On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  But no time to ponder on such delights. I even have to miss the prospect of exploring Old Buckenham’s ancient octagonal-towered All Saints church to power-walk back to Brundall to catch my train to Berney Arms. What is officially Britain’s smallest station is rather more copiously provided for than Buckenham, with a generous two trains each way a day. But since it has no electric lights on the platform, the last train leaves well before the evening draws in. I have just seconds to spare when I puff up the footpath into Brundall as Barry is swinging back the big gates to let my train through. From Brundall eastwards, the lines divide, the northern section climbing steeply on a single track to Acle and Yarmouth, contradicting Noël Coward’s famous line: ‘Very flat, Norfolk.’

  The southerly tracks go on to Reedham, where the line splits again – one section going on to Lowestoft and the other swinging north to Yarmouth, via Berney Arms. The views across the flat Broadland as the train heads east are sometimes surreal, with boats seemingly sailing across the fields and fens, an optical illusion created by the river running parallel behind hedges and fences. Sadly, even in our dreams we are unlikely to see many genuine wherries – the square-sailed Norfolk trading barges that have given the line its name. First they were victims of the railways and then of the self-skippered motor cruisers that dominate the Broads, and now there are only two of the original trading wherries remaining. Once there would have been dozens of them bringing beet from the surrounding farms to the huge British Sugar processing plant which dominates the next station at Cantley, with its tall chimney belching exhaust over the neighbouring countryside. Now even the railway doesn’t get a look-in. Although there are rusting tracks leading into the factory, where freight wagons would once have brought in beet, coal and limestone and take out sugar and molasses, the last freight train ran in 1988. Now all is carried by lorry, much to the annoyance of local residents. And things may get worse. The Cantley village website complains that new EU rules encouraging the refining of cane sugar in the UK could mean another eighty-five lorry movements a day on the narrow local roads.

  But in this sleepy landscape we don’t have to worry too much about the impact of industry. Reedham, the next station, is a pretty junction with a timber signal box, old semaphore signals and a chain ferry across the Yare. Here our train leaves the Lowestoft line to take a dead-straight trajectory across the marshes to Berney Arms. It is so squelchy here that the original engineers had to lay down bundles of faggots to prevent the tracks from sinking into the marsh. Make sure you tell the guard you want to get off before the train whizzes past the stop. The platform is just one carriage long and the driver could easily miss it. But why would anyone want to get off at a tiny platform literally in the middle of a seemingly endless marshy void, with no houses in sight and the nearest public road three miles away? One answer is that the local landowner – Thomas Trench Berney, from whom the station takes its name – insisted that the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway should keep services going ‘in perpetuity’ in exchange for building a station on his land. The alternative answer is better – since Berney Arms is what one writer has described as a ‘stepping-off point for an earthly paradise of boundless horizons and reedy dykes’. And silence. Once the train has clattered off into the distance, there is only the sound of a few rooks wheeling overhead and just a whisper of breeze gently brushing the grass. Once there was a small community here. Sheila Hutchinson, a local author, recalls how until the 1940s the railway had a signal box and station cottages that served as the ticket office, waiting room and local post office run by a stationmistress called Violet Mace. Although there was no mains water or electricity, a bell on the wall operated by the signalman would ring across the marshes to announce the arrival of a train. Now there is nothing but grass and sky. The cottages have long been demolished and the current skimpy wooden platform shelter, officially the smallest in Britain, offers all the comforts of an upright coffin. There is a hole cut in the back to prevent the roof from blowing off and to allow the shelter to double as a birdwatchers’ hide – not much help in the driving sleet from the North Sea that is typical of a winter’s day. And poor Berney Arms station gets no post these days at all.

