The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Even so, who could disagree with the railway commentator Geoffrey Kitchenside, who waxed lyrical in 1979:

  There has always been a magic about dining on trains. Eating on a train can be one of life’s most enjoyable experiences, with good food well served and a constantly changing panorama as the scenery unfolds before you. Breakfast with dawn breaking over a misty river valley transcends even the finest paintings in the best-known art galleries, while no seascape on canvas could match luncheon on the Cornish Riviera Express as it ran beside the beach between Dawlish and Teignmouth, while dinner on the Midday Scot climbing over the southern uplands of Scotland in the falling light evoked far-greater memories than any sun-sinking-slowly-in-the-west travelogue.

  But by this time the writing was on the wall for railway dining. The demise had come steadily, almost before we had noticed. The grandest named trains with their Pullman cars had faded from the timetables in the post-war years. The Devon Belle went in 1954, followed by the Kentish Belle in 1958. The Queen of Scots disappeared in 1964, and the White Rose and Bournemouth Belle soon after in 1967.

  But the idea of dining on trains clung on as railway managers tried to adapt it to modern times. In the 1960s BR reinvented train dining with its new luxury diesel multiple-unit Blue Pullmans to Manchester, Birmingham and South Wales, although the ride meant you might end up with a bowl of consommé in your lap. Then there were ‘griddle cars’, which kept freshly cooked food going on many secondary lines. I recall eating the Tartan Platter during this period – Aberdeen Angus entrecôte, with fried egg and grilled tomato with roll and butter – on a slow train rolling on a Sunday evening along the Highland main line from Perth to Inverness. Even at the end of the 1970s the unjustly maligned Travellers Fare was offering ‘home-made’ steak and kidney pie with mushrooms as standard on restaurant cars. In his book Dining at Speed Chris de Winter Hebron says that even at this time chefs were allowed to make their own pastry for the pies on board if they so chose.

  Even at the close of the nationalised era in 1994 there were 249 trains a day with dining cars open to both first- and standard-class passengers. Hard to believe now, but at the beginning of the era of privatisation there were more than eighty a day alone on the east coast line to Scotland – all operated by the Great North Eastern Railway, the original franchise holder. But sadly most of today’s private train companies see dining on trains as an anachronism in the modern corporate world and have now purged them almost entirely, substituting what is known in the jargon as an ‘at-seat offer’ for first-class passengers, where a limited range of mostly pre-prepared food is served on weekdays only. The claim that it is free is disingenuous, since it is priced into the cost of the fare. You cannot opt out of it – nor can you realistically opt in while travelling. Standard-class passengers are barred, unless willing to take out a mortgage for the eye-watering cost of an on-the-day upgrade.

  Britain’s very last regular service of all-day restaurant cars open to every passenger ran on the evening of 20 May 2011, appropriately along the old Great Northern Railway route out of King’s Cross where the pioneer dining car had first run 132 years previously. It was with a mixture of euphoria and sadness that I booked my ticket for the very final train of the evening, the 19.00 from London to Edinburgh. Looking back at my notebook – handwriting squiggly from the jolting of the train – I wrote at the time,

  The aroma emanating from the galley in coach No. 11998 is a signal for euphoria and sadness. The reason? Chef Stephen Naisby is loading a batch of sizzling rib-eye steaks on the grill aboard the last ever restaurant service on the East Coast Main Line, bringing to an end a great era of railway history.

  The fare served up by Crew Leader Alistair Barclay and his team is as splendid as on that very first day. My freshly cooked Smoked Haddock Arnold Bennett Crêpe is crisp, and the huge rib-eye of steak, topped with fried onions flavoured with Madeira wine, is cooked to a tee. And this is no special valedictory repast, cooked for the occasion. It’s all from the standard East Coast Autumn–Winter menu that will be replaced this week by a trolley service of at-seat inclusive snacks, available to first class passengers only.

  As if in tribute, the evening sun shines as the train flashes through the eastern counties on its way north, and Crew Leader Barclay, along with members of his team of eight, race through the coach balancing steaming plates and silver-service salvers. Many of the passengers are regulars saying goodbye. Also on board are a group of railway industry grandees, attired in full evening wear – as one of them put it, ‘to carry out the mourning suitably dressed …’

  Just to prove that memories of fine train dining in relatively recent times were not all rose-tinted, it was after I had recounted my journey in an interview on BBC Radio 4 the next morning that I received a letter from a Mrs P. Billingsley of Southport, whose father had been a chef on Pullman trains in the late 1940s and 1950s. ‘As a child, I remember my