On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  Some passengers are baffled about the prettiness of the line as we head around the bay towards Barrow-in-Furness. Shouldn’t there be some furnaces here, or at least the odd steelworks? ‘Don’t get confused about the name,’ says Peter Anderson, a retired council planner who is president of the Cumbrian Railways Association. ‘Furness has got nothing to do with furnaces. It actually means father of Ness.’ Anderson, who leads a band of more than 400 enthusiasts from as far away as South Wales dedicated to supporting the line, meets me on the platform at Grange-over-Sands and briefs me over a pot of tea in the ever-so-genteel Cedar Tea Rooms. ‘No minstrels or anything of the noisy order,’ proclaimed the 1906 edition of the Guide to Seaside Places in its entry on Grange. Clearly not much has changed in this resort, where feeding the ducks in the municipal gardens seems as exciting as it gets.

  Even in Barrow, whose fortunes really were built on steel, there are not many furnaces these days, Anderson explains. You are more likely to encounter protectively clad engineers from the nuclear industry. But iron and coal run through the veins, literally, of West Cumbria, and through the veins of the men who developed it. Iron was first discovered by the Romans, Anderson tells me, as he pours the tea, and by the year 1200 was being mined by the monks of St Bees Priory along the coast. It was the reason for the development of a tangle of wonderfully named railways in the area – the Maryport and Carlisle, the Whitehaven and Furness Junction, the Ravenglass and Eskdale and the Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith. Giants of the Industrial Revolution stalked the land round here. George Stephenson, designer of the Rocket, was appointed by his friend William Lowther, second Earl of Lonsdale, to link the Lowther family’s mines and factories in Whitehaven to the national rail network in Carlisle. His ancestor Sir John Lowther was known as the ‘richest commoner in England’ and built his factory chimneys in the shape of his favourite silver candlesticks. But two of Britain’s greatest inventors defined the prosperity of the area and its railways. One was the Cumbrian John Wilkinson, who discovered a way of replacing charcoal with common coal for smelting. Henry Bessemer was an even more prolific genius, inventing a process that could transform pig iron into steel. There was no better ingredient than pure Cumbrian haematite, and for more than a century Workington, a few stations up the line, exported rolled steel track to build railways far and wide across the world. Sadly, it went the way of much of British industry, and Workington’s rail-making works, which first exported to the Texas and Alabama Railway in 1872, were finally closed in 2006.

  We’re now into our second cup of Assam, and discussing the merits of the Italianate style of the local station architecture – with nice touches such as the monogram of the Furness Railway set into the cast-iron lamp holders. Grange station is especially attractive, and a plaque on the wall pronounces it WINNER. BEST INTERNATIONAL SMALL STATION OF THE YEAR 2007. Another grander plaque says the station was built in 1872 to the design of James Brunlees and is a replica of the top storey of the Grange Hotel. ‘This is quite wrong,’ says Anderson, who clearly knows as much about the line as it is possible to know. But the next train is due, and life is slow enough on the Cumbrian Coast for me not to be able to afford to miss it. The train is surprisingly full as we rumble over the next estuary crossing and onto the Leven Viaduct, an even grander piece of engineering than the Kent Viaduct, recently rebuilt by Network Rail, who closed the line for four months during its reconstruction. In 1903 the Whitehaven to Carnforth Mail was blown over here, though fortunately not into the water. But the passengers were left to crawl to safety on their hands and knees through the storm. There was even greater drama farther along the line at Lindal, where the engine of a goods train disappeared into a hole opened up by mining subsidence. It was never recovered, an intact piece of industrial archaeology frozen in time and waiting to be exhumed by generations hence.

  The views are especially lovely here, as the line weaves through the Vale of Nightshade and past the remains of Furness Abbey, built by the Cistercians and second only in importance to Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. The construction of the railway infuriated William Wordsworth, who called the company’s directors ‘profane despoilers’. He had already publicly warmed to the theme with a sonnet attacking the building of a new line to Windermere. ‘Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?’ he wrote. One wonders what he would have made of the hideous rectangular bulk of Heysham nuclear power station, which disfigures many of the views from our train window along this part of the coast.

