The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Most of today’s passengers would almost certainly agree with him. What a wealth of heritage was callously thrown away in almost every sphere of the railway’s operations. Tragic above all was the loss of the named Anglo-Scottish expresses. First introduced by the London & North Western Railway and the Caledonian Railway in 1862, the Royal Scot – running non-stop from Euston to Glasgow and leaving simultaneously from both stations at 10 a.m. – was one of the most famous trains in the world. From the 1930s onwards, it would always be hauled by one of Sir William Stanier’s powerful Coronation or Princess Class locomotives, and even in the 1950s was still celebrated as one of the world’s grandest trains.

  The text on the back of its restaurant car wine list in 1957, which you could peruse over your aperitif, rhapsodised:

  The Royal Scot is the lineal descendant of the first train which, in February 1848, linked the Thames with the Clyde, travelling by the West Coast route, the first all-rail route between London and Glasgow. Today The Royal Scot still holds a leading place in the list of British named trains. Throughout the years, the comfort and amenities of the train have been steadily improved, to culminate in the smooth-riding, all-steel carriages of the latest British Railways design.

  A few years later none of this seemed to matter, and the name was binned in 1973.

  Over at King’s Cross the same fate befell other famous Scottish trains, such as the Talisman and the Elizabethan. The Talisman was the heir to the pre-war streamlined morning express to Edinburgh – the Coronation – and was always hauled by the most immaculate locomotives the King’s Cross shed could provide. The name even lasted into the era of the HST diesel trains, before finally expiring in 1991. The Elizabethan, named for the coronation of Queen Elizabeth II in 1953, was the most heavily loaded fast train in Britain at 420 tons. It last ran under steam in September 1961, although the headboard was still carried for a time by the Deltic diesels that took over the line in 1962.

  Equally sad was the loss of the holiday trains. The most famous, the Atlantic Coast Express, was axed in the 1960s despite a noble history bearing generations of families with their buckets and spades to the resorts of Devon and Cornwall. The ACE, as it was known, dated back to 1926, and in its heyday carried more through portions to more destinations than any other named train in Britain. Even as late as the summer of 1963 there were five departures from Waterloo: 10.15 a.m. with through coaches to Ilfracombe and Torrington; 10.35 a.m. through to Padstow and Bude; 10.45 a.m. with sections to Seaton and Lyme Regis; more at 11 a.m. to Torrington and Ilfracombe and yet another departure at 11.15 through to Plymouth, Padstow and Bude. Despite such demand, it was abruptly and painfully axed on 5 September 1964. We may perhaps be thankful that today’s First Great Western franchise has revived the title, but this is affixed to a train on a different route, running from Paddington via Reading to Newquay. True fans regard it as an outrage and a heresy that the pride and joy of the Southern Railway should be hijacked by its old rivals at the Great Western.

  The previous year had seen the end too for that other famous seaside express, the Scarborough Flyer. Unlike the ACE, this one really did go fast. Launched in 1927 and running only in the summer months, the service was boosted in 1935 with its timing cut to three hours between King’s Cross and York, making it one of the fastest trains of the day. There was an added bonus for schoolboy trainspotters in that it was regularly hauled by the cream of the LNER’s locomotive fleet. Imagine the double thrill of setting off for a fortnight at the seaside with Mallard or Flying Scotsman on the front of the train. There was mourning indeed when the last service ran on 8 September 1963. Today the North Yorkshire resort has no through trains to the capital of any kind.

  The end of the titled trains, to which so many regions of Britain lent their name, meant that the British seaside would never be the same again. No more would genteel folk take afternoon tea aboard the Pullman cars of the Bournemouth Belle on their way to select private hotels on the Dorset coast with ‘H&C water and interior-sprung mattresses in all rooms’. The era of luxury was terminated on 9 July 1967, when commuter-style electric trains took over the line. Gone too was the Southern Region’s all-Pullman Devon Belle, with its famous observation car at the rear. Hopeful travellers from the north were no better off; the celebrated Devonian from Bradford to Paignton was pulled in 1975.

