According to the former regulator Tom Winsor: ‘The train operator nowadays has to ask permission to breathe in, and he may or may not get permission to breathe out again. Early franchising agreements just set minima. Now any change to the timetable, even additions, must be approved by the department. The operators are allowed to change the staff uniform, and whether there will be two sausages rather than one. That’s about it.’
It is perhaps not so surprising then that they are so obsessed with uniforms and paint. East Midlands Trains, the new domestic operator from St Pancras, is being graciously allowed to take delivery of three new coaches between 2010 and 2014. ‘Gee,’ said a manager, ‘I hope they don’t come all at once.’
There is no need to cry too much for the operators. They claim they only make a return of three or four per cent per annum from their franchises, but since their role involves almost no capital investment or risk, it is not clear what this means. Three per cent of what? Most show minimal commitment to the railways. In practice, they seem able to wriggle out of their contractual obligations, or even vanish entirely. They come, they go, they can give up and put their money in an Icelandic bank. In early 2009, as the economic crisis worsened, there were signs that this proposition might be tested.
Government hypocrisy about all this is breathtaking. In December 2008 The Times reported that Geoff Hoon, the latest transport secretary, had criticized the operators for their latest fare increases. Hoon had urged the companies to bear in mind ‘the difficult economic circumstances’ and was disappointed that they had ignored him. Yet government policy is that regulated fares should go up every year by an average of one per cent above inflation, rather than the original one per cent below, to shift the burden from the taxpayer to the passenger. You have to admire the man’s chutzpah. The main object of Labour railway policy has been to maintain plausible deniability; we are now moving to implausible deniability.
There is still a regulator charged with making sense of all this. His name is Bill Emery, but he is perhaps not quite as plain spoken as Winsor. Asked by The Times what he thought of the current railway set-up, he replied: ‘There are lots of people who say that the current structure is not optimal. I would probably take a raincheck on whether it’s ideal.’ That is presumably the more normal Whitehall way of providing Sir Richard Mottram’s summary of the situation: ‘It’s the biggest cock-up ever. We’re all completely fucked.’
The scandal is that still no one in authority has emerged with any vision of what the railway is for, and of the role it could and should fulfil in twenty-first-century Britain. The inability to invest means it can only get worse. In 2007 (a mere seventy-six years after the recommendations of the Weir Report) the government rejected the idea of further electrification, partly on the grounds that electricity could be superseded as a means of traction by ‘a truly renewable source of hydrogen, such as photosynthetic splitting of water using bioengineered algae’. Or indeed fairy dust.
In 2008 the minister du jour, Ruth Kelly, announced her conversion to the cause of electrification. This may have been connected to the discovery that, pending the arrival of green slime power, it will otherwise be outrageously expensive to get new trains for the lines out of St Pancras and Paddington because every other advanced country gave up on high-speed diesels years ago. This being Britain, this was not the prelude to action, merely a theoretical statement. She was gone within weeks anyway.
Since then, the new Minister of State, Lord Adonis, has been showing dangerous signs of being bright-eyed and bushy-tailed about new fast lines. All history suggests that his spirit will be broken even before he’s reshuffled. And with the country moving into recession, there was even less chance than usual of anything being done. The nature of a long-term transport scheme is that there will always be a recession at some point in the process which means that in Britain it will inevitably get axed.
John Major had a plan for the railways. It was a terrible plan, execrably executed. But looking back now on almost twelve years of Labour posturing and procrastinating, you can say this for him: at least he had a plan. At least he had a plan.
CHAPTER TEN
THURSO
You probably won’t remember this, but the author of the book was last seen (in Chapter Two) at the northern extremity of Britain’s railway network. I have been fine, honestly; and it was there in Thurso, the most northerly town on the British mainland, that I met the man who is probably Britain’s most northerly railway expert.
Mike Lunan is a retired actuary, and convener of the Friends of the Far North Line, which fights for the interests of the ever-fragile route from Inverness under the splendid acronym of FoFNL. He is a sagacious observer of life in general and railway politics in particular. Perhaps being on top of the world gives one a certain perspective.