  It seems incredible that during the nineteenth century the directors of the Furness turned the docks at Barrow into England’s third-largest after London and Liverpool. In modern times the shipyards were renowned as the place where Britain’s Trident nuclear submarines were built. But the naval industry fell on hard times at the end of the Cold War and there is not so much reason to come here now: the last direct trains to London Euston were withdrawn in the 1980s. As one commentator observed, ‘There were not enough submarine salesmen journeying to the consulates and embassies of the capital to justify a through service.’ Building nuclear submarines is hardly a vote winner these days and the number of people working in the shipyards is a fraction of what it once was. In any case, the town has other claims to fame. In 2002 it suffered the world’s fourth-biggest outbreak of legionnaires’ disease in which seven people died. In 2008 it was judged the most working-class town in Britain, something of a contrast with the 1870s, when it had the largest number of aristocrats per head of any town in the land. While the train is waiting I alight briefly to use the gentlemen’s toilet, which I discover to be the cleanest I have ever seen on a railway station. Could there be a connection?

  ‘Where do you want to get off?’ asks Brian, the conductor. North from Barrow is the least used section of the line and many of the stations are request stops. Brian seems constantly to be popping his head round the driver’s door to let him know. He tells me that one conductor at Carlisle got into trouble for announcing, ‘All stations to Whitehaven and beyond – though why anybody would want to get off there, I have no idea.’ Today I have a very good idea of where I want to alight. I am planning to stop for lunch at Foxfield on the edge of the sands of the Duddon estuary, where I’m joining the lunchtime crowd at the Prince of Wales, a legendary local boozer opposite the station. Its fame in brewing its own real ales extends far beyond Cumbria. The City editor of a London newspaper, well versed in the fare of the finest private dining rooms of the Square Mile, told me he considers the Prince of Wales, Foxfield a ‘paradise on earth’.

  I tell this to Brian, who says, ‘Sometimes we get trainfuls of thirsty blokes travelling up the line at lunchtime for the pub. We pick them up legless on the last train home. But doesn’t do any harm, does it? They’re mostly nice people. And what else is there to do round here since the Millom steelworks closed?’ Brian, who is sixty-two, tells me he comes from Ipswich and taught in local schools for sixteen years before he joined the railway three years ago.

  You get mostly nicer people on the train than I generally encountered in teaching. But shame they took the passenger services off the Foxfield to Coniston branch back in 1958. They didn’t even hang around till Beeching came along. Said it was losing £16,000 a year – does that sound like a lot to you? One day they came along and just closed it, just like that. It was the prettiest branch line in Britain. You could have changed at Foxfield and gone right up to the lake. Now the cars are just nose to tail on the local roads – they can’t pack any more in. They had special little steam-powered carriages with big windows so you could see the scenery more easily. You know, the writer John Ruskin would have gone this way – he had a place up at Coniston.

  I wonder how much the fastidious Ruskin would have enjoyed a pint or two of Good Old Boy ale among the amply gutted men in ‘Coniston Beer Festival’ T-shirts at the bar of the Prince of Wales, although aesthetics are not on the agenda as I attempt a House Special Giant Pasty with mushy peas and a pint of Foxfield Old Pale. He would at
least have been close enough to the platform to jump aboard the next branch train to Coniston, where he would almost certainly have admired the Swiss-chalet-style station. There’s a grand view of the signalman in his box here, kitted out with an array of levers fit to control a country junction, complete with water tower to fill the boilers of steam engines but without much more to do than control a level crossing and a farm track. The signal box, perched on top of a little weatherboarded waiting room, looks as though it might fall down of its own accord. A crumpled-up Somerfield plastic bag is stuffed in the window frame where the wood has rotted away. But the view from here, across the serene waters of the Duddon estuary, must be one of the most beautiful from a railway station anywhere in Britain.

