Snobbery also played its part. C.A. Saunders, secretary of the Great Western Railway, claimed on several occasions in the 1840s that the behaviour of third-class passengers caused offence to other rail patrons – a view that reinforced a determination to segregate the classes on both trains and stations. The belief that the ‘lower orders’ would annoy or even drive away higher-class patrons, or simply vandalise railway property, is a recurring theme in railway history. For example, the chairman of the North Eastern Railway complained that when curtains were provided in third-class carriages, the passengers ‘cut them off and probably used them as pocket handkerchiefs’.
Class prejudice wasn’t the only influence on railway policy. Underlying the business strategies of most companies were more hard-headed commercial considerations. Just like today, many of the early main-line companies believed that a high-class service was the road to high profits. They didn’t want to clog up their trains with large numbers of poor passengers paying low fares. The directors of the Leeds & Selby and the Manchester, Bolton & Bury reported gleefully that increasing fares caused numbers to decline but revenues to increase.
Enter the Railway Regulation Act of 1844, brought in by William Gladstone, president of the Board of Trade. Surprisingly, given the antipathy of the Victorians to any kind of state interference, Gladstone’s principal ambition was to regulate the railways, and the original draft of the bill, as presented to Parliament, would have given the government a powerful range of controls over train services, including the idea of eventually nationalising them. However, howls of protest from the railway owners led to the bill being watered down.
But Gladstone’s act had least one positive outcome – in forcing the railway companies to guarantee at least one train per day on every line, running at a minimum speed of 12 mph, stopping at all stations, and with a fare of not more than 1d. a mile. They were also required to offer an increased level of comfort. These trains were labelled ‘Parl’ or ‘Gov’ at the head of the timetable.
However, the train companies came up with a clever ruse to duck their responsibilities while sticking to the letter of the law. The parly services were often scheduled at the least convenient hour and operated by the surliest staff to make the service as unattractive as possible. For example, the first train out of Paddington to the West Country was the 6 a.m. parliamentary train. Railway staff cynically dubbed it the Plymouth Cheap. The outcome was that even poor people were often forced onto the more expensive trains at a penny-farthing a mile. The parly trains even got a mention in Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado in lyrics satirising upper-class attitudes: ‘The idiot who, in railway carriages/ Scribbles on window-panes/ We only suffer/ To ride on a buffer/ On Parliamentary trains.’
Today’s parliamentary trains operate on a similar principle, with services so unattractive that few people in their right mind would want to use them unless they had to. Certainly the Leeds to Goole service seems desperately unloved, as is the landscape it passes through. Yet this local network of railways was once at the centre of the beating heart of industrial Britain. Journeying by train from Leeds City station today, it is hard to imagine anyone battling to lay claim to this drab railway hinterland through post-industrial West Yorkshire, yet so vicious was the rivalry between the North Midland Railway and the Great Northern Railway to get their trains to the promised land of Leeds in the 1840s that it led to the notorious Methley Junction Incident – one of the nastiest episodes in the railway mania that gripped Britain at the time.
When the GNR refused to yield to the Midland’s demand not to build its own line to Leeds, the Midland threatened unsuccessfully to stop its trains and levy a toll on every passenger. On the eve of the opening GNR officials, suspicious that the Midland might be up to something dastardly, sent a light engine along the track and found the points had been removed at Methley, a junction just outside the city. The perpetrator was never identified, but what would have been the consequences for the passengers on the first train along the next morning do not bear thinking about.
The only signs of cut-throat competition today are in the shopping arcades of the city’s slick new station, where the magnificent restored art deco concourse built by the LMS has been given over to McDonald’s, Wetherspoon’s and Sainsbury’s. Meanwhile, alongside the tracks towards Goole, the weeds grow high. Saplings are already turning into trees along the disused trackbed of the old Central Station Viaduct, curving off into the distance. Post-Beeching closures force our train to reverse at Castleford – in its day a boom town with proud Rugby League triumphs but now with foot-high weeds on the platforms and a shuttered and abandoned signal box. The legacy of the 1960s is a truncated patchwork of lines that no intelligent civil engineer would ever have devised. However, Castleford has a poignant place in the annals of British industrial history as the home of one of the very last steam locomotives in commercial use: an Austerity 0-6-0-saddle tank lived on as a shunter at the Wheldale Colliery until 1982.
