Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Under Virgin I could have sent him down to The Shop to buy some. Instead, I crumpled, and moved to the far end of the carriage where there was a solitary seat which, according to the electronic display, was available until Leeds, and it didn’t actually say it was booked from there. Anyway, the dipsticks who reserve seats never turn up; it’s a well-known fact.

  The age-profile of the travellers was odd, I began to notice. The average was about the same as you would expect but it was made up of the very old and the very young. There was a high percentage of puzzlers, readers – Daily Telegraph readers in particular – and the deaf. The last two categories tended to overlap. One woman was reading out news items to her very hard-of-hearing and very elderly white-haired companion.

  ‘Solicitor who spent victims’ £220,000 on strippers is struck off!’ she said, very slowly and distinctly, for the whole carriage to hear.

  ‘Struck off!’ repeated the old lady, as though this seemed unduly harsh.

  There was also the news of the funeral of Gwynneth Dunwoody, the Labour MP. ‘It’s Mrs Dunwoody’s funeral. You know, the wife of the doctor in Totnes.’

  ‘She wasn’t very well-liked in Totnes,’ the old lady said.

  ‘Oh, I think she was a very staunch MP.’

  This cut no ice whatever. ‘Not very well liked at all.’3

  We progressed through the broad country of Gloucestershire and Worcestershire. This looked achingly beautiful, flecked with buttercups and may blossom, sometimes with an old orchard in full bloom. Spring lambs skittered away from the passing monster, perhaps terrified by the whiff from the toilets. The old lady was unimpressed. ‘It’s not going very fast,’ she said.

  ‘It’s been going at quite a rate,’ said her companion defensively. ‘It’s been going along. But I don’t think it’s been making much of an effort.’

  She was quite right. Privatized trains are not meant to make an effort. They have to be on time to avoid a fine, and the timetable is designed to ensure that it’s difficult for them not to be on time.

  We reached the once-famous Lickey Incline, the steepest sustained gradient on the network: two miles at 1 in 37 north of Bromsgrove Station. It used to pose terrible problems for steam locomotives, and special engines (‘Lickey Bankers’) were kept on hand to give them an extra shove. These days, it is barely noticeable, and the train hardly slows.

  It slowed down on the flat instead. We crawled the last few miles into Birmingham, stuck behind a goods train, only just managing to overtake a narrowboat on the Worcester & Birmingham canal. There were quite a few railwaymen standing around now, heading for New Street and the start of their shift. Some were discussing their new bosses. ‘What you’re trying to tell me, Dave, is that apart from being a load of penny-pinching bastards, Arriva are all right?’

  I got talking to an old hand about the privatized railway in general. ‘It’s the little things that have changed,’ he mused, ‘The things that don’t get done. The piles of rubbish by the line. Cleaning the weeds. No one’s in charge.’ There is also the strange fact that, even when a train fails to make an effort, as the old lady said, and then gets stranded, it remains notionally punctual.

  The character of the train changed at New Street. It was Friday afternoon, and people were starting to leave their offices for the weekend, so a more businesslike, more middle-aged crowd joined the throng. And it was a throng now; they were standing even in first-class. Further down the train, Chris from Lincoln had been sitting on his kitbag since Exeter St Davids.

  ‘I’ve slept in worst places than this,’ he said cheerfully.

  ‘Such as?’

  ‘A snowy field for three nights with people shooting at you.’

  He had just come back from Lympstone, where he had passed the famously vicious three-day test for the Royal Marines. ‘I can’t get up anyway,’ he said. ‘I’m completely knackered.’

  Others were less content. ‘It’s always a nightmare on a Friday,’ said one regular, standing till Sheffield. ‘It’s no good them apologizing. They know it’s Friday. They should put an extra carriage on.’ He must spend the rest of his week in a logical world, where common sense can apply. But this is the railway, and we are on a train set. It’s not a sensible train set, like my old Tri-ang, for which Auntie Maisie could buy an extra carriage on my birthday. The Voyagers come in sets of four or five; so to add to this five-car set, they would have to add at least another four carriages. And the process of doing that is far too complicated for a Friday afternoon; suffice to say it involves the siphoning off of the taxpayers’ and passengers’ money in another direction entirely.