  But wait. Buried among the brambles at the end of the platform is a peeling moss-covered sign that points to BERNEY ARMS MILL. ANCIENT MONUMENT. Cut through a gate, past a swan’s nest on a dyke fluorescent with algae, swish through the reeds and there it is, towering over a bend in the Yare: Norfolk’s tallest windmill, seven stories high, its cap like an upturned boat hull and its white sails in perfect condition. Although it might appear now as an image of rustic perfection, the original use for the mill was industrial – grinding cement clinker, using clay brought from the Broads by wherry. It was restored to working order by English Heritage in 2007, but the curse of lonely Berney Arms struck again. After the restoration there were never enough visitors coming here to keep it open regularly, and apart from the odd special day it has been closed to visitors ever since. Yet there is one institution in this deserted landscape that still apparently functions – the public house that gives the place its name. Dare I hope the Berney Arms might be open on a quiet lunchtime in the middle of nowhere on an autumn Monday?

  A push on a door opposite some skeletal hulks of rotting boats on the riverbank and I am inside a dark wood-lined interior, fragrant with an ancient beery smell of hops and malt. No trendy Norfolk pub this, serving posh seafood to north London second-home owners. Rather, it is a scruffy old boozer stuck in so much of a time warp that I am able to order chicken in a basket without irony. There are few pubs in the land inaccessible except by train (or also by boat in the case of the Berney Arms), and it makes me think of the Adam and Eve, the railway pub described in Brensham Village, John Moore’s famous book about English village life: ‘The stationmaster had his morning and evening pint there, pulling out his great turnip-watch every time a train went by; our only porter spent a great deal of time there as he could afford to do, since the even tenor of his life was interrupted only by four stopping trains a day; and at noon the gangers came in and ordered pints of cider, sat down in the corner with their bait.’

  At Berney Arms nowadays of course there is no stationmaster, no porters, nor any staff at all, and woe betide any ganger ordering a cider over lunch. But the landlord, John Ralph, tells me he depends on the railway for his trade, even with the current scorched-earth train service, along with the boaters and walkers who come up from Yarmouth. ‘The fact is, there’s nobody living round here, so we’re a pub without locals – although the occasional farmer pops in for breakfast. The old days, when country people would walk miles to get anywhere, have long gone. It’s manic in the summer, but utterly desolate in the winter. And try getting staff. There’s just me and the wife – though we’ve got a Colombian girl in at the moment.’ John is a big, bearded Brummie, amply tattooed – a sparks by trade, he tells me, though he looks as though he could have played bass guitar with Meatloaf. He bought the pub after coming here on holiday one summer, although things are not always quite so sunny now. ‘We have to go down three miles of local farm tracks to get to the nearest road. Imagine that in the mists we get round here in the winter. One false move and you could go off the road into a dyke. But you’d better get your train. There won’t be another along till tomorrow.’

  At the station there’s just time to admire its single glory, the Indonesian hardwood station sign bearing the name BERNEY ARMS in gunmetal characters. It was made in a local boatyard and installed after the last one got stolen. Somewhere, presumably, there is a back garden masquerading as Britain’s smallest station.

  I wave down the train back to Reedham and the driver slides open the cab door to let me into the carriage. ‘Goodness me, it’s rush hour at Berney Arms this afternoon,’ he jokes. Even though I already have a return ticket, I splash out on a single to Reedham from the conductor. Around twenty tickets a week are sold to and from Berney Arms each week, so I have done my bit in single-handedly increasing usa
ge by 5 per cent. And in return I get an unusual star-shaped clip in my ticket.

