Wight lines might have been a paradise for transport enthusiasts, who flocked there from all over the country, but there was a simple answer for Beeching as to what to do with all these geriatric trains – eliminate them.
But Beeching didn’t get his way entirely, and it was announced in 1964 that the busiest part of the line, from Ryde to Shanklin, was to be saved. Miraculously, the old Southern Region decided to electrify it and bought a job lot of redundant London Tube stock from the 1920s at a cost of between £120 and £200 a carriage. These elderly trains, of a design which ran over the Piccadilly, Central and Baker-loo Lines and ended their London lives on the old Northern City Line from Moorgate to Finsbury Park, were not much younger than the trains they were replacing, and it is instructive that as the first cars were being sent to the Isle of Wight one of their sister coaches went on display at the Science Museum in London. These early Tubes have now gone to the scrapyard, being replaced by ‘young things’ from 1938, which have operated the Ryde line since.
Ryde St John’s Road is a cheery place where many of the old Victorian buildings survive and the cast-iron spandrels supporting the canopies bear the monogram of the original Isle of Wight Railway, opened in 1864. There is a handsome Victorian signal box, which controls the whole line, festooned with tubs of flowers. On the up platform is one of the most prolific displays of colour-coordinated flowers I have ever seen on a railway station – I have to touch the giant red lilies, begonias and busy lizzies to make sure they are not made of plastic. The displays are done by local disabled people, Tony Dickinson, the station manager, tells me. Tony, a slick young man with a neat white shirt and tie, with a South West Trains badge on a clip, controls all the stations on the lines, and his office is a buzzy place shared with drivers and conductors drinking from steaming mugs of tea. ‘We’ve had a good year,’ he tells me. ‘A total of 1.3 million passengers – I’m very pleased.’ Not surprising, since this means that nearly half the 2.7 million passengers who travel to the Isle of Wight each year get aboard one of his Tube trains. Not exactly Piccadilly Circus, but not bad for a small island off the Hampshire coast. ‘And we’re operating sixty-seven trains a day,’ he tells me. I am too polite to remind him that recent economies mean the service runs to an odd timetable, with alternating intervals of twenty and forty minutes between trains. Not exactly convenient for most people.
All traces of the engine sheds, which were once outside his office and in the 1960s attracted droves of young boys who preferred the thrill of trainspotting to a boring afternoon on the beach with their parents, have gone. However such is the measure of affection still held for the little locos running at the end of steam that their handsome brass nameplates (all commemorating island towns and villages) can fetch up to £15,000 at auctions of railwayana.
But time to head off on the next train south to the island’s newest station, Smallbrook Junction, one of a tiny number of stations in British railway history never to have had any external access. This is where the lines to Newport, the island’s capital, and Cowes once diverged, until Beeching got his hands on them. A signal box once stood here and the signalman doled out tokens allowing track access to the respective drivers as they raced off with their trains full of holidaymakers down the lines to Ventnor (then the terminus of the Shanklin line) and to Cowes. In the 1960s it was the busiest mechanical junction box in southern England. But the Cowes line was too good to lose and a bunch of preservationists saved part of it to become what is now the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. In an astonishing act of generosity, the old British Rail management built Smallbrook Junction station in 1991 to allow passengers to change from the Tube trains on the Shanklin line.
But renewals since have been rare – and the platform and signal box at Brading, the next station down the line, are now weed-grown and derelict, with the boarded-up station setting the tone for the rest of the line. At Sandown, the loveliest resort on the island with wide sandy beaches, the station cafe is derelict, with dust-covered tables visible through a broken window, although the newspaper kiosk is still open, bearing its former WH Smith sign, proclaiming in faded paint, NEWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES POSTED ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY. A notice on the toilets announces that they close each day at 12.25 p.m. – a time at which bladders presumably cease to function and which explains why, at the Shanklin terminus, a man is hosing down the subway with a watering can of disinfectant. Wasn’t like this once. I have a black and white photograph of Shanklin from 1963, spruce and smart, with hundreds of folk in their holiday best making their way to the taxi rank for their seafront hotels. There is not a single taxi here today and the walk down to the beach is a long one, although some of the best sands in the south of England make it worth the effort.
Until 1966 the trains went on from here to Ventnor, through a 1,312-yard tunnel under St Boniface Down to a spectacular station set in a chalk cutting. But the tunnel, which is now used by the local water authority, would be far too expensive to reopen. It is tempting to walk the rest of the course of the line over the down, but I must return to Ryde because I have an appointment with a monk. Not to confess uncharitable thoughts about the rather run-down state of the railway, for whose continued existence we must be grateful, but because I am to stay tonight with a community of Benedictine monks at the Grade I-listed Quarr Abbey near Fishbourne.
