You might ‘lern yerself some Scouse’ here as the train fills up. Gahan points out (and as a Scouser himself, he is not being patronising) that Liverpudlians like ‘to talk freely and for all to hear’. So you might be greeted by ‘Ullowhack’ or ‘Whereareyerworkinlads?’ You may also, if you are lucky, learn the art of striking a match on the sole of your boot or opening a beer bottle with your teeth. Curious, you may think, that the train itself is curiously quiet compared with the loud chatter on board. This is thanks to another Ovee innovation – flange lubricators set in the track, which automatically smear the rails with grease, eliminating the squealing as the trains pass, so as not to rattle the grand and sober offices of the Liverpool merchants hereby.
Heading north again along the Mersey there are no such constraints. The train’s motors build up to their characteristic whine as we pick up speed. Here are the city’s busiest docks, through Canada, Brocklebank, Alexandra and Gladstone. When the doors open here, you will find on the air the unmistakable salty whiff of the Atlantic. Gladstone Dock was the haunt of the great international liners, which would disembark their passengers here. In less busy times it was possible, for a modest price, to buy a permit from the Overhead booking office to take a tour of these behemoths before they departed, and to live out momentarily the glamour of being a transatlantic passenger for the price of just a few pence. Don’t be surprised to find a buzz of international conversation as the train doors open, or people asking in strange accents, ‘Is this place really England?’
And so on to the end of the line, where you might want to park your deckchair on the beach at Seaforth Sands, knot your handkerchief and focus your binoculars on the giant ships queuing up for their berths. Or you might change at Seaforth and Litherland onto a main line train, and head to Southport, where the sands would provide sunbathing with a little more class.
But no such whimsy for most Liverpudlians, bent on getting home in the rush hour. ‘The carriages are tightly packed,’ writes Gahan,
with home-going overalled men in peaked caps or battered trilbies until there was scarcely room to breathe, and at each station along the line, the platforms are thronged with prospective passengers up to six deep. As soon as the train comes to a halt the doors are flung open and they pile in, and woe betide anyone trying to alight. Courtesy is an absent virtue but everyone is cheerful and much banter is exchanged between various groups of men. Sometimes several will commence to sing and others will join in until the atmosphere becomes positively sociable, with an occasional good-humoured admonition to ‘shut up’ from colleagues reading their copies of the Liverpool Echo.
Sometimes itinerant salvationists would work the carriages, hoping to save the occasional soul; not much hope here – Liverpool’s dockers were never interested overmuch in God-botherers or do-gooders. The no-smoking notices were routinely disregarded, and the air in the carriages was usually thick with tobacco smoke. The fug on board is superbly recreated in a vignette of the railways in Terence Davies’s famously nostalgic film set in Liverpool in the 1940s and 1950s, Distant Voices, Still Lives, one of the most widely admired British films of the post-war era.
But it wasn’t to last. One slushy, grey, miserable day in February 1955 the headlines in the evening papers delivered a bombshell – the Docker’s Umbrella would have to close. There was disbelief throughout the city. One former engineer proclaimed, ‘If they stop the railway for one day, there will be anarchy on the docks!’ But the cold facts were irrefutable. Sixty years of weather had left the ironwork in such a fragile state that most of it would have to be renewed. Combined with this, the economic tide had turned. Liverpool’s importance as a world port was beginning to diminish, leading to cuts in the workforce, growing numbers of redundant warehouses and a shrinking economy. The cost of renovation was too much for the privately financed railway.
Even so, it had carried nine million passengers in the previous year – not surprising since fares were so competitive. A poster in 1955 advertised, ‘Save time, save money. The Overhead is still the cheapest transport in the city.’ And it certainly was – a weekly season ticket from Dingle to Pier Head cost just four shillings. In 1956 an eleventh-hour bid was made to save the railway, as the Mersey Docks & Harbour Board met to discuss the impact the closure would have on the working of the docks. Local councillors and trade unionists joined in the outcry. But it fell on deaf ears. The then transport minister, Harold Watkinson, ruled that there would be no government bailout, arguing that buses could do the job at a cheaper price. With a heavy heart the shareholders agreed to the closure and the winding-up of the Liverpool Overhead Railway Company.
