On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  Thomas Hardy had a long-standing connection with the railways, from the time when, as a young surveyor in the 1860s, he supervised the removal of thousands of bodies from the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church when the Midland Railway extended its line to London. Among them was the body of the archbishop of Narbonne, which reportedly had a full set of porcelain false teeth. Hardy reportedly found the whole experience a gruesome one. Schoolchildren through the ages have recited Hardy’s railway poems ‘Faintheart on a Railway Train’ and ‘At the Railway Station, Upway’, and with his young wife Emma he was reportedly fond of taking the train to travel round Somerset and Wiltshire. In 1886 he wrote to his friend the critic Edmund Gosse inviting him to Dorchester to travel to some of the places ‘newly opened up by the railway’. It turned out to be an unfortunate experience. The two men were stuck on the platform here at Maiden Newton for so long after missing their connection on the Bridport branch that Gosse told later how he had had the time to write a lengthy essay on his friend’s poetic mentor William Barnes.

  This little village station is almost unchanged since Hardy’s day, retaining nearly all its stone Brunel buildings, although it is much quieter since the nine-mile Bridport branch closed in 1975. The days of Hardy and Gosse are long gone, and it is no longer possible to pass the time of day watching the Bridport branch train idling in the bay platform: ‘A pannier tank coupled to its “B” set standing under the overall roof in the branch bay with smoke drifting lazily from the chimney,’ wrote the historian of the line, Derek Phillips.

  A faint breath of steam swirling from the safety valves. The driver would be wandering around the engine complete with his oil feeder, giving the straps and glands a top-up, and there is the scrape of a shovel on the footplate, as the fireman puts a few rounds of coal around the firebox whilst waiting for the rumble and the roar of an approaching main line stopping train. Carriage doors would slam as passengers disembark and head for the branch train, the boards would be ‘off’ and with a roar from the chimney as the vacuum ejector was opened and with a toot on the whistle, the pannier tank would pull away on the journey to Bridport, leaving a lingering smell of hot oil and steam in its wake.

  While I wait, I don’t spend my time writing a memoir like Gosse, but instead I walk part of the way along the old trackbed of the Bridport line, now converted into a cycleway. Here, their growth now uninhibited by passing trains, are those old-style denizens of dry railway embankments – tangles of evening primroses with their pale yellow flowers, and colonies of the snapdragon-like toadflax, with their yellow hoods and orange bulges like Adam’s apples. And there is a bit of industrial archaeology too – old lengths of Brunel’s original broad-gauge track still used as fence supports by a local farmer.

  At the next station, Dorchester West, a group of men with a large Tesco bag overflowing with cans of Foster’s lager are the only people on the down platform. This station was once nominated by the Daily Telegraph as the worst in Britain. ‘No use waiting here, mate,’ they shout across at me as I get off and pause to look at the timetable. ‘There won’t be another train along for two hours.’ This used to be rather a grand place, with an overall roof and vast sidings that would echo to the bleating of sheep, the baying of cattle and the hue and cry of one of the busiest market towns in the south-west. All was swept away in the 1960s, but the elegant Italianate station building is still there, once housing first-and second-class waiting rooms. Even the booking office was partitioned so first-and second-class passengers didn’t have to rub shoulders. Now it is an Indian restaurant, and as I wait for the final train of the day I try the Wednesday night special (£8.95 for three courses). The Alishaan is bright and cheerful in contrast to the gloom on the unstaffed platforms. Over a chicken shashlik in what was once the ticket hall, I ask the owner Mr Ali whether he gets people in trying to book for a journey. ‘Dozens every day,’ he says. ‘If I am in a good mood, I let them in to use the toilet. If I am in a bad mood, I kick them out.’ Grass grows high between the tracks as I wait for the train on the final leg of my journey. But half-close your eyes and it is just possible to imagine the packed Channel Islands Boat Express steaming into the platform from Paddington.