  My train from Reedham to Lowestoft runs gently onto the swing bridge across the Yare before heading towards Haddiscoe, where we cross the border into Suffolk. (There’s a local joke about a Norfolk man and a Suffolk man standing on the boundary, where a genie asks them both for their wishes. ‘My wish is for a high fence all around the county,’ says the Norfolk man. ‘And mine,’ says the Suffolk man, ‘is for it to be filled to the brim with water.’) Haddiscoe church, which can be seen from the train, is one of the most unusual in England, with a round tower built by the Saxons and a thatched roof. ‘The place is so tranquil,’ says Simon Jenkins in his book England’s Thousand Best Churches, ‘that we can still imagine the longboats pulled up on the banks of the marsh by what is now the churchyard.’ The train is now running upstream along the south bank of the River Waveney, before calling at Somerleyton station, a short distance from Somerleyton Hall, one of the most magnificent Jacobean stately piles in Britain and the home of the Victorian civil engineering entrepreneur Sir Samuel Morton Peto, whose firm constructed the line as well as many buildings in London, including Nelson’s column. Charles Dickens was sometimes a guest of Peto here. How much the novelist’s time at the hall influenced the writing of David Copperfield we cannot know but Copperfield’s fictional birthplace at Blundeston (Blunderstone in the novel) is not far from here, and Dickens claimed he chose it after seeing the name on a local signpost.

  After the wide-open drama of the marshes, Oulton Broad North on the last lap into Lowestoft seems disappointingly suburban, though not so disappointing as Lowestoft itself, where the station, constructed by Lucas Brothers, who also built London’s Royal Albert Hall, has lost its once-magnificent Baltic timber overall roof, although the walls still stand, giving it the melancholy appearance of a bombed-out church. It is a pity, since a blue plaque on the wall outside proclaims it to be the most easterly station in England and it still retains a large blue enamel sign saying BRITISH RAILWAYS LOWESTOFT CENTRAL, although it is a long time since BR ceased to exist and even longer since Lowestoft had any other stations to confuse it with.

  It is a long time too, since holiday trains disgorged thousands here every summer Saturday or loaded fish wagons crossed the road from the docks. In their Edwardian heyday Lowestoft and Yarmouth were among the herring capitals of Europe, landing up to a billion fish a year and dispatching fish trains every hour to London and the Midlands as well as to Harwich for export to Europe. Even the fish waste, processed by hundreds of young women who travelled down from Scotland especially to do the gutting, was dispatched from here – dyed green and destined to be spread on East Anglian fields. The smell is said to have been indescribable.

  These days the herring quays are deserted and the fish trains have gone. The produce – mostly shellfish – from the tiny remaining inshore fleet is loaded into the back of vans. Lowestoft’s PR people have done a brave job rebranding the town as the capital of the ‘Sunrise Coast’ although this does not seem persuasive as I wait two hours in the drizzle for my connection to London. Still the 16.58 to Liverpool Street is a train worth waiting for, and the journey over the East Suffolk Line through Beccles, Saxmundham and Woodbridge is one of the great secret treats of the national system.

  This is a line that should never, in any logical world, have survived. Although it was once a main line in its own right, it runs parallel to the Great Eastern main line from Norwich through Stowmarket and was thus targeted early by Beeching for closure. Never mind that it was used by crack expresses such as The Easterling – hauled by Sir Nigel Gresley’s famous Sandringham Class – it had to go as ‘surplus to requirements’. But Beeching did not reckon with the tenacity of the local Suffolk burghers, nor the obduracy of one of his lieutenants, who happened to live along the line. Gerard Fiennes, general manager at the time of the British Railways Eastern Region, believed that Beeching was wrong in his view that rural railways could never pay their way and should thus be eliminated. Why not try simplified signalling, single tracks, pay trains and automated level crossings first? argued Fiennes. (Determination clearly runs in the family, since his relative is the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.) Eventually he was sacked for writing a book called I Tried to Run a Railway, which displeased Labour transport minister Barbara Castle, who presided over many of the Beeching closures. But Fiennes’s legacy lives on. Mrs Castle reprieved the East Suffolk Line and it thrives to this day on the ‘basic railway’ principles he espoused, linking sleepy villages, ancient treasures and areas of outstanding natural beauty on its 117-mile route to London.