I, like many other travellers to the Isle of Wight, have long held eternally sunny images of the island imprinted on my mind after being taken on holiday there by my parents as a child, and one of these was of Quarr, its pink bricks glowing in a kind of perpetual sunset. Would it still be there? I sent an email, not expecting a reply, but within a day a message had pinged back – from Father Nicholas Spencer, the guestmaster, who told me how interested he was in the Isle of Wight railways and that I could come and stay the night at the abbey if I liked. There’s long been a ‘general kinship between the religious life and the railway scene’, as Canon Roger Lloyd put it in his book The Fascination of Railways. Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple is said to have memorised the railway timetable of his day; Canon Victor Whitechurch of Christ Church Oxford was the creator of the vegetarian railway detective Thorpe Hazell, and the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was, of course, the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. Fans of the Ealing comedy The Titfield Thunderbolt will recall that the train was driven by the local vicar.
So, as darkness falls, I am on the No. 9 bus along the Newport Road, asking the driver to put me off at
the abbey. ‘Never been there myself,’ he says. ‘I expect you’ll find some spooky type answering the door. If you need to escape, we’re running until midnight.’ Actually there appears to be nobody around at all when I ring the bell, and after twisting the handles on the various great oak doors of the monastery and the church, I find one that creaks open into a lobby. Here too the doors are locked, but under a heavy metal bolt is a scrawled note telling me to wait. I sit in the deserted quadrangle under the cypresses as the dusk settles for seemingly ages. A pair of red squirrels play around my feet. Might I have to head back to the bus stop after all? Then a slight figure, black habit flapping, comes running out of the church. ‘So sorry to keep you.’ This is the decidedly un-spooky Father Spencer, who has been at a meeting. ‘There are only nine of us,’ he tells me, ‘in a monastery that was designed for 120. I take it you are coming to dinner? Don’t forget that we eat in total silence.’ He shows me into a vast refectory with long polished oak tables in semi-darkness. The monks sit at one end of the room and a table is set for me at the other. ‘But first you must shake hands with the abbot – who is a large red-faced Irishman with silver hair. When you have finished eating, you can get up and leave.’ The food is surprisingly good – a meat and lentil pie with red kidney beans and fragrant apples from the monastery garden – which is reflected in the speed with which the monks eat. There is a rapid scraping of cutlery on plates, and soon everyone is heading for the exit.
Afterwards, Father Nicholas shows me round the vast abbey church of Our Lady of Quarr, built in 1912 by the French monk-architect Dom Paul Bellot, who brought a community of monks from Solesmes in France, driven out by the anti-clericalism of the time. Constructed of Belgian brick by local workmen who had never put up anything bigger than a house, it is like nothing else to be found in Britain. Pevsner calls it ‘brilliant’ and a work of international importance, comparing it with the achievement of the Catalan architect Gaudi. But I notice it is falling apart in places, with cracks in the brickwork over the nave, missing pointing and leaking gutters. ‘It’s hard work for such a few of us to keep it going,’ says Father Nicholas, a blunt but charming man who comes from Millom in Cumbria, and whose father was the manager of Barrow steelworks. ‘I’ve been here twenty-six years and I always wanted to be a monk and I’ve never doubted that I did the right thing. But our community is a small one. The youngest is forty-five and the oldest over ninety. The one thing I pray for above all is that it will be enlarged. We have a few possibilities . . .’ He looks doubtful. And what about the Isle of Wight Steam Railway? ‘I’ve never been on it, although I would like to have done so. You see, I have never had enough money for the fare.’
As well as looking after guests, Father Nicholas is the abbey bee-keeper and runs a bookbindery in the basement. He shows me a magnificent copy of Oscar Wilde’s Ballad of Reading Gaol, ornamented with a gallows with the rope represented in relief in braided leather. Appropriate fare for a community of monks? I don’t know. ‘But do come to compline.’ This is a night service, one of the five acts of worship held in the church every day of the year, starting at 5 a.m. I wonder how the monks find the time to do all the mundane jobs necessary to keep the monastery running. Walking to the darkened church with the moon reflected on the slate roof and listening to the same Gregorian chant that has been sung for more than 1,500 years is a humbling experience. The rule of St Benedict states that every monastery guest should be ‘received as Christ’. I think that the monks haven’t failed in their duty when Father Nicholas waves me off to the bus stop in the morning.
It is ironic that the Southern Vectis Omnibus Company – the monopoly bus service provider on the island – was founded by the Southern Railway back in 1929, as it was instrumental in killing off large parts of the railway in the 1960s. You can see why as I get off the bus at Wootton, the terminus of the preserved Isle of Wight Steam Railway, which once ran all the way from Ryde to Newport and Cowes. The modern two-tone green buses run every nine minutes and carry slogans such as THE SLEEK WAY TO TRAVEL. COOL OR WHAT? ‘Cool’ is a term that could never be applied to the railways of the Isle of Wight and it’s no wonder the Cowes line was seen off by the buses. But enough of the line remains to catch a train back along the five and a half miles to Smallbrook Junction. I buy a ticket from a man in a baggy uniform with a remarkable resemblance to Charles Hawtrey, and in the platform a little former War Department saddle-tank locomotive is fussing around its train – the familiar blink-blonk-hiss of the Westinghouse brake pump gives the impression that it is impatient to leave.