  Sadly, the most evocatively named station on the line, Upwey Wishing Well Halt, closed in 1957, and the final station, Weymouth, is nondescript and modern – not much of a gateway to this elegant Georgian resort. This is also the terminus of the old Southern Railway line from Waterloo and the destination for the very last regular main line passenger steam trains in Britain in 1967. The Great Western had long lost its steam trains, so after all the battles of the rival companies to Weymouth, Waterloo had the last hurrah. But the journey does not quite end there. Buried under a tangle of ragwort and buddleia, the rusted tracks of a branch line disappear around the back of the station beyond a set of level crossing gates. This was once the Weymouth Harbour Tramway, where until the 1990s express boat trains would edge their carriages past holidaymakers in the town’s narrow streets and quays to deposit their passengers alongside the Channel Islands ferries. Opened by the Great Western in the 1860s, it was the only street railway in Britain ever to carry regular main line passenger trains and was originally constructed in broad gauge, although Brunel’s wide trains must have caused consternation on the narrow quays of the town. Theoretically it could carry trains now, although the last actual train operated in 1999, when a special tour ran from London. I follow the tracks round the back of the B & Q car park, and apart from the cars parked on the tracks in defiance of modern notices telling them not to, the line is intact, its rails worn shiny, not from rail use but from the regular motor traffic that passes over it. On the quayside, the little pannier tanks that operated it had bells to warn pedestrians, and the engine crews were known to be specially strong-armed, lifting parked cars out of the way. The lines are still intact and weed-free right up to the ferry terminal, although it is a long time since daffodils and Jersey potatoes were loaded into wagons to be sped up to London. Weymouth is to host the sailing events at the 2012 Olympics and some hope the line might see trains again as a green way to get spectators to the harbour front. ‘Should it happen?’ I ask a group of fishermen parking their catch, including a giant conger eel, in the middle of the tracks on the Old Harbour. ‘You’ve got to be joking,’ says one of the men, who has what seems to be an even more monstrous conger tattooed on his back. ‘It’s bad enough along here already. The last thing we need is a load of trains getting in our way. Green? It’s a load of b******. Look what they’ve done to the fishing industry in the name of being green!’ Until the 1960s this little railway was bustling. Now it looks unlikely that wheels will ever turn here again. Catherine and David and Norman and Terry and the other Heart of Wessex volunteers might hope that one day loaded trains might race down the tracks from Paddington, unloading cargoes of passengers in exchange for fresh flowers, fruit and vegetables from the fertile fields of Jersey and Guernsey. Sadly, like the revival of the Somerset and Dorset, here is another dream that seems destined to die.

  CHAPTER ELEVEN

  THE 08.04 FROM NORWICH – ‘SECRET’ LINES TO LIVERPOOL STREET, VIA BRITAIN’S SMALLEST MAIN LINE STATION

  Norwich to London Liverpool Street, via Buckenham, Berney Arms, Lowestoft and the East Suffolk Line through Beccles, Saxmundham, Woodbridge and Ipswich

  ‘ON WEDNESDAY LAST, a respectably dressed young man was seen to go into a London station and deliberately take a ticket to Cambridge. He has not been heard of since.’ So wrote Punch in the early 1860s, lampooning the awful train services of the Eastern Counties Railway, the company that in mid-Victorian times ran most of the trains to East Anglia. The novelist William Makepiece Thackeray commented at the same time in a similar sardonic vein, ‘Even a journey on the Eastern Counties Railway comes to an end.’

  But perhaps we should be grateful for East Anglia’s remoteness and relative inaccessibility. It still has dreamy branch lines and slow secondary railways of the sort that disappeared from m
uch of the rest of the network long ago. True, some of the quieter branches have gone. It’s no longer possible to change at country junctions onto little two-coach trains pulled by antiquated engines for stations with lovely East Anglian names such as Lavenham, Brightlingsea, Aldeburgh, Southwold or Snape. No longer do trains loaded with holidaying mill workers from the West Midlands halt at Melton Constable and all stations beyond on their way to the holiday camps and camp sites of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. But there still are slow trains to be discovered on byways with quaint titles like the Bittern Line, the Poppy Line and the Wherry Line – ‘winding slow’ as John Betjeman put it ‘to some forgotten country town’. Astonishingly, the East Suffolk Line (which does not have a nickname but is as lovely as any of them) still has direct trains from Lowestoft to London, stopping at stations in slumbering market towns on quiet river estuaries, much of the way on a single track.