  Like the Foxfield–Coniston route, almost all the branch lines into the heart of the Lake District are now fading memories. The Lakeside branch from Ulverston, a few stops back along the line before Barrow, was killed off by Beeching in 1965 just four years before its centenary, although the northern section from Haverthwaite was saved by a group of enthusiasts and now operates as a heritage line, with some authentic former London, Midland and Scottish Railway Fairburn tank engines, the last of their kind still running. Further north, the line that passed through Keswick on its way from Workington to Penrith, and the only one to traverse the Lakes from east to west, was an even more tragic casualty of the 1960s closures, drawing fury from locals as Beeching had his way. The first section west of Keswick went in 1966, the trackbed being turned over to the builders of the new A66 road, and the rest went soon after.

  But the little narrow-gauge line from Ravenglass, along beautiful Eskdale to Dalegarth, at the foot of England’s highest mountains, lives on. ‘La’al Ratty’, as the Ravenglass and Eskdale is known locally, is probably the only profitable secondary railway in Cumbria, and one of the few profitable non-nuclear enterprises on this part of the Cumbrian Coast. It takes my train just twenty-eight minutes to get here from Foxfield, and crossing the platform to change trains you can see why the Ratty is so successful. Two miniature replicas of mainline steam locomotives sit simmering in the sidings. The one that is to haul my train seven miles into the heart of the Lakes is the mustard-coloured River Irt, which, according to a notice on the platform, was ‘built in 1894, the oldest working 15-inch gauge locomotive in the world’. Being swung round on the turntable is her sister, the River Mite, painted in the India red of the Furness Railway. She looks like the fastest and most thrilling express engine in the world, but you have to get down on your knees and half close your eyes to imagine it.

  But this is no toy railway; it operates throughout the year, carrying both locals and tourists. The Ravenglass and Eskdale was opened in 1875 to carry quarried haematite down to the Furness Railway main line, as well as the occasional passenger. But when supplies of the ore started to run out, it was rescued as the realisation of a grown-up little boy’s dream. The saviour was a Northampton model maker called Wynne Bassett-Lowke. (The firm had a famous model shop in High Holborn, a mecca for young boys and their fathers until it closed in the 1970s.) Bassett-Lowke rebuilt the line changing the gauge from 3 feet to 15 inches. Since then La’al Ratty has gone from strength to strength. Some of its success may be due to the fact that it is one of the few non-imaginary railways to be enshrined in the Thomas the Tank Engine canon. The ‘Arlesdale Railway’ in the Reverend W Awdrey’s Small Railway Engines is based on the Ravenglass and Eskdale, where Awdrey spent a holiday with his clergyman chum the Reverend E R Boston; they take the parts of the ‘Thin Clergyman’ and the ‘Fat Clergyman’ respectively.

  And what a jolly ride the two clerics must have had on the train up the valley. Today, in the open-top carriages, families with young children sucking on Starbursts mingle with stern-looking hikers in Tilley hats, shorts and Hillmasters – ‘Scafell Pike, here we come!’ There is even space for bikes. ‘You can sit in one of the open carriages,’ Geoffrey the volunteer ticket collector tells me. ‘But don’t dance on the ceiling!’ Ho-ho! Warm steam blows back in our faces as the River Irt chuffs past giant ferns and oaks, her carriages emitting a curious da-da-tiddlypop, da-da-tiddlypop. An upturned boat serves as a station shelter at Murthwaite. Here a red squirrel is briefly glimpsed scampering away from the train, while a buzzard hovers menacingly above the valley. The dark presence of Harter Fell, 2,129 feet, looms on the right. And then whoomph as the brakes suddenly go on, followed by the staccato bish-bosh of the Westinghouse brakes on the loco. It turns out that a flock of the local Herdwick sheep, with their curious black coats, have strayed onto the track, and the driver has to climb down to shoo them off.