Entering Pontefract, line-side slag heaps stand as mournful monuments to the pre-Thatcher years when the coal mines once kept the local furnaces burning. But despite the rundown, the town still has two of its five famous liquorice factories and boasts three separate stations, all with charming Yorkshire names – Monkhill, Tanshelf and Baghill. We clatter past a decrepit Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway signal cabin, marked PRINCE OF WALES COLLIERY, where perhaps a phantom signalman still shunts trucks full to the brim with the black gold that once brought prosperity to this area. Meanwhile, the freight trains still rumble by, these days conveying imported coal and biomass to the vast local power stations at Ferrybridge and Drax. As I passed, in summer 2014, the very last local coal mine that fed the turbines – at Kellingley – was under sentence of closure.
Sadness too at Knottingley, which was once a stop on the main line from York to London, where the fine double-span overall roof has been demolished and the station buildings reduced to bus shelters. Spookily, one of the letters is falling off the sign on the Railway Hotel in the station yard. From here on, as the train rumbles on into remoter countryside, I am the sole passenger. And I start to question whether I am still in the land of the living when we stop at little Hensall station, a time capsule with an enamel sign advertising Wills Capstan cigarettes, where an ancient railwayman opens equally ancient crossing gates by hand. It is reassuring to know from the latest statistics from the Office of Rail Regulation that the station is used by 184 (human) passengers a year.
Darkness is falling as our ghost train sighs to a halt at Goole station – mausoleum-like with its peeling paint and empty platforms. The antique platform clock reads 18.26, and the words of Flanders and Swann from their famous 1963 song ‘Slow Train’ couldn’t be truer: ‘No one departs, no one arrives,/ From Selby to Goole, from St Erth to St Ives.’ But it is comforting to know from the destination flashed up on the board that at least we’re scheduled to head back in the other direction tonight. Just the driver, the guard – and me.
But who’s this? A second passenger is sitting bolt upright in the front coach. With his bushy Victorian beard, could he be the ghost of railways past? Nothing so exotic. He turns out to be Brian, a retired teacher from Halifax, one of the ghosties – the tribe of railway enthusiasts that roams the land, travelling at unearthly hours to ‘cop’ the ghost trains of Britain. ‘There used to be a good service on this line not so long ago,’ he tells me, ‘but all of a sudden in 2001 the train company Arriva replaced all the services between Leeds, Wakefield, Castleford, Knottingley and Goole with buses. They claimed they were short of drivers and trains. Hmmm. By the time they brought back the Goole train six months later, it was the perfect excuse to turn it into a ghost service. And it’s been the same ever since.’
Still, Brian isn’t worried, since ghost trains are his hobby, and he tells me he has copped them all. ‘And this is my third time on this one – it’s one of my favourites,’ he says. In fact, some of the parly trains are often so packed with ghosties like Brian
that they defeat their purpose – none more so than the most famous of them all, the Stalybridge Flyer. This two-coach diesel railcar is one of the rarest trains in Britain, leaving Stockport at 9.22 a.m. on Fridays only for the short journey around south Manchester. There is no return service, which may be just as well, since many of the ghosties who pack the service each week find themselves waylaid by the legendary real ales and home-made black puddings at Britain’s most famous railway buffet on the platform at Stalybridge. An even rarer service runs between Frodsham and Runcorn, near Liverpool, which has only one train a week – on Saturdays in summer.