  Never more would you be able to buy tickets for the holiday trains of East Anglia, steaming out of Liverpool Street to Hunstanton, Lowestoft, Yarmouth and Cromer with their marvellous regional names – the Fenman, the Broadsman and the Easterling. No longer would Glaswegians escape to the fresh air of St Andrews aboard the Fife Coast Express. The legendary Pines Express, which bore the toiling masses from the factories and mills of Liverpool and Manchester across the Mendip Hills for a refreshing fortnight on the south coast came to an abrupt end when the Somerset & Dorset line, which provided a direct route avoiding London, was closed.

  In fact, almost every social tribe of Britain was diminished as the lights went out one by one on the great named trains. No more excited emigrants to far-flung corners of the world on the Ocean Liner Express to Southampton, nor hiking boots and crampons on the Lakes Express from Euston to Windermere. Hard-nosed West Midlands businessmen would miss sealing their deals after a trip up to the smoke on the Midlander or the Inter-City. Doing business in Manchester would never be the same after the demise of the Palatine or in Liverpool without the Merseyside Express or in Hull minus the Hull Pullman.

  How much less glamorous continental travel would be with the loss of the Golden Arrow and the Hook Continental, with its onward connections to Amsterdam and beyond. The Isle of Man would never be the same without the Manxman, nor Belfast and Dublin without the Shamrock. How dull to have to travel to Butlin’s without a reserved seat on the Butlin’s Express dashing to Skegness on a train headed by one of the LNER’s famous Football Class locomotives.

  Some of these grand old trains didn’t give up without a struggle. Passengers, led by actor Lord Olivier, fought back when British Railways started to run down the Brighton Belle, the world’s first all-electric Pullman train, at the end of the 1960s. The famous thespian’s protest received media coverage across the world. But to no avail: the train was withdrawn entirely on 30 April 1972.

  But recently – whisper it not too loudly – the fashion has been reviving. First Great Western, East Coast and East Midlands Trains were all still running a modest stable of namers in 2014. Even Abellio – a subsidiary of the Dutch state rail company – operated a solitary named train on its London to Norwich route. New ones even occasionally enter the constellation, such as the Sheffield Continental – so named because it connects with the Eurostar to Paris at St Pancras International. Thankfully there is still some spirit of poetry and romance in the press and publicity offices of some of our hard-nosed private railway companies.

  But there is no escaping the fact that, no matter how romantic the name, the bearers are all anonymous trains in standard formation. Apart from the Flying Scotsman, with its adman’s vinyls plastered across the locomotive, they do not carry headboards, mostly making do with a bit of card or paper affixed to a window and some small print in a timetable. They go mostly unrecognised by their passengers, unless you happen to be a nostalgist or an anorak.

  Today’s Cornish Riviera Express still departs daily from Paddington for Penzance, but is operated by a diesel HST packed full of tight aircraft-style seating to cater for Home Counties commuters. It is a poor thing compared with its predecessor, which in its 1930s heyday would have included the Great Western’s sumptuous Centenary coaches and been hauled by one of the monarchs of the locomotive fleet – a mighty Great Western Railway King Class locomotive resplendent with burnished copper and brass and immaculate Brunswick-green paintwork. But at least today’s train has the virtue of going faster, reaching Penzance half an hour quicker than in the 1950s.

  In fact, for all their ordinariness, most of today’s titled trains are nippier than the
ir predecessors. Today’s West Riding, an identikit Inter City 225 leaving King’s Cross at 06.30, may not offer much glamour compared with its 1937 predecessor – one of the most exciting streamlined trains in the world, with its dedicated articulated dining coaches pulled by a speed-record-breaking garter-blue A4 class Pacific – but the timing to Leeds then was 2 hours 43 minutes, compared to less than two and a half hours today. So let’s be thankful for the ones we have got – at least they remind us of the heritage and allow us to bring back the spirit of the glamour of the railways, albeit vicariously.