We were sitting in his kitchen discussing why it is so hard to do anything in Britain when it comes to improving infrastructure. And Mike explained to me his ‘nine-year theory’, taking as an example the Dornoch Bridge, the project so beloved of Highland rail campaigners to cut a huge curve off the Far North Line, a project only likely to happen if the Messiah fetches up in Scotland, and turns out to be really nuts about trains.
Mike Lunan knows this better than anyone. So this is totally hypothetical. But anyway, he began:
Let’s just say that the minister wakes up one morning and says ‘Right, let’s build it. Action this day.’ First you go out and tender for the initial scoping, the investigation of the site. It takes about four months to publish the tender to get preliminary consultants in to prepare a report and costings that can be presented to the engineers. And it would probably require another tendering process to get the engineers in.
Then you have to go to detailed work. Is it good rock? Or are there environmental issues like a rare butterfly or newt? And so on. That’s another year to eighteen months. Then the government’s got to sit down and look at it. Can we afford it? Can we get round the business of the butterflies? Three months if they’re trying. Normally more.
Build it. You can’t just go to Bob McAlpine. Public work on this scale has to be tendered across Europe. Three months for that. Two to look at the answers. One month of delay. The minister can then appoint ABC Construction. Two to two and a half years so far, and that’s very fast.
At Dornoch you need an access tunnel to get the railway to the bridge south of the town. That would go under at least two houses which would be rendered uninhabitable. Government has to go to court to get compulsory purchase. Dum-de-dum.
Building the thing can’t take less than four years. It can but in practice it doesn’t. Then there will be the other things to do. The railway has to get the rails down. Including that, I reckon five years for building even if everything goes well. But it doesn’t . . .
And of course that assumes the project has not been politically controversial, that the minister is either still in office or been succeeded by someone equally enthusiastic, that there hasn’t been a financial crisis forcing cancellation, which there usually has been. And that the weather is favourable, there isn’t a strike, and that the components are delivered on time. So nine years seems to me pretty optimistic when all’s said and done.
In any case we are talking about a decision that would be taken by the Scottish government, and Scotland tends to be politically more consensual than England when it comes to these kinds of projects. It has a good record, since devolution, of bringing railway projects to fruition. And this is the Highlands: anywhere else would have far more than two houses facing destruction for almost any project of this sort.
Look at it this way, and it is no wonder at all that the English railway network has remained almost precisely what it was when the Beeching closures petered out forty years ago, like a woolly mammoth preserved beneath the Arctic permafrost. The only thing more politically fraught than opening a new and vital route is closing an old and useless one. Either way, there are always thousands of reasons why it cannot be done.
This problem is not unique to the railways.
The former transport minister Sir Malcolm Rifkind tells the story of the British minister complaining to his French counterpart about the impossibility of building anything: ‘Whatever we propose in Britain, there are huge protests, it takes eight years of public enquiries, and it still never gets built.’ ‘In France,’ replied the French minister, ‘when we want to drain the swamps, we don’t ask the frogs.’ (This has ramifications in English which the Frenchman may not have understood, but you get his drift.)
And so, in Britain, almost nothing happens. Addition and subtraction both involve such complex calculations that it is best to leave well alone. Politically, economically and environmentally, this may be insane. Yet the sheer illogicality of the British railway network does have a certain gloriousness. It is living history.
Every few years throughout my adult life I have bought the great thick railway timetable and stared lovingly at its Wisden-like pages – I am particularly fond of the distance tables – and the faraway places with strange-sounding names. Did you know that it’s twenty-one and three-quarter miles from Clitheroe to Hall i’th’Wood? I always stared most at the map that was tucked inside. They were probably still running steam trains when I first conceived the notion of taking the line to Kyle of Lochalsh, hitch-hiking down through Skye, and then catching another train from Mallaig to Glasgow . . .