  It is tempting to hope that the managers up at Liverpool Street may still be oblivious to the lines beyond Cambridge, and that trains will somehow continue to chug in obscurity through quiet fenland stations in a parallel universe for ever more. But the survival of East Anglia’s remaining branch lines has been hard won and communities are ever vigilant. None more so than around the little triangle of lines from Norwich to Yarmouth and Lowestoft, where local people have fought to preserve trains to both the smallest station in Britain and the station which has just about the tiniest passenger numbers of any in the land.

  This morning I’m travelling to both, through remote marshes dotted with windmills and pretty riverside villages, underneath the ‘big skies’ so characteristic of Norfolk. It could not be a more perfect autumn day for such a journey. The early-morning sun is warming the spire of Norwich cathedral and firing up the red-brick frontage of Norwich Thorpe station. With its huge French elliptical dome and cupola, complete with classical urns, the terminus looks more like a chateau than anything as prosaic as a railway station in the bright morning light. Screw up your eyes and we could be on the River Loire rather than the plain old River Wensum. The pedimented clock on the roof says precisely eight o’clock, and the two-coach diesel forming the 08.04 Wherry Line train to Yarmouth is ready to leave.

  First stop heading east is Brundall, on the banks of the River Yare and famous for its boatbuilding as well as being the home of Colin Chapman, the founder of the Lotus sports car firm. But it is neither boats nor fast cars I have come to see today. I am on my way to the remote platforms at Buckenham, which has an ignoble place in the statistics books as one of the least-used stations in Britain. According to the latest figures from the Office of Rail Regulation (whether you believe them or not) only ninety-seven passengers use the station each year, a statistic which must be directly related to the number of services that stop there. According to the timetable, the next train doesn’t stop at Buckenham for another five days. ‘The trouble with travelling on slow trains to small stations,’ observes Ian Dinmore, Norfolk County Council’s community rail officer, when I ring him to enquire about the service, ‘is that they tend to be infrequent and infrequently stop.’ Quite so. It appears I have no alternative but to walk from the previous station along the line.

  To help me on my way, I am fortified with a mug of very strong railwaymen’s tea in the porters’ room at Brundall, one of the very few rural stations in Norfolk still to have a staff. There’s Barry the crossing keeper, Roger the signalman and Steve the ticket collector, plus two others who relieve them on shifts. With its ornate wooden signal box, semaphore signals, fancy finials, wooden level crossing gates and stationmaster’s house still intact, it probably comes as close as we can get in modern times to the idyll of the country station in its heyday, as atmospherically described by David St John Thomas in his book The Country Railway.

  Calves, day-old chicks, pigs and other reinforcements for the local livestock normally came in by passenger train along with the mails, newspapers and local soldiers on leave. The pair of rails disappearing over the horizon stood for progress, disaster, the major changes in life; the route to Covent Garden and Ypres, the way one’s fiancé paid his first visit to one’s parents, one’s children returned for deathbed leavetaking . . . The country railway 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 gossip news and advice.

  That world has not entirely vanished from the Wherry Line, which is still run almost entirely with equipment from the Victorian era. ‘That’s why it’s so special,’ says Barry, stroking an Ancient Mariner beard and speaking over the rattle of teaspoons stirring large quantities of sugar into mugs. A chiming clock periodically interrupts our conversation. ‘We do it the old way – the semaphores, the manned crossings, the mechanical locking systems of the signals and points. We even have a man who comes round each week to fill up the paraffin in the signal lamps and on the crossing gates.’ Barry reels off the list of signal boxes on the line, all of which still have a human being to pull levers attached to wires that change the points and raise and lower the signals – Yarmouth, Acle, Brundall, Cantley, Reedham, Somerleyton – a recitation which goes on until Roger pings the bell from the signal box, and it is time to swing closed the heavy wooden level crossing gates to let a train pass. ‘The old ways are the safest,’ muses Steve. Although he’s not entirely right, since on a rainy night on 10 September 1874 a tragic accident happened near here, when the mail train from Yarmouth crashed at speed into an express from London, killing twenty-five and injuring more than a hundred others. ‘One of the most appalling accidents that ever happened in English railway history,’ reported the Illustrated London News at the time, and it remains so to this day. The graves of the driver and fireman of the mail train can still be seen in the Rosary Cemetery, Norwich.