  Back at Ravenglass station there is a crowd quaffing Ratty Ale in the Ratty Arms, part of the miniature railway’s empire, which has taken over much of the old Furness Railway station. The workshops are in the goods shed and the museum and pub are in the station buildings on opposite platforms. The sun is sinking over the Mite Estuary as the River Irt is put to bed in the engine shed, and I wait for the last train of the day to my own berth in the Millom Station hotel. Quarter past seven doesn’t seem late for a last train, but clearly Northern Rail expects its customers to be tucked up early. (No clubbing round here, please.) But I wait half an hour, and no train appears. Then forty-five-minutes have gone, and I look around at the once-busy scene to find everything shut and no one to ask. No hotel vacancies round here in picturesque Ravenglass, which is why I’m slumming it in Millom. I think of Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’: ‘No one came and no one went on the bare platform . . .’ Perhaps I shall have to walk. But then I remember not Adlestrop but Bangalore, and use my mobile phone to ring the nice lady at National Rail Enquiries head-quarters in India. ‘Your train is running precisely forty-nine minutes late,’ she tells me, consulting her computer screen and beaming back the news across the world to Cumbria. ‘But supposing I didn’t have a mobile phone,’ I say to her. ‘How could I have known?’ There’s a crackly silence at the end of the line.

  When the southbound train finally arrives, the conductor is apologetic.

  A few days ago we had a Class 153 [single-carriage] train come off the track near Dalston. There were seventeen aboard and lucky none of them were injured. They reckon it was a rail that buckled in the heat. I spoke to the driver and he said it drifted off the rails into the ballast, just like that. They’re playing safe today and slowing us all up. They like to call us a ‘showpiece line’. But do you think it really is? The real problem is the trains. They’re too short and we haven’t got enough of them. Sometimes I get twelve cyclists wanting to get aboard at Whitehaven, where the Coast-to-Coast Path starts. They get a bit iffy when they say I can’t let them all on. And don’t talk to me about the Pacers . . .

  At Millom the darkened station is deserted and the bar at the Station Hotel is empty. The barmaid is resting on her elbows watching TV, and there seem to be no takers for the cheapo deal on vodka and Red Bull. Still, I get a good night’s sleep before resuming the journey north along the line the next morning. But first I have something to seek out – the little house at 14 St George’s Terrace where the poet Norman Nicholson, the ‘modern bard of the Lake District’, was born and lived for most of his life. His poetry more than anything sums up the schizophrenic nature of the Cumbrian Coast railway’s hinterland. I interviewed him just before he died in 1987 and he said something that I have never forgotten – that the rock that forms the noble high fells of Cumbria is the same rock that put bread on the table for thousands of families through the mines and quarries and ironworks.

  Millom’s once-mighty Hodbarrow steelworks is now a memory and its bulldozed site is a bird sanctuary – home to the rare great-crested grebe, once almost extinct in Britain. The only industries that put bread on the table for local people these days are the vast facilities run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (formerly British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) along the ‘nuclear coast’. Millom station platform this morning is thronged with Sellafield-bound passengers, and looks more like rush hour
in suburban south-east England than one of the most depressed towns in Britain. ‘It’s a fact,’ says the lady who runs the Millom Folk Museum in the old station booking office, ‘that Millom is the busiest station in the UK. You work it out by comparing the number of people who use the trains with the population. Footfall, they call it.’

  I ponder this as the packed train heads towards Sellafield, where the vast cooling towers and chimneys dominate the landscape for miles around. Even the names of the local stations have a sinister ring. Drigg, for instance, sounds as though God could have created it for the purpose of storing nuclear waste. Ten thousand people, nearly all of them local, are employed in Sellafield and its related plants, and while international environmentalists would like to see the whole place closed down, the locals will have none of it, believing it to be entirely good for their economic, if not physical, health. The original name Windscale was changed to Sellafield after a major fire in 1957 led to a core meltdown and the discharge of vast amounts of radioactive material into the local landscape and the Irish Sea. Another leak from the Thorp reprocessing plant in 2005 went undetected for nine months. Even according to the management, building B30, in the heart of the facility, is the most hazardous industrial building in Europe. Now another giant nuclear power station is to be built on the coast here with enough power to meet the energy needs of Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow combined. Yet nobody seems fazed. The railway station at Drigg has a splendid platform garden full of pre-nuclear age delights such as roses, antirrhinums, delphiniums and petunias tended by the lady from the gift shop next door. She even has a home-made set of steps to help passengers from the trains – it is not deemed economic to rebuild the low Furness Railway platforms. Just down the road is Britain’s main low-level nuclear waste dump, although let’s not dwell on it now.