Splendour, Splendour Almost Everywhere
For most of the year, there is only one train to Kyle of Lochalsh on a Sunday. I took no chances: I made my farewells to Mike Lunan on Thurso station on Saturday afternoon. Wearing his FoFNL hat, he was very proud of his station. It has left luggage lockers, a rare convenience these days in paranoid Britain. They cost £3 a day even though the station closes at 4.30pm, so the convenience is limited. But a visitor might be very pleased to see them.
The decoration was a bit random: a picture of a Union Pacific loco as well as Mallard and Evening Star, neither of them obviously associated with Thurso. And, to be honest, the whole place felt more like a garden shed than a trainshed. I didn’t want to upset him, but did pluck up the courage to say it was not quite on the scale of Penzance. ‘That’s southern, this is northern,’ he replied.
The junction for the Kyle line is at Dingwall, or Inbhir-pheofharain, as the station sign puts it. I formed the notion that this was an ancient Gaelic tourist slogan, meaning ‘In here out of the rain’. Next time I’ll opt to get wet. Dingwall is a sad-looking, run-down place. The hotel was dire, the staff surly and ugly, and the breakfast inedible. Through the long May evening, the streets were full of pre-adolescent children, feral yet obese, as though they were filming a twenty-first-century version of Lord of the Flies.
The Chinese restaurant was, to my surprise, less disgusting than normal in such towns, and I concluded that Dingwall could rank only third on my list of Britain’s Vilest Towns, behind the malevolently inhospitable dump of Caldicot in South Wales and . . . but, no, let me spare you the name of the winner until we get there.
On the map the Kyle line is the most enticing of them all. Just past Dingwall come the most euphonious grouping of stations on the entire system: Achanalt, Achnasheen, Achna-shellach. Field by the stream, Field of storms, Field of willows. I think.
Can we just pause for a moment to savour the beauty of these names?
There are other groupings of similar power elsewhere. What about Llandovery, Llanwrda, Llangadog, Llandeilo on the Heart of Wales line? English place names cannot quite compete with this: you have to look at words in a different way. The stations between Sleaford and Boston in Lincolnshire include Heckington, Swineshead, Hubberts Bridge. Or you might prefer Penge West, Anerley, Norwood Junction.
The translation of Achanalt was announced to the carriage by a rather loud know-all, an Englishman of course, which rather spoiled the moment. Like everyone else on the train, he was travelling for the sake of it. It is important on a train like this, I always feel – well, it’s important to me, anyway – to appear to be going somewhere (‘I am a traveller; you are a tourist; they are grockles’). David St John Thomas, who went on the line through Morayshire from Elgin to Lossiemouth before it closed in 1964, described the withering contempt of the guard when he discovered that all fifteen aboard were just enthusiasts. Everyone on this train had a guidebook and/ or a rucksack. They were all either grockles or enthusiasts, except me because my enthusiasm was starting to diminish.
The Kyle line is a little less beautiful than its place names suggest. Overall, the scenery is just a bit Jimmy-Shand-White-Heather-Club, you know, rather than West Highland spectacular. In places it is even rather ugly: the power line is intrusive, the Forestry Commission conifers are intrusive, the cars are intrusive, the building rubble is intrusive.
Yet the railway does not feel intrusive. One of the miracles of trains is the way they can come to feel like part of the ecosystem. Just before Achnashellach, a herd of deer skittered away from us. But they seemed to understand this was a ritual rather than a threat. Their Sunday was not going to be disturbed again until the return journey in the late afternoon. And then not till Monday.
Just after the Field of Storms, the wind got up a little – not that it affected us, in our sealed train – and then the sun came out. We were early at Strathcarron and were allowed on to the platform for a while. The conductor and driver had a slight disagreement about the exact time. It was not a serious problem. ‘Aye well, it’s the Kyle line,’ said Davey the conductor. ‘Set your calendar, not your watch.’
‘Do you get any real people on this line?’ I asked Davey.
‘Nooo, just plastic cones,’ he replied.
‘I mean people actually going anywhere, instead of us.’