The Isle of Wight Steam Railway is almost unique among heritage lines in that the volunteers who run it got their act together almost immediately after closure and have a vast collection of authentic Victorian rolling stock. ‘Why then the relatively modern steam loco?’ I ask Charles Hawtrey. ‘Well, she’s reliable for a start,’ he tells me. ‘And our star loco, Calbourne, is in the works having her boiler done.’ No. 24 Calbourne was one of the last locos to work on the line before British Rail closed it. He tells me a story about how the volunteers acquired it. ‘The wildlife artist David Shepherd wanted to save a steam loco from the scrapyard, so he went to the office of Ian Allan, the trainspotters’ book publisher, to ask for advice. The publisher told him, “David, if you’ve got £500 to spend, why don’t you buy an 02 tank engine”. And do you know, she’s been running for us twice as long as she ran for BR!’
The train jogs along through a silver birch wood, the leaves just tinged with autumn red. It’s the perfect period-piece slow train straight out of Philip Larkin’s Whitsun Weddings: a warm afternoon, ‘all windows down, all cushions hot’, ambling along with ‘shuffling gouts of steam’. The advertisements under the luggage racks offer Holiday Runabout Tickets for summer 1950 at a modest ten and sixpence, first class for fifteen shillings. Or how about ‘Southern Railway restaurant cars on principal trains. Lunch, two and sixpence, dinner, three and sixpence. Tea and light refreshments at modest prices.’ At the Southern’s Charing Cross Hotel there are ‘gas fires and telephones in every room’. But we’re back to the real world at Havenstreet, the headquarters of the line – once a modest single-track platform with a siding serving a gasworks, now with its gift shop, tearoom and museum, the nerve centre of one of the island’s most popular tourist attractions.
It’s presided over with schoolmasterly precision by Alan Doe, the operations manager, a retired headmaster from Cornwall in charge of nineteen paid staff and 200 volunteers ‘Why are we so special?’ He breaks off to order two tins of Brasso over the phone. ‘It’s because we have original locomotives and original stations, with original carriages running on lines they used to work on. We’re a proper working heritage site.’ Now there’s a gleam in his eye. ‘Let me show you this.’ He leads me across the tracks to a shed away from the public gaze. Inside are two relatively modern but rusty 1940s Ivatt Class 2-6-2 tank locomotives once earmarked by British Railways to work the line when the Victorian tank engines went. It never happened because the Tube trains were drafted in. ‘Some old gents bought these at the end of steam, but they’ve got past the point of restoring them so they’ve given them to us. And soon we’re going to get them running.’ A secret cache of steam engines that haven’t run for nearly half a century? It’s every rail enthusiast’s fantasy and Alan Doe’s equivalent of the back catalogue of his thriving steam railway.
But what future for the electrified Island Line, with its superannuated Tubes? Can it survive in the bean-counting world of the modern railway? Until recently the line received the biggest subsidy per passenger of any in Britain. To get the answer, everyone says, ‘You’ll have to ask Bobby.’ Bobby Lock is the island’s rail development officer, who, according to local legend, is responsible single-handedly for transforming the line’s fortunes – a one-woman publicity machine and consciousness-raiser. Even gritty old railwaymen defer to her. John Little, South West Trains’ operating manager, says of her efforts: ‘Now the railway has soul.’ I track Bob
by down to her home in Cowes, on the way attempting to decipher the remains of the old station. But there is nothing to be seen – it has disappeared without trace under a Co-op supermarket. But Bobby, small and blonde and busy feeding tea to her three-year-old daughter, is in upbeat mood. She shows me some safety posters that have been designed for the railway by local schoolchildren. ‘Of course the line won’t close. Not now. We all love it too much. And I hear London Underground have a nice batch of Tube trains soon to be retired from the Victoria Line …’ I get the sense the Tube bosses in London won’t be in a position to refuse her.
Next morning, when I head back for Portsmouth, the pickets are out at Ryde bus station. It turns out there’s a one-day bus strike on the island. And with high autumn winds whipping the Solent to a froth, none of the sleek catamaran ferries to the mainland are running because of the weather. But Bobby’s Tube trains are still doughtily shuttling up and down the line to Shanklin. And eventually, after an hour’s wait, an old-style ‘vomit bucket’ ferry turns up at the pier head. ‘It may be a bit rolly and unpleasant,’ announces the captain over the intercom, ‘but we’ll make it to the other side eventually.’ Old trains, old ferries. But at least they get you there.
CHAPTER FOUR
THE 10.30 FROM WREXHAM CENTRAL – UP THE LINE TO LONDON’S LAST TERMINUS
Wrexham Central to London Marylebone, via Gobowen, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, Banbury and High Wycombe
‘GO THROUGH THE multi-storey,’ says the nice young man in the Games Workshop. ‘Take a left and you’ll see a pile of Asda catalogues.’ I’m in a bleak shopping centre in Wrexham, North Wales, looking for what must be the most forlorn railway terminus in Britain. And here it is, tucked in between Argos Extra and Asda Living. It may have a grand-sounding name, but Wrexham Central is nothing more than a single track and a large red set of buffers sandwiched between the shops. There are piles of broken glass on the platform and a group of youths flick stones at beer cans on the track.
On the Slow Train Page 5