In fact, the north of England offers ghost-train paradise – or hell if you are unlucky enough to be dependent on them. There are only four services a day between Helsby and Ellesmere Port in Cheshire. And at Styal, between Crewe and Manchester, just three services a day stop while the rest race through, forcing passengers to drive to the next station at Wilmslow. (This appears to be true lunacy, since local campaigners have proved that a stop would not add to overall train times.) There are some stations, such as the historic Gainsborough Central in Lincolnshire, where no passenger trains at all stop on weekdays, yet on Saturday there are three services to Sheffield and three to Cleethorpes. This station reached a low point in 2003 when the annual number of fare-paying passengers boarding trains was officially recorded as just five. A far cry from opening day in 1849, when it was the pride of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire Railway and hundreds turned out to admire its fine classical portico – now, like so many grand railway buildings, pulled down in favour of a bus shelter.
On the Ely to Norwich line, Shippea Hill – surreally named since it sits in the middle of Fenland – has a surreal train service to match. On weekdays there is one eastbound train to Norwich, but passengers have to wait till Saturday for the westbound train to Cambridge. Lakenheath, the next station along the line, has a similarly sparse service but is served by different trains. Poor Teesside Airport station, on the Darlington to Middlesbrough line, has an average of just one passenger a week, making even the most obscure Ryanair destination at some godforsaken town in the Baltic appear like Heathrow.
But the most surreal and inaccessible ghost station of all lies, paradoxically, on Britain’s busiest railway, the west coast main line between Euston and Glasgow. Each day the weed-covered platforms at Polesworth in Warwickshire can be glimpsed tantalisingly by thousands of passengers speeding on their way north and south. Polesworth, which had six weekday services as recently as the 1980s, now has a single train – the 07.23 to Crewe. Passengers cannot travel in the southbound direction because the footbridge to the up platform was removed six years ago and no one has bothered to put it back.
Other ghost trains date back to Beeching days, keeping the rails shiny with occasional services running over obscure curves and junctions. Back in the 1960s, for instance, Beeching butchered the railways around Lancaster, forcing trains across the Pennines on the old Midland route from Leeds to Morecambe to traverse a zigzag route, reversing at Lancaster to access the resort. However, occasionally a ghost train takes the direct line over what’s known as Bare Lane Curve. But pssst – don’t tell anyone!
There was until recently a journey even more obscure, more recherché, aboard a train that is so ethereal that it was actually a bus. This came about in 2008 after a member of the public complained to the Department for Transport that the axing of the twice-daily service from Brighton to Birmingham via Kensington Olympia left a short section of track without a passenger service. The response was to provide a fifty-seat motor coach, at a cost to the taxpayer of £500 a day, which invariably ran empty. Fortunately sense prevailed, and after numerous shadowy, passenger-less journeys through the streets of west London an exorcism was performed in 2013, and the service was formally put out of its misery.
But perhaps the most evocative journey on any ghost train is along the old Paddington line through the Chilterns that once went to the West Midlands and on to Chester and Birkenhead. To most Great Western devotees the initials GWR have long been synonymous with Brunel’s majestic route from London to Bristol and its dramatic extension through to Cornwall and the far west. Yet in its day the Great Western’s Birmingham main line was one of its most prestigious routes, until its rundown in the years following Beeching.
This was the last great main line of the steam age, built to the highest engineering standards. After it opened in 1906, the Great Western’s publicity rhapsodised, ‘It has opened up a district of phenomenal beauty which has somehow or other managed to retain, notwithstanding its nearness to London, most of those old-world characteristics which have vanished from more remote parts of the country. The new line will open up … a land asleep since the days of the stagecoach.’ Here was once the stamping ground of the Kings and Castles – jewels in the crown of the locomotive fleet – which hauled fast expresses such as the Inter-City, the Cambrian Coast Express and the Shakespeare Express. Even in the 1960s it was chosen as the route of a brand-new sumptuous diesel train, the Birmingham Pullman, in which crisply dressed stewards served the finest railway cuisine of the day at every seat.
It could hardly be more different when I revisit one bright autumn morning half a century later. Waiting for me on Platform 14, a long dark walk from the main Paddington concourse, is the spookiest train in Britain – the 11.36 a.m. ghost to Gerrards Cross in Buckinghamshire. Certainly, this once-grand main line seems on its last legs as the train crunches along a rusted single track past the back end of the industrial estates off the Great West Road.
