On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  Not as long a day, though, as for the locomotive support crew, a bunch of enthusiasts from the 5305 Association, a preservation group subcontracted by the National Railway Museum to maintain and nurse Oliver Cromwell who travel with her faithfully wherever she goes. As the train stops briefly at Bromley South before the final leg into Victoria, I am allowed into the holy of holies – the coach behind the engine, whose door is generally locked against the rest of the train. Here is a jumble of greasy overalls, sleeping bags, coffee cups and oil cans, presided over by the chief custodians of Oliver Cromwell while on tour – a young married couple, let’s call them Jane and Justin. ‘Please don’t print my real name,’ says Jane. When I ask why she peers with mock amazement at her breasts inside the bib of her overalls. She’s had enough of the media focusing on her just because she’s a woman. ‘Actually, I’m a qualified steam driver, like Justin. When we’re not with Oliver Cromwell, we drive passenger trains on the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire. Our home is in Nottinghamshire, but when we’re with Cromwell, we’re in the sleeping bags here.’

  It is fashionable to take the jaundiced view that interest in steam on the main line will disappear when Marcus Robertson and his cohort of middle-aged schoolboys passes on. Robertson frowns when I raise this with him. ‘Look around you. I can tell you that at least 50 per cent of people on this train haven’t the remotest interest in steam. There will always be people who want a nice day out on a train, whether they remember the old days or not.’ But maybe this is just nostalgia too. Back in 1952 L T C Rolt, one of the earliest preservationists, wrote, ‘A future generation denied the spectacle of an express train in full cry will suffer a loss as great as we have suffered who have never seen a full-rigged ship with all her canvas set.’ But who ever sees a fully rigged sailing ship these days? Or cares? Ian Carter in his book British Railway Enthusiasm, the first ever academic study of the phenomenon, believes that interest in railways is a passing fad, probably now in its final days. ‘British railway enthusiasm is a creature of its time and place, waxing and waning in close relationship to the full-size railway’s reputation.’ He reckons that ultimately ‘the British railway enthusiast’s world will vanish like a badly fixed photograph’.

  But I wonder. After all the passengers have dispersed, Oliver Cromwell reverses out into the twilight at Victoria with a sharp bark and a shower of sparks. The locomotive is now in the care of Justin and Jane and the other young people in the support coach, who are, they have told me, going to ‘put her to bed and just make sure she is all right for the night’.

  I have a hunch that Carter and the other sceptics may be wrong.

  CHAPTER SEVEN

  THE 08.29 TO RICHMOND – LONDON’S COUNTRY BRANCH LINE

  Stratford to Richmond, via Camden Road and Willesden Junction

  I’M ABOUT TO take a journey on inner London’s only country railway. Sitting where I am, this may seem a peculiar claim, since apart from the odd tuft of ragwort and rosebay willowherb growing between the tracks of Stratford station’s Platform 11, I am in the midst of a concrete-and-glass futuropolis. Over there is the vast bulk of the new 80,000-seat stadium for London’s 2012 Olympics; behind us are the rising towers of the Olympic village. Not far away, rearing out of the morning mist, are the towers of Canary Wharf, dominated by César Pelli’s No. 1 Canada Square – the tallest building in the land. Clustered around are its Manhattan-style neighbours, including Norman Foster’s HSBC tower, not quite so proud since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, whose HQ stands empty nearby. But with the Olympics in prospect, grimy old Stratford is in bullish mood. There is the growl of earth movers everywhere as new blocks of flats sprout up in what was once the bleakest part of the old industrial East End.

  Yet as our little three-coach train rattles down under the Great Eastern main line and veers westwards past the new Stratford International station on the fast line to Paris, we are entering a different world. True, we could hardly be in a more urban setting, yet the North London Line has more in common with a rural branch line than any other in the capital. Running in a huge arc for twenty-two miles around the north of the city, from Stratford to Richmond, it is the only line to cross the capital without traversing the centre – although you almost feel that you could reach out and touch St Pancras station or the BT Tower as you pass by a mile or so away. It was also the only major line within London to be slated for closure by Beeching, who may have confused it with a country railway since for much of the way it passes along the ends of green and leafy back gardens, linking the three oases of Hampstead Heath, Kew Gardens and Richmond along the way. Luckily it escaped the axe, and to this day it remains the most pleasant way to travel from one side of the hurried metropolis to the other.