That autumn sombre members of staff pasted up closure notices on all the stations, and it was a grim winter’s night indeed on 30 December when the service finally ended. The last trains left simultaneously at 10.03 p.m. – from Seaforth and Litherland in the north, in the charge of Driver Sutcliffe Fawcett, and Dingle in the south, with Driver Jack Mackey at the controls. Both final services were packed to the doors, and hundreds more tore themselves away from warm firesides to be able to tell their grandchildren that they had witnessed the line’s passing. There were bangs from the fog detonators placed along the track (probably the first time for years they had been used, since the line had automatic signalling), and flashes from the arcing conductor rails lit up the Three Graces. Sirens from ships all along the waterfront wailed a tribute through the cold night air. At one station staff wept as they passed the station cat through a train window to a passenger who had offered to adopt it.
As the final up train pulled in at Dingle, the crowds were reluctant to depart as a rumour did the rounds that the closure might be temporary. But the station inspector was already on the phone to Seaforth to check that the last down train had arrived. When he was satisfied, he pulled over the main switch for the final time, cutting the electric current and snuffing out the signal lights. The Liverpool Overhead Railway was well and truly dead. The anguish sounded even in the ranks of management. No less a figure than H. Maxwell Ruston, the company’s general manager, declared, ‘The time will come when Merseysiders must rue the day when they permitted the City Fathers to throttle the lifeblood of this unique undertaking.’
There is something intensely melancholy about any train consigned to spending its final days in a museum. But at least there is an entire gallery devoted to one of the former carriages of the Liverpool Overhead Railway in the new Museum of Liverpool on the waterfront. But for all its gloss and polish, it is more coffin-like than most. Sure, this last surviving car is immaculately restored, brass burnished and the panelling fragrant with beeswax. Even the SPITTING PROHIBITED sign has been lovingly polished. The memorabilia on the surrounding walls is beautifully curated, with yarns from former employees about their working lives. But the essence of the Docker’s Umbrella – the clangs and clanks, the shouts and banter from the dockers, the smoke and steam from the ships, the general melee of dockside life – can never be replicated. Nor, as any Liverpudlian would tell you, could the human essence of this great port city ever be bottled and sanitised.
We weren’t to know it half a century ago when the city seemed doomed to decline, but the spirit of commercial Liverpool would rise from the dead once again. Here just by the museum in the new Liverpool One shopping mall, on the edge of the waterfront where the docks once rotted into dereliction, I’m being jostled by crowds of shoppers just yards from where the Ovee trains would have rattled by. With its department stores, shops and cinemas, it’s now the biggest open-air retail centre in Britain. Imagine being whisked along to buy some of the vast range of designer goodies at the fashionable John Lewis store by an elevated train.
There are still folk around who remember the line today. The veteran BBC Radio Merseyside presenter Billy Butler recalls:
I used to get the LOR on the way to work. I remember seeing all the ships when you looked out of the window. It was a bus to me – a functional train ride to work. When I worked on the docks,
I recall seeing the Empress of Canada – we all went to see that. In hindsight it’s easy to say we should have kept it, but it would now be an excellent tourist attraction. My biggest worry was always that King Kong, from the film, would sweep down and pick me up in the carriage. That still haunts me.
But, King Kong or not, the sad truth is that the Liverpool Overhead Railway will never return. Even so, what better way to revive its memory than some verses composed by a local enthusiast? Not Betjeman. Or even Roger McGough. But for now we can but dream and forgive the errors of the past.
From Seaforth Sands to Dingle, a lengthy metal span,
Traversed the land of docks and quays,
Through which the trains once ran.
The Overhead, our railway, known to one and all,
Served the docks and river front, a wondrous place withall
To work in early morning, or coming home at night,
The crowds flocked to the stations, every train packed tight.