  I’ve invested in a first-class ticket to sit behind the driver on this modern Turbostar train so I can eavesdrop on the patter as he negotiates our way to Ipswich with the radio-controlled signalling centre at Saxmundham, using virtual tokens issued by a computer rather than the big brass keys or tablets that drivers once had to swap with signalmen to enter single-track sections. (However, the East Suffolk was always double track throughout, with conventional signalling, until downgraded by Beeching into its present mode of operation.) Only three people and a computer are needed to operate the entire line these days, but from my position at the front of the train, this is grand travel indeed, with only seven well-upholstered first-class seats in an exclusive closed-off section, although there are no refreshments, not even a cup of tea in a plastic container from a trolley. With fifteen stations and more than twenty level crossings between here and Ipswich – and pulling into passing loops, to make way for northbound trains – this is not going to be a fast journey. The trains are slowed down still further by the ‘sawtooth’ gradients on the line, which was built on the cheap in the 1850s, avoiding cuttings, embankments and bridges wherever possible. This is just as well, since the understated scenery of east Suffolk is best enjoyed at a slow pace.

  The line rises from Beccles, plunges into Halesworth and climbs again out of the town on the far side of the River Blyth. These cosy little market towns, off the beaten track, still have a life of their own as centres for the surrounding villages, though once they were junctions for a series of little lines that branched off to the coast. At Halesworth, until 1929 when it shut, you could change for the narrow 3-foot gauge line to Southwold. Passenger services from Saxmundham to Aldeburgh lasted until 1965, long enough to serve the town’s most famous resident, Benjamin Britten, on his journeying to and from London. Today it is still open to Leiston for a rather less artistic function – carrying spent nuclear waste from Sizewell power station. At Woodbridge, one of the nicest towns on the East Suffolk Line, the station has been restored and you can almost dip your toes in the River Deben, which laps along the lineside. There are superb views of the town on one side and the estuary on the other. The fabulous gold treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial site are located not far from here. Those in search of what is reputedly the best all-day breakfast near the Suffolk coast need look no further than the Whistlestop Café in Woodbridge’s old Great Eastern station building, named by the Guardian the second-best railway station buffet in Britain.

  Before we join the main line at Ipswich there is a long stop, and the driver jumps down from his cab to make an agitated phone call to the signalling centre, with an incantation of numbers and codes. There is a ‘failure of lineside equipment’, he announces to passengers over the intercom, meaning that we get to Liverpool Street half an hour late. The Grade I-listed building with its magnificent iron roof is the most cathedral-like of the great London termini and is at its most dramatic as dusk is falling. But I ponder on an even bigger marvel than this – that it is possible in the modern age to travel with ease from the smallest station in Britain to the third-busiest. What a score! Berney Arms 1,014 passengers a year; Liverpool Street 57.8 million.

  CHAPTER TWELVE

  THE 07.06 FROM FORMBY – THE STATIONS THAT CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

  Formby to Chester-le-Street, via Southport, Manchester, Stalybridge, Huddersfield, Penistone, Bar
nsley and Sheffield

  No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

  On the Slow Train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road.

  No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat

  At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.

  We won’t be meeting again

  On the Slow Train

  FUNNY THE WAY some of the most unpredictable things have the power to resonate through the decades. Even to people who haven’t a clue who Beeching was or what he stood for, the name still produces a frisson. ‘Doing a Beeching’ – there no mistaking the meaning, shorthand for the senseless axing of public services. Private Eye magazine still runs a satirical column about the railways called ‘Dr B. Ching’. And so it is with some of the words of the comic songwriters Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. This odd couple of middle-aged middle-class men in suits, one in a wheelchair and the other seated at the piano, seem permanently frozen in the black-and-white era of 1950s entertainment. Yet many of their songs have entered the national psyche. Who doesn’t remember ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud’ or ‘That big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, 97-horsepower omnibus’? Or ‘Slow Train’, written in 1963, the year of the Beeching report. The song is a litany of some of the poetic-sounding country stations that were due to be closed by Beeching. But it is something more than that. It is an elegy to a vanishing, less-hurried way of British life, and no less resonant now than when it was first written. You can find it on YouTube, and there have been several cover versions, including one adapting the lyrics to the stations on the route of the Orient Express.