  Could we see yet more return? So far, all the various operators of the line have stuck resolutely behind the Flying Scotsman, and who could deny that a few hearts continued to flutter as my modern train rushed non-stop through Berwick, Durham and York. The east coast has a clutch of other long-distance namers, including the Highland Chieftain to Inverness and the Northern Lights to Aberdeen. First Great Western still flies the flag of its heritage in the west, running eighteen named trains, including such evocative titles from the past as the Cathedrals Express and the Merchant Venturer. The humbly titled East Midlands Trains at St Pancras has attached some glamour to itself by perpetuating the Master Cutler and the Robin Hood. The East Anglian, to Norwich – in continuous service since its inauguration as a streamliner in 1937 – makes a daily appearance at Liverpool Street, showing there is some poetry in the hearts of its Dutch operators.

  Over at Euston on the west coast main line the mood has been more utilitarian. Not so long ago the Red Rose would depart proudly to Liverpool or the Comet to Manchester. The Royal Highlander would set off in full pomp to Inverness and the Lakes Express bear off a train full of folk to tread in Wordsworth’s footsteps at Buttermere and Keswick. Scarcely an hour would go by without a named train letting off steam in one of Euston’s platforms. These days you can spend an entire day watching the destination board flash and not encounter a single named train, although there is a night service that runs under the corporate title Caledonian Sleeper, which is informally known to its fans as the Deerstalker Express.

  Can it be that Virgin Trains boss Richard Branson – that master of modern branding – has suffered a lapse of creativity? Surely in his ever-imaginative PR world there might be room to recreate the romance of the named trains we have lost? When I put the question to the Virgin west coast press office, they scratched their heads. Ever charming, they said, ‘We’ll have to put this one to the marketing team.’ And eventually the answer came back: ‘The Virgin brand is well understood by customers and Virgin believes that consistent brand messaging should apply across all its services. It has therefore chosen not to name any of its train services.’

  That’s the end of that then. But never say never. Back in 1961, when the Euston Arch was brutally hacked down, whoever would have thought it would rise again? Yet a reconstruction of the arch has now been incorporated in the blueprint for a new Euston, where it is expected to be a totemic symbol of the new £50 billion HS2, scheduled to open in 2026. Memo to Sir Richard and all the other grandees with a stake in the heroic new Euston. What a marvellous marketing ploy it would be to name a train with a suitably romantic title to match. Get ready to book your tickets for the Coronation Scot 2 …

  Chapter Six

  The train that got ahead of its time

  Scousers knew it as the Docker’s Umbrella. In its heyday the Liverpool Overhead Railway was a state-of-the art urban transit system; now it is just a memory on Merseyside. But its vision is emulated round the world.

  I’M WHIZZING IN almost celestial fashion over the rooftops of one of the busiest and buzziest cities on the planet. Below are the teeming streets of Bangkok, eleven million population and growing fast. But the noise, tangled traffic, choked alleyways, stench, simmering heat and melting pot of humanity that is the Thai capital could be a world away, since I’m ensconced coolly aboard the Skytrain, the world’s busiest and most modern elevated urban railway.

  Effortlessly and silently, the fast silver and blue air-conditioned electric trains whisk more than 600,000 passengers daily high above the streets along a fifty-five-kilometre network of tracks. Since the line opened in 1999 it has become possible to cross this gigantic metropolis in minutes, liberated from the hooting, parping tangle of cars, buses, scooters and rickshaws in the streets below. This may be the Third World, but sailing along aboard my train, I’m happy to be in Parallel World.

  Cut to another mighty commercial city on the other side of the globe, and I’m trudging through the backstreets of Liverpool fringing the brown waters of the Mersey in search of another great urban elevated railway, one now vanished into the recesses of time. Like the Skytrain, the Liverpool Overhead Railway was a marvel of its age. The Ovee or Docker’s Umbrella, as it was known, was the world’s first electric elevated railway and the first rail system to use that underrated wonder of modern transport, the escalator.