  Like a proper country railway too, the North London demonstrates that the greatest metropolis in the world is little more than a series of villages. They may jostle together geographically in an urban melee, but socially and culturally they are often a million miles apart. In the sixty-two minutes it will take our train to trundle from Stratford to Richmond we will pass from neighbourhoods where newcomers from Albania to Zaire eke out a life in slums that would have been familiar to Mayhew or Booth, to the Islington heartland of City bankers with their multi-million-pound Georgian villas and on to the posh suburbs of Kew and Richmond.

  Originally, the directors of the North London Railway didn’t care much about people at all. Projected in 1850 to carry goods from Birmingham and the great manufacturing cities of the north to the London Docks, it branched off the Euston main line at Primrose Hill, meandering eastwards through north London till it bumped into the Thames at Poplar. But as the city expanded on its northern heights, there was a lucrative new market for a hitherto undiscovered species – the suburban commuter. The line was soon extended through the ‘two up, two down’ west London suburbs, as John Betjeman called them, crossing the Thames to posh Richmond. An army of clerks thronged the new line, and to cater for them, a large and handsome terminus was built next to Liverpool Street in the Lombardic style by the company’s engineer, William Baker. So splendid was the new Broad Street station, with its ornate roofs and chimney stacks and ironwork, it made the Great Eastern’s huge terminus appear very modest indeed. The little NLR had hit the big time. As the Railway News commented at the time, ‘The history of the North London is … a curious one and if a railway be a sensitive thing it must feel as much astonished at being brought into Broad Street as Christopher Sly, the tinker felt when he found himself metamorphosed into a duke.’

  Until the coming of the Tube, the North London was the biggest suburban railway north of the Thames. But in the 1950s it went into a long slow decline. After decades of being allowed to moulder, Broad Street was demolished in 1985 and is now interred under the hideous corporate red marble of the Broadgate office block. The North London was diverted to Stratford and now runs into no central London terminus, but this little railway has always been a fighter, and after many scrapes with oblivion and rebrandings, has finally joined the Tube system with a grand new title – the London Overground – and an extension along the course of the East London Tube Line to Crystal Palace, West Croydon and other stations south of the Thames.

  ‘Did you know it’s always been faster to travel across London on our line than on the District Line of the Tube?’ Grace, the guard, tells me. (The NLR was a rarity on urban railways until recently in still having guards – although they are being eliminated as new more sophisticated trains and signalling are introduced.) Grace, whose parents came to London from Nigeria, has been with the line for nine years, through its previous brandings as the North London Link and the absurdly named Silverlink (‘Always sounded like my auntie’s tea service,’ she says). Now Grace is particularly pleased with her smart new jerkin in the grey and orange house colours of the Tube. She proudly displays the embroidered London Transport roundel, a badge of permanence if ever there was one.

  My train from Stratford arrives at the first westbound stati
on, Hackney Wick, in minutes – not because we have gathered speed but because all the stations are so close and this slowest of slow trains rarely gets above 20 mph at any point on the journey. This is the heart of Hackney – rustbowl London, a wasteland of derelict factories and streets that appear to go nowhere. Iain Sinclair, the chronicler of unconventional London life, describes it thus in his book about Hackney, That Rose-Red Empire: ‘A once Arcadian suburb of grand houses, orchards and conservatories, Hackney declined into a zone of asylums, hospitals and dirty industry. Persistently revived, reinvented, betrayed, it has become a symbol of inner-city chaos, crime and poverty.’ But it also represents the vibrancy of ethnic London at its best. By Homerton the carriage is buzzing with what seem to be most of the 150 languages that are currently spoken in the metropolis.

  Sadly, at this end of the line the magnificent station buildings of the North London Railway, designed by E H Horne in the Venetian-Gothic style and constructed of white Suffolk brick, Portland stone and terracotta, have mostly gone. By the end of the 1950s, the infrastructure of the old North London was like something from a Gothic horror movie. Water dripped through ceilings, algae ate away at elegant carvings, slates dropped from roofs and once-splendid wooden structures mouldered away with dry rot. Weeds grew through cracks in the platforms. It was the perfect scenario for the Beeching axe. But change was in the air. There were the first inklings that the endless advance of the motor car might end up strangling London, and local authorities along the line roused themselves to save it from closure. Jo Grimond, leader of the Liberal Party, wrote an article in the Manchester Guardian suggesting that it should be incorporated in the Tube map, a status it has only recently fully achieved, nearly half a century later. But when the North London was finally reprieved in 1965 by the Labour transport minister Tom Fraser, British Railways had their revenge and butchered nearly all the heritage – substituting bus shelters and huts built from the cheapest materials where Horne’s commodious buildings had once stood. One of the most monstrous acts of vandalism was the total demolition of Dalston Junction, once a grand station with several platforms, where even in the early 1960s passengers might find a roaring coal fire in the waiting room on a winter’s night. You could once, in the heyday of the line, pick up a restaurant-car express to Wolverhampton from here. But as it sank into decline, passengers might be forgiven for thinking they had alighted at a ghost station. What a pity, since a new but more spartan Dalston Junction has opened as part of the new route taking the North London Line south of the Thames through the world’s first underwater tunnel, designed by Marc Brunel, Isambard Kingdom’s father, at Rotherhithe.

  Sadly though we shall never again be able to take the slow train to Broad Street. Which is why I am abandoning the train at Dalston Kingsland and taking a rare bus diversion from my journey. This morning I am on a special mission to rediscover memories of Broad Street, because my father was among the hundreds of thousands of Mr Pooters who commuted into the station every day, making the fortunes of the North London Railway and its successor, the London and North Western Railway. (Henry Pooter, hero of George and Weedon Grossmith’s novel The Diary of a Nobody, makes no mention of the North London Railway, although it is a fair bet that he would have used its services to travel from his home in Holloway to his job as a clerk, like my father, in the City.)

  This is a social world that has almost entirely vanished. For forty years, Stanley Williams caught the 8.23 each morning from West End Lane station (now West Hampstead) to his job as a clerk in the offices of the Royal London Insurance Company in Finsbury Square. Not only did the timing of the trains not change much, nor did people’s jobs. These days, according to the latest statistics, the average twenty-something stays in a job for less than two years. Stanley Williams stayed loyal to the North London until his retirement, always preferring the style and comfort of its electric trains to the Tube. The line was electrified as long ago as 1916, and one of the original cars, which lasted in service until the 1960s, is in the National Railway Museum in York – the oldest electric multiple unit in the land. No wonder it lasted so long, since its equipment was supplied by one of the best engineering firms in Switzerland – Oerlikon Maschinenfabrik of Zurich. Even in the bleakest days of the nationalised railway in the 1960s the North London continued the tradition of having trains specially designed for it, although the Class 501 units, built in British Railways’ works in the 1950s, did not have such splendidly comfortable cushions as the Oerlikons, nor did they have the leather straps to open the carriage windows, which were a favourite trophy for local schoolboys and their penknives.

  Dalston Kingsland is a mean and shabby station built at the end of 1973 after Dalston Junction was closed and passenger services diverted to Stratford. Possibly the only sign of the universe Mr Pooter or my father once inhabited is the Railway Tavern next to the station, on old Irish boozer covered in puke-coloured tiles, which still has its traditional pub sign, with a picture of a train looking more like the red engine in Graham Greene’s The Little Train than anything the North London Railway might have run. In the bar, where there is a framed front page of the News Chronicle announcing ‘Crowning Glory – Everest is Climbed’ along with the words of the Irish national anthem, elderly West Indians in baseball caps slumber over halves of Red Stripe. ‘We don’t serve food here,’ says Rose the landlady as she pours a Guinness in the way only the Irish do, and directs me to Ridley Road market over the road, which is as potent a distillation of multicultural urban life as can be found anywhere on the planet. Amid hundreds of stalls selling every conceivable foodstuff from cows’ feet to parrotfish, old-fashioned cockney stallholders with fat jewellery jostle with ringletted Rastas and toothless elderly men speaking Urdu doing deals over boxes of mangoes and yams. There is every kind of tripe, stomach and testicle here – heaving innards of all kinds dripping blood and who knows what other fluids. It is said that with a quiet word at the back of a stall you could negotiate, if you so wished, for some black-market monkey steaks here, but I settle for a relatively conservative goat curry, sneaking into the back of a huge Victorian church to eat it surreptitiously. ST MARK’S, DALSTON, CATHEDRAL OF THE EAST END, says the board outside. It is apparently the only church in Europe with a working barometer, but when I try to put some money in the offertory box, I find it has been crowbarred out of the wall. ‘It’s OK. Give it to me,’ says a wizened man emerging from the darkness. I reckon not.

  I wonder what the stonemasons of Dove Brothers, Islington, the builders of St Mark’s, might have thought. Almost certainly they would have made their way to work here on the North London Railway. But for me it is the No. 242 bus (Homerton Hospital to Liverpool Street) south along the Kingsland Road to the site of what John Betjeman once called the ‘saddest of London stations’. As a small boy travelling to the City with my father – doing overtime to support a young family on a Saturday morning

  – I recall vividly Broad Street’s deserted air of faded glory. Betjeman wrote evocatively, ‘In the sixties, the magnificent iron roof over the train shed was removed. The large Lombardic buffet and the shops for city clerks were shut down and in 1970 the scale-model 4-4-0 engine whose wheels went round if you put a penny in the slot was either removed or stolen.’

  Sad, because I invested what seemed an enormous amount of my pocket money standing on tiptoes watching the wheels revolve. This little engine, which whizzed away without going anywhere, and the Italian man in the buffet who would tip a sugar shaker into my dandelion and burdock drink to create a volcano of fizz, were, for some inexplicable reason, some of the most profound memories of my boyhood. Betjeman went on (writing in 1972):

  Standing in the empty concourse at Broad Street today, one has a feeling of its former greatness. A few steps back will take you into what was once an enormous booking hall whose timber roof towers above the station shops. Along on the concourse now stands the 1914 war memorial of the North London, a miniature version of the Cenotaph in Whitehall . . . May God Save t
he Old North London!

  Of course he didn’t. At least, not in that joyous incarnation of Betjeman’s time. Sitting in Starbucks in the Broadgate Circle amid the 1980s corporate pink granite over a large macchiato, I reckon the grid reference is about right for the booking office, if not my little penny-in-the-slot engine. Just fancy – at the turn of the century there were more arrivals at Broad Street than at Euston and Paddingon combined. It was the Edwardian equivalent of London City Airport, with frock-coated City gents preferring to take trains to the Midlands from here, complete with the services of a travelling typist provided by the railway. Only Liverpool Street and Victoria had more trains. But not a brick or a shard remains of Broad Street, not even the echo of a whistle. Certainly not a memory. I ask Alphonse, the ‘barista’, if he knows there was once a great railway station here. ‘Maybe like the Gare D’Orsay?’ he ventures. Yes. But unlike the Parisians, Londoners didn’t bother to save it.

  Still, not all is lost. Small railway companies like the North London were often grand in disproportion to their size, and despite the wreckers of the 1960s a few mini-Broad Streets have survived. I take the No. 48 bus to pick up the line again at Hackney Central, where more than sixty years since it closed the station building is almost intact, although now it is a Turkish restaurant. Squint a bit, and its palazzo-like frontage with its Gothic pilasters could just about be perched on the bank of the Grand Canal.