They gazed upon the shipping a wondrous sight to all,
For ships of every nation made this a port of call.
Since the railway vanished, with no vestigial trace,
This great dock-land of Liverpool is a less inviting place.
Chapter Seven
On the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting – the railway that time forgot
The charms of the old Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway, meandering through the rural heart of England, were legendary. But don’t try to get anywhere in a hurry on this, one of the slowest trains in the land.
HEAD ON OUT past the queues at Shakespeare’s birthplace in Henley Street. Don’t get seduced by the lure of tonight’s performance at the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, even though the latest heart-throb off the TV might be playing. No dallying, please, to feed the Avon swans. We’re heading north-west out of town, leaving behind the Hathaway Tea Rooms and the Cymbeline Hotel and keeping going till the half-timbered fantasy of tourist Stratford-upon-Avon gives way to the dreary borderlands of West Midlands suburbia. And onwards still, to where the pavements start to peter out into truly mean streets (even lovely towns like Stratford have them) and I am standing on the so-called Seven Meadows Road, whose bucolic name belies the reality of this thunderous A4390 dual carriageway, where I hug the grass verge to avoid being crushed by the massive HGVs sweeping by.
But the long hike has been worth it. Here it is – buried beneath the roadside couch grasses and buddleia I can just discern the platform edge of the station that was once the nerve centre of the old Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway. Who could imagine that this was once the main line of one of the most obscure yet romantic railways in the land? Feeling my way through the tangle of brushwood, I can just discern too a rusting set of buffer stops, overgrown by saplings, like some inexplicable totem from a prehistoric era. Rooting around in the weeds below, I find some of the original ballast. I rub a piece in my hand. It is still stained with the soot and grease from the days when the trains once passed by here. The rains of decades have steadfastly failed to wash away the still-powerful presence of this iconic railway.
Turn round now and close your eyes and imagine the busy life of the station that once stood here. A polished black locomotive, with the initials SMJ painted on its tender, is hissing impatiently, and behind it the rake of six rather elderly coaches in freshly polished brown and cream livery is so clean you can smell the beeswax. A small crowd of passengers has just alighted after a journey down from London, and with the help of porters, smartly dressed in green corduroy trousers and blue jackets with silver buttons, is making its way through the booking hall to the horse-drawn wagonettes that will take them on a sightseeing trip around the town. They might perhaps take tea at the Shakespeare Hotel or a jaunt on the Avon aboard the steam launches Titania or Ariel.
This genteel Edwardian moment is long before Shakespeare got a full commercial makeover, and farmers, tradesmen, cows, sheep and pigs vastly outnumber tourists in Stratford. But thanks to the railway company’s prototype marketing men, no one alighting here could possibly mistake where they were. Almost everything in sight, from the posters on the platform to the notices in the booking hall to the labels on their luggage, proclaims that passengers are on THE SHAKESPEARE ROUTE. Even the map in the booking hall shows Stratford plonked at the centre of the British railway universe, with a large circle across the West Midlands – even bigger than that denoting London – signifying the town. With such a persuasive association with Britain’s greatest playwright, you might imagine this to be the grandest of railways – bestriding its world, in the poet’s words, ‘like a Colossus’ – but the truth is infinitely less heroic.
Not for nothing was the Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway known to its passengers as the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting, and to those who were victims of its mostly unreliable trains, the Save Me, Jesus. Booking your ticket along the Shakespeare Route at Stratford, some jested, could at best be a Shakespearean comedy, but if you were trying to get anywhere in a hurry it was more a tragedy, with a sparse service, late trains and frequently missed connections. This most remote of railways rambled for fifty-five miles from nowhere in particular to nowhere even more in particular through some of the most deserted countryside of the English Midlands. It was perhaps the worst among the worst cases of the hopeless railway lines of Britain, yet despite its brief functioning life of around half a century, it has attracted a more powerful following down the years than many a scenic branch or high-speed main line. This backwater, with neither comfort nor charm, reliability nor speed, was the Eddie the Eagle of railways – a heroic British failure on wheels.