As the sole passenger, I am privileged to enjoy the bulldozed remains of the Old Oak Common engine sheds, which once housed the great copper-trimmed giants of Great Western steam. What ghosts still roam here! There’s more post-industrial nostalgia as we pass behind the art deco Hoover factory, now converted into a Tesco supermarket. Disused sidings are shrouded with dying buddleia as we rumble by an old-fashioned wooden signal box and even more antiquated semaphore signals sited incongruously near a gigantic modern waste transfer station.
But when I get off at Gerrards Cross I find that I am no longer alone. The ethereal figure at the end of the deserted platform pointing his iPhone at the front of the train is no spectre but Steve, an off-duty train driver, who is, like Brian back in Goole, one of the ghosties who haunt trains like this one. ‘Actually,’ Steve tells me with the conspiratorial air of a man in the know, ‘the train operator Chiltern Railways keeps this route open for crew training.’ Training for what? it is tempting to ask. Surely not taking souls into the next world? The average London commuter is in hell already.
‘There’s always a reason, however obscure,’ Steve explains pedantically, ‘for every ghost service,’ as I find out when I ring up Northern Rail to enquire about the skeleton service on the Knottingley line.
‘Surely putting on more trains might encourage more people to use them?’ I ask innocently.
‘It’s out of our hands,’ their spokesman tells me. ‘We simply follow the service level specified by the Department for Transport. That’s what we have to do under the terms of our franchise. And so we do it.’
‘The whole situation is completely crazy,’ says Barry Doe of Rail magazine, Britain’s foremost timetable expert. So why don’t the authorities simply put all these sad railway wraiths out of their misery? The problem, Doe says, is that in the old days of nationalisation British Railways were only too happy to put the closure notices up. But since privatisation the railways have been controlled and regulated by the Department for Transport, and no one in government dares to raise the politically sensitive subject of axing train services. ‘We’re stuck in a limbo world,’ says Doe.
When I arrive back in Paddington, after a return journey on the alternative line to London Marylebone and a bus back to Paddington along the Marylebone Road, the early-evening commuters are already besieging the home-bound services on what are, according to the latest statistics, among the top ten most overcrowded trains in Br
itain. Here is a subject worth pondering. Is it a quaint and charming eccentricity straight out of the world of Gilbert and Sullivan that an empty train leaves this station each day while passengers on other services are transported like cattle in conditions not dissimilar to those that appalled Mr Gladstone 150 years previously?
Or does it simply confirm that the way we run our railways is totally barmy?
Chapter Nine
Goodbye to the toy train
Who could forget the delightful little Lynton & Barnstaple narrow-gauge railway which once traversed Exmoor through the Switzerland of England? Certainly not the legions of enthusiasts who have never recovered from its closure more than eighty years ago.
COULD THERE BE a more revered closed railway in the land with a meaner, more miserable substitute to replace it? As I search for my bus, a right old mist is swirling in from the Atlantic on this early autumn morning, and its chilly fingers are probing all the recesses of Barnstaple bus station. At the back end of town, never a place of much charm at the best of times, it is deserted apart from a couple of superannuated New Agers swigging the last drops from cans of Stongbow. The assembly of shelters here that calls itself a bus station could single-handedly provide a doctoral thesis on the decline of rural public transport in the twenty-first century.
No integrated interchange for a brave transport future this. The diaspora of north Devon villages dotted around what has been known since Victorian times as the Switzerland of England are served by a raggle-taggle bunch of private coach operators with no coordinated timetable that I can find. Do I want Beacon Bus or Turners Tours, Riders Travel or TT Coaches? ‘Is this the Lynton and Barnstaple service?’ I ask as a battered yellow and blue single-decker pulls in. It seems an appalling heresy to utter the name of the fabled and much mourned Lynton & Barnstaple Railway in the context of this long-in-the tooth road vehicle. ‘Hold on,’ says the driver, busily inspecting a dent on the side of his bus. ‘I had a bit of a scrape on the way down.’
The Trains Now Departed Page 16