  The Liverpool Overhead Railway was an international pioneer in other ways too, deploying Britain’s first automatic semaphore signals and then the first electric coloured lights, a technology that controls most modern trains today. In its heyday, at the end of World War I, the short six-and-a-half-mile route was carrying around twenty-two million passengers a year. The rattle of the trains, with their austere brown wooden carriages suspended on girders sixteen feet above the street, was the definitive background soundtrack to one of the world’s great port cities, which in its day was a mighty rival to New York. It is hard to imagine the shock to Merseyside when it was shut down in 1956. We had not yet encountered Dr Beeching, but it indisputably ranks as one of the most traumatic British railway line closures of all time.

  Few railway systems have been so completely obliterated as this great transport artery of the once-second city of the British empire, with all signs of it almost entirely purged. Which is why I’m standing at a cold bus stop on Lime Street waiting for the number 82 to Toxteth, hoping I might find the vestiges of the terminus in the docklands streets where the line once began. No Maggie Mays or drunken sailors on today’s Lime Street, with its boarded-up shops, just a gaggle of Chinese university students passing by on their way to the halls of residence fronting Lime Street station – a sign of changing times. The mood is also downbeat when I alight on Park Road, once the beating heart of the South Docks.

  In Liverpool’s commercial heyday these terraced streets would have been bustling; now even the ghosts seem to have packed up and gone home. The Queen’s Head pub on the corner of the appropriately Dickensian Dorrit Street is derelict. The Royal Oak, which would once have resonated with the optimism and zest for life of Scouse working-class culture, is boarded up. More poignant still is the grand art deco Gaumont Cinema. With its 1,500 seats and cavernous interior, this great dream factory once had the most modern projection system in the world. Now it is home to roosting pigeons, and water trickles down its once-splendid frontage. Sad that it is now not even in demand in its most recent incarnation as a bingo hall.

  But what’s this? Few might recognise it now, but on the corner of Kedlesdon Street, with its tiny terraced houses, buried deep below the ground under the derelict offices of an abandoned engineering works called Roscoe, are the remains of the Dingle terminus, virtually all that survives of the Ovee. After slumbering for half a century, it announced its presence in dramatic fashion in 2012 when the tunnel wall collapsed causing the houses above to be evacuated.

  Of course there have been other great elevated railways of the world. New York had its own, especially the famous Manhattan Railway and its Second, Third, Sixth and Ninth Avenue lines. The Boston Elevated Railway, with its distinctive orange trains, was part of the lifeblood of the city until much of it was closed in the 1980s. The 113-mile Chicago El or L lives on today as the third-busiest metro system in the US after New York and Washington, with 231 million passengers a year. But the Liverpool Overhead was in a class of its own – the first, the most revolutionary and, in the hearts of the people of this most heart-on-the-sl
eeve of cities, probably the most loved by the citizens who used it.

  The Docker’s Umbrella was not just another railway, it was a landmark and an institution embedded deep in the heart of all Scousers, as much cherished in its own day as the Beatles would be later – and John, Paul, George and Ringo knew it well as boys. When closure suddenly stole up on 30 December 1956 – because the cost of essential repairs had mounted to more than £2 million – disbelieving crowds lined the route, many in tears, scarcely comprehending what was happening. ‘Why had nobody foreseen this?’ the cry went up. But there were other priorities in a city which had only recently emerged from the terrible ravages of World War II and whose commercial fortunes were on the brink of calamity.

  The outpourings of nostalgia were all the more extravagant since the railway was linked in the minds of many Merseysiders with Liverpool’s one-time greatness as a port, which in the post-war world was starting to slip away with the rise of air travel, containerisation and the beginning of the tilt southwards in the economy of the nation. What a contrast to seventy years before, when the railway was first built. Liverpool’s docks were among the wonders of the world. Even by the eighteenth century the trade in manufactures, sugar and slaves had already created immense riches for the city’s merchants.

  Cotton was integral to the fabulous enrichment of the city, arriving in ships’ holds on the third leg of their triangular run: Lancashire’s wool and linen to west Africa, slaves in their thousands across to the Atlantic to the West Indies and American colonies, raw cotton, tobacco and rum back to Lancashire. Liverpool’s role in the world cotton trade was without rival, making it one of the richest non-capital cities on the planet. It was these profits that helped to finance that other great local transport undertaking – the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, Britain’s first fully steam-powered passenger line, in 1830.