  Anyway, I didn’t feel much sympathy for him. My niece Jenny, who uses this line regularly between Sheffield and her in-laws in Cheltenham, has often had to spend the journey sitting on her luggage even when heavily pregnant. And, the hell with them, I still had my seat, covered with the detritus of the long-term inmate. I was thinking of applying for permission to stick pin-ups on the wall and maybe get a vase of flowers to make it more homely. I hadn’t seen anyone standing who was old, lame or pregnant enough to make me feel uncomfortable about sitting. Compared to me, they were all just passing through.

  However, I was starting to feel uncomfortable in another way. A third toilet was out of action now and I had needs. It was not an enticing prospect. This was British train travel at its most disgusting. It was often like this for the 118 years when the railways were initially private; and then for the 49 years when they were nationalized; and it’s the same again now that they are re-privatized. Bad seats, bad toilets, bad food. Slow, grubby, inadequate. But it wasn’t really a ‘nightmare’ (that all-purpose Britishism), not for me. I was still enraptured by the sight of England, even while we passed through the less obviously lovely bits of it. Sheffield station was a particularly pleasant surprise: it looked light, airy and rather welcoming: the awnings have been painted up in a fresh silvery-grey with a white rose motif that may have been intended to designate Yorkshire, but actually gave the whole thing the pleasing air of an upmarket tart’s boudoir. And then Leeds.

  Leeds!

  I’d forgotten all about the reservation notice. Nemesis arrived in the shape of a young man called Angus who had two mobile phones, a pinstripe suit and an earnest expression. ‘I think this is my seat,’ he said, with some degree of confidence.

  So I wandered along to The Shop, which still had six sandwiches, possibly the same ones. My new host was as baffled by his employers as his predecessors. ‘If you’ve got a businessman going from Edinburgh to Bristol, he wants a bit of comfort, decent catering,’ he mused. ‘Why not serve him breakfast? Wouldn’t that help attract him? But when have you ever known the railways take a long-term view?’ At Darlington, the coffee machine bust. The good news was that Angus vanished at Newcastle, and I got my seat back. Shortly afterwards, the train manager said two of the four toilets were now working; he was inclined to blame us, and said we should not put nappies or sanitary towels down them. It was not clear where else on this train you might put a nappy or sanitary towel, but that was not my problem.

  Indeed (having found a functioning toilet), I was having some trouble remembering what problems I did have: what my life had been like before I joined this train. At Alnmouth we caught the sea again; the sun came out, and so did the evening golfers. I finally struck up a conversation with a passenger I had spotted on my regular patrols who had been there almost as long as I had: he was doing Truro to Inverkeithing, the whole thing bar half an hour at the start and an hour at the end. ‘I’ve never done it before and I won’t do it again,’ he said. ‘It’s very full and very slow.’

  In fact we could have both sliced about twelve minutes off the journey time by catching the slightly later train from Cornwall to London, going by tube from Paddington to King’s Cross, taking a fast train to York and then getting this one – a more elaborate version of the game the adventurous can play on the little steam train that loops up to Darjeeling: jumping out, and then catch
ing it up again.

  Edinburgh came and went. It was misty now, and the Forth Bridge was visible only faintly if you looked back from the Fife beaches, where the sea was rippling gently, providing an illusion of the Caribbean. We fell behind schedule in Fife, and at Cupar I began to get quite excited by the possibility that we would be eleven minutes late, justifying the title of this book, and ensuring that Arriva would be fined.

  We were seven minutes early into Dundee. They do it by magic, or sleight of hand at any rate.

  The Even Slower Train Further North

  But the day’s travel was still not over. To get to Thurso the next afternoon, I had to position myself in Perth for an early start, which meant a sixteen-minute trip on First Scotrail (First Great Western’s more reliable brother). It notionally takes up to twenty-five minutes if the train has come from Aberdeen or somewhere, and they have to play the same kind of silly buggers over the scheduling.

  The trick is to make the timing between the last two stations ludicrously long so that in almost every case it is possible to make up the time lost. It is a fraud on the public that makes train travel unnecessarily slow, but it is good enough for the government, the regulators and the passengers’ feeble representatives.