‘We may pick up a few at Plockton going into Kyle for a bit of shopping, but not many, no.’
The cloud sat high on the top behind Strathcarron. We went through a tunnel that had windows enabling us to keep the view of the loch. Loch Carron is quite built up, but all the houses are on the other side of the loch, the north side, rendering the railway even more irrelevant.
At Stromeferry, on the banks of Loch Carron, we had another wait and Davey encouraged us to get out and take pictures. The loch glinted in the spring sunshine. The know-all did not know, or did not mention, what had happened here in the summer of 1882. One of the few good reasons for building this railway was the fish traffic. But the Highland Line’s business objectives, hard enough to achieve in these depopulated regions, were perpetually hampered by militant sabbatarians. And when the locals at Stromeferry realized that a fish train had been loaded there on a Sunday, they became incensed.
Aware of this, but anxious not to let the weekend catch linger until Monday, the railway company arranged to load the next weekend train in the early hours of Sunday morning. The workers unloading the fish were greeted by about fifty local men, who had brought clubs, bludgeons and a sense of divine wrath, a combination that enabled them to overpower the crew. And though that may sound quaint, the sabbatarians won the war as well as the battle. To this day, trying to catch a Sunday morning train anywhere in post-Christian Britain often involves acquiring an understanding of what it means when God’s grace has been withdrawn.
Kyle of Lochalsh would not be a major shopping destination if you lived further afield than Plockton, even on a weekday. On a Sunday the old rules apply. There was, surprisingly, a bus running, but it just went over the new road bridge to Skye, where there were no connecting buses available, forcing me to return to my ancient intent of hitch-hiking down to the ferry port at Armadale.
There also appears, however, to be a stern biblical injunction against cadging lifts on a Sunday. And my once reasonably effective hitching skills (involving strong eye contact and a pleading labrador-ish expression) may have gone somewhat rusty. I gave up and called a local taxi driver, who bored me rigid talking about his days as a butcher in Preston while the meter clicked upwards at a terrifying rate.
It was now one
of those lovely, rare West Highland afternoons that occur in that brief interval between the last knockings of winter and the midge-invasion. At Armadale, I dozed in the sunshine while waiting for the ferry and arrived in Mallaig to find a nice clean B&B and a lovely fish restaurant that was actually open.
The Monday morning 0603 from Mallaig to Glasgow Queen Street (164 ¼ miles, four hours twenty-five minutes) is as bleary-eyed as the 0603 anywhere else. The late Victorians crashed their way through the landscape, blasted through the crags, imposed themselves on this scene, so that German students, with only the vaguest idea exactly where they were or why, could doze as best they could on the train with a headrest that stopped just below an average-sized male shoulder blade.
The electronic indicator in the carriage was set so that the same message was repeated every fifteen seconds for the eighty-two minutes from Mallaig to Fort William, 328 times in all: PLEASE KEEP HOLD OF YOUR TICKETS WHEN LEAVING THE TRAIN. BARRIER CHECKS MAY BE IN OPERATION AT THIS STATION. Barrier checks may indeed have been in operation to bring about the prosecution and downfall of the extremely occasional passenger alighting at Morar (0609), Arisaig (0619), Lochailort (0634, by request only), Locheilside (0701 and ditto) and Banavie (0717), I mused. It might not have been the most sensible use of ScotRail’s resources.
Then a mobile rang, loudly.
Between Lochailort and Glenfinnan the most amazing scenery in the world was appearing before us. Sometimes we lost sight of the road on the far side of the loch and only the railway fences gave any indication that anyone had ever set foot here. We went over the twenty-one-span Glenfinnan viaduct (built by Sir Bob MacAlpine, without going through a European tendering process), as the Hogwarts Express does.1 Lone birch trees stood sentinel on their own hillocks, like bonsai. Wisps of cloud hung over the crags and then, beyond Glenfinnan station, poured through a cleft in the mountainside. The station clock there stood at ten to three.
Eleven Minutes Late Page 26