Stratford was the Crewe of this meandering enterprise, which ran from Blisworth, a hamlet in Northamptonshire famous for little except its tunnel on the Grand Union Canal, to Broom Junction – just a platform and a few houses on the Midland Railway between Evesham and Redditch. Apart from Stratford, the only place of any consequence on the line was the sleepy town of Towcester, whose claim to fame was its racecourse and a church with the biggest peal of bells in Britain. From here a branch wandered through the empty countryside to Banbury.
The trains may have been empty, but the names of the wayside stations were delicious. ‘Wappenham, Helmdon and Farthinghoe – all stations to Banbury,’ the Towcester porter would once have cried. Indeed, there can hardly have been a railway in the land with a more poetic collection of station, signal-box and junction names – all invoking the soul of a vanished rural England. Here passengers could alight at Fenny Compton, Moreton Pinkney and Salcey Forest stations – the latter having no road access at all. Clattering wagons would be shunted into sidings along rusty tracks at obscure Aston-le-Walls and Burton Dassett, while the signalman at the wonderfully titled Cockley Brake Junction would lean on his elbows, pull his levers and dispatch the (very) occasional train on its way. All dead and gone, with scarcely a trace remaining. Well, not quite. But we’ll come to that later.
The origins of the Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway, as with so many speculative railways of the period, derive from the cobbling-together of various bits of track built more in hope than economic reality during the great Victorian mania of the mid-nineteenth century, when railways were promoted in the most unlikely places. Jack Simmons in his classic history The Railways of Britain talks about an ‘element of lunacy in the business’, and Punch in 1846 ridiculed the companies that were floated and found subscribers fool enough to back them. Its spoof ‘John O’Groats and Land’s End Junction, with branches to Ben Lomond and Battersea’ was scarcely less foolhardy than some that were promoted in actuality, including, sadly, our very own Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction. Even so, the directors were unshaken in their faith that one day the various bits would amount to an empire that would ultimately bring them riches. It never happened. For the poor old SMJ, an empire gained through a succession of half-cock amalgamations and the odd bankruptcy was destined sadly to be an empire that would eventually b
e lost.
The story of the line, wrote its historian J. M. Dunn,
in places as elusive as the line itself, is a curious example of the survival of the unfit. Traffic obstinately refused to flow east and west along its single track; the main lines disdained, after some cautious experiments, to use the connections it afforded; and yet, in spite of financial straits for which embarrassment would be too mild a word, it survived. That fact alone made it noteworthy to the railway historian; so too did the remarkable collection of locomotives, including even a Fairlie double-boiler machine in the railway middle ages – that at different times dragged its vehicles across the Warwickshire plain.
So it’s worth bearing with the Byzantine tale of the line’s construction, complex though it is. If the slow, difficult birth of the SMJ seems hard to comprehend now in hindsight, just imagine trying to sell the idea to the small landowners, provincial businessmen and other sundry burghers whose support was needed to make it work. The first part of the railway dates from 1847, only seventeen years after the pioneering Liverpool to Manchester Railway, so it wasn’t a latecomer entering the market after all the best schemes had been cherry-picked. This was the year that parliamentary powers were granted for a railway between Northampton and Banbury, although no track came into use until 1866.
However, the ambitions of the straggle of lines that became the SMJ were far bigger than moving a few crates of chickens around rural Northamptonshire. Here, as the directors saw it, was a chance to stoke the fires of the Industrial Revolution by moving iron ore from the local mines to the furnaces of South Wales. The Welsh ironworks had to import haematite on unreliable coasters over choppy seas around the coast from Furness in Cumbria. But, like almost everything associated with the SMJ, the opportunity was spotted too late, and high-grade ore was already arriving from Spain. Never again, except briefly during the two world wars and just before it closed, would the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting fulfil its original function – and this became the eventual story of its life (and slow death).
The Trains Now Departed Page 13