  We followed the banks of the Tay which, as night fell, looked very unsilvery. And the surrounding fields were full of polytunnels and rape, making it slightly less attractive than the stretch north of Birmingham New Street. At Perth station there was a large advert:

  NEW ROUTE!

  Dundee to Birmingham

  From £34.99 on Flybe!

  Next morning, there were David and Pru Jeffrey, two Edinburgh doctors who were walking from John o’Groats to Land’s End on behalf of the Mercy Corps, raising money to improve the lives of people in villages round Darjeeling. They were waiting for the Inverness train on Platform 7: Perth has a surprisingly expansive station, and reaching Platform 7 is a serious hike in itself. Rather improbably, Pru was carrying a copy of the Financial Times.

  ‘Only for the crossword,’ she said, hastily, and added just as quickly: ‘We’re just going to the start, and then we begin walking. People think we’re cheating, going by train.’ Cheating? Lord, no. I thought they were doing it the hard way. Loads of people walk from one end of Britain to the other. Four thousand people a year are said to cycle it. There was a bloke who did it naked. Who does it my way? Shouldn’t I have touted for sponsorship?

  The stretch north of Perth is where travellers on the Inverness sleeper are woken by the attendant with a nasty cup of tea and even nastier bread roll. Then they open their eyes and the window blind and – wow! – they’re in the Highlands. At Dunkeld we had to wait for a southbound coming out of the single-track section and had the chance to get out, a tricky operation since Dunkeld has eccentrically low platforms.

  But this was a welcome opportunity. There is no chance of God’s fresh air on these air-conditioned so-called Turbostars, and Scotland smelt tingling-fresh that morning, even above the mild whiff of diesel. George the conductor was not a fan of the Turbostars. ‘I think they should bring a proper engine instead of these things,’ he said. ‘The heating goes hot-cold, hot-cold. And they’re nowhere near big enough. This summer they’ll be absolutely packed. Aye. Absolutely packed, it’ll be. Well, we’re doing our best to stop people going on trains, and they just keep on coming. They got nae consideration.’

  At Pitlochry there was a wonderfully mad station building with what Biddle calls rusticated quoins, and completely pointless ornamentation on top. Everywhere there was spring green, silver birches and dancing rills. And north of Blair Atholl we were confronted by Beinn A’Ghlo, a long sinuous mountain, still snow-flecked in May, a combination that made it look like a spume-topped breaker about to crash down on the glen.

  At Aviemore we passed a train hired by a railtour company in the nostalgia business. It comprised turgid old coaches with vile red seats pulled by a couple of foul old diesels. I remember those trains well, relics of the Darkest Ages of the railways. The tables were laid not just for lunch but for luncheon: crisp white linen, cut flowers, and a beautifully printed menu which we couldn’t quite read although someone thought they had spotted the word ‘chicken’. And everyone went ‘Oooh’, as though the train itself were special.

  Ridiculous.

  David, Pru and I only had a few minutes to catch one of the three trains a day leaving Inverness for the far north, which was a frantic pace for a very unfrantic line. For a fit crow with a good sense of direction and rations for the journey, it is barely seventy-eight miles from Inverness to the end of the line in Wick. By road it is 106 miles and takes about two hours with a good run. By rail it is 175 miles and takes nearly four and a half hours.

  Wick is not the northern extremity of the line, though it is now the terminus. Traditionally, the train always ambled as far as Georgemas Junction, the most northerly junction on Britain’s railways and undoubtedly the most placid. Then it would split into two, half heading south to Wick and the other half north to Thurso. Now it takes a cheaper, more long-winded option, turning first to Thurso before returning down to Georgemas ( . . . so good it calls there twice!), and thence to Wick before coming back to Georgemas and Thurso again.

  I made a unilateral decision that Thurso was really the end of the line because (a) it made geographical sense; (b) I had someone to see there; and (c) enough was enough.

  This distant limb of the British railway system has been a candidate for amputation since at least the 1930s, when the War Office intervened to save it. And many of the smallest stations and the various branches – twigs, more like – had gone even before Dr Beeching could have the pleasure of picking them off in the 1960s. These included the old single-track line that trudged through the Black Isle to Fortrose, and gave rise to an old Highland joke: ‘Aye,’ said the traveller as the train finally pulled into Inverness. ‘Well, that’s the worst o’ the journey over, noo.’ ‘How much further do you have to go then?’ he was asked. ‘China.’

  Beeching did include the main line, if you can call it that, on his list of closures. But there was a certain worrying symbolism in cutting the railway from such a vast tract of country, especially as it happened to include three marginal seats. The government held off and, with a minimalist approach to staffing and signalling costs, the Far North line and its western sideshoot to Kyle of Lochalsh have clung on.

  But, golly, it’s one for the connoisseurs. From Inverness we crept round the south side of the Beauly Firth at a pace that would not have taxed David and Pru on foot. We passed wee Beauly, recently re-opened and arguably the tiniest of the 2,500-odd stations on the network (the platforms at Betjeman’s favourite, Dilton Marsh Halt in Wiltshire, are even shorter, but Beauly only has the one). Then we headed north, skirting the Black Isle, to Dingwall.

  About half the seats in the two carriages had been reserved for a party travelling from Dingwall to Ardgay. They proved to be passengers on a coach trip, mostly elderly ladies from Dunfermline, heading for the Falls of Shin, which turns out – and I am not making this up – to be a Harrods outlet store in the middle of nowhere (‘See Mr Al Fayed for yourself as he graces the entrance courtesy of a genuine Madame Tussaud’s waxwork.’) The idea was to give the coach travellers a little taste of the train to break up their journey.

  ‘We’re going to see a waterfall,’ said one old lady.

  ‘Nooo, I don’t think so,’ said her companion. ‘Shopping.’

  ‘I don’t mind, as long as they tell us when to get off.’

  ‘TIME TO GET OFF!’ bawled Dennis the conductor obligingly as soon as we got to Ardgay.

  I did my best to help David and Pru with the FT crossword, and at the little request stop of Rogart was joined by Frank Roach who had agreed to spend an hour with me to chat about the route. Frank works, as development manager for the Highland Rail Partnership, in the station house at Lairg, the next stop back down the line, and actually lives in the station house at Rogart. He walked onto
the train straight from his own kitchen clutching his own mug of tea.

  Frank was not terribly impressed that I had come up from Penzance: he was brought up there and is clearly the world’s leading expert on train travel from Penzance to Thurso. He says you can get as far as Tain, about a quarter of the way north of Inverness, in a single day – provided you don’t mess about with diversions to Dundee. One senses that some people are attracted to geographical extremes the way others are attracted to political extremes. All the ex-communists in New Labour gleefully turned into right-wing authoritarians when given a hint of power, without ever pausing for breath in the middle ground. Frank no doubt would be very unhappy living in Warwickshire.

  For anyone connected with rail in the Highlands, the bridge over the Dornoch Firth is the Holy Grail, which would knock about forty minutes off the journey to Thurso. A road bridge over the firth opened in 1991, but the Conservative government, for a piffling saving, kept trains off it. ‘The Scottish Office thought that would ensure the railway would wither away,’ says Frank.

  Now, with devolution, the Far North Line is probably further away from closure than at any time since the First World War, especially with the impending decommissioning of the Dounreay nuclear power station, which will necessitate the secure transport of all kinds of nasty stuff. But the bridge seems to have receded towards the realms of impossibility, and the railway lurches off for miles into Sutherland before remembering where it’s going and spending another stretch eccentrically heading south-east.

  We stopped at Golspie, said to be the first town that a motorist, driving to Thurso from London or Exeter, cannot realistically avoid. Above it is the huge and controversial statue of the First Duke of Sutherland, mastermind of the Highland clearances. Then came the old private station for the ducal castle, Dunrobin (or, bearing in mind the family origins, Done Robbin’). The fourth duke, a gentler soul who loved railways, helped finance the line and in return was allowed to run his own locomotives and rolling stock, a privilege that lasted until nationalization. The station building is a half-timbered pavilion, now a museum.