  Buckenham station is so little used that the Ordnance Survey have not even bothered to put it on my map, but it does not seem to matter on this mesmerising walk from Brundall along deserted country lanes lined with holm oaks and sloe bushes. Shiny blueberries and fat bullaces – a speciality in this part of Norfolk – are everywhere for the picking, perhaps because the art of transforming them into a kind of damson jam is lost. I follow the line of the track until I come to a little gated crossing over the line, and here is a surreal sight. The surroundings of the crossing keeper’s cottage are festooned with multicoloured gnomes – thousands of them. In a landscape even Disney might find hard to replicate, they are busy fishing, sweeping, gardening, waving and gesticulating with their little staffs, brooms and forks. (The gnomes may be up to all sorts of other things too, for all I know, but I cannot tell since they are crowded into such a congested place.)

  ‘They belong to the widow of the old crossing keeper,’ says a dapper man in a railway uniform who darts out of a hut to let me through. ‘We call this “Gnome Man’s Land Crossing”, by the way – you can see why,’ he says without any apparent irony. This is Steve, who has one of the quietest jobs on the Wherry Line if not the entire railway network, operating a crossing across the railway which sometimes has only four vehicles a day. This is actually fewer than the number of trains, which run hourly along the line. For this reason, he tells me, the gates are generally set against the road traffic rather than the trains as is standard railway practice. ‘On a busy day I may have twenty-five vehicles. But they can’t replace me with a machine. Just look at that dangerous curve as the line comes round the bend there.’

  With a wave, Steve lets me through the gates on the other side, which open onto a vast seemingly uninhabited area of reed beds, fens, wet meadows, grazing marshes, scrub and woodland, connected by a maze of rivers, dykes and pools – which is the reason for Buckenham station’s continued lonely existence. This is the avian kingdom of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and home to some of the major bird sanctuaries of Britain. It may seem bizarre that Buckenham station survives with just five train
s each way a week – one on a Saturday and four on a Sunday – but all becomes clear when you realise the trains are strictly for the birds, or those who come to watch them. As if on cue, a honking flock of Egyptian pink-footed geese flies over and, surreally, in this place which with every footstep appears to be a kind of pantheistic paradise, I bump into a human too. He introduces himself as Tim Strudwick, an RSPB warden, who tells me,

  You should see the marsh harriers here – big birds of prey with four-foot wingspans. We’ve got a big population of them. And then we’ve got the rare bittern, with their deep booming voices in the spring. There are only about 150 bittern overwintering in Britain, so they are very rare. In the winter the marshes at Buckenham are alive with the sight of huge numbers of widgeon, their white breasts glistening like ghosts – maybe 10,000 flying over at a time.

  Listening to the cries of the birds on the deserted Buckenham platform with little other prospect than a five-day wait for the next train or a long walk back to Brundall, it is hard to imagine that the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway was once a busy main line, so important that it appointed no less an eminence than George Stephenson as its chairman and his son Robert as engineer. The Stephensons reckoned the line could be completed in eighteen months, but since there were no tunnels or other major bits of civil engineering, it was actually ready in a year. The opening day on 12 April 1844 was an occasion for rejoicing and feasting on a bacchanalian scale. A fourteen-coach train left Norwich with 200 guests, including the Bishop of Norwich, a government inspector and a brass band in the coach next to the engine. The local newspaper reported that ‘the electric telegraph having performed its office and informed the manager that all was clear, the engine gave forth its note of warning, the band struck up See the Conquering Hero Comes, the engine moved forth in its majestic might . . . the hills reverberated its warning, while the puffs of steam, heard long after its departure, sounded like the breathing of Polypheme.’ After a brisk forty-four-minute run and further celebrations, the day concluded with a dinner in the Yarmouth Assembly Rooms, including ‘spring chicken, green geese, tongues, pickled salmon, plovers’ eggs, ornamental jellies, peaches, strawberries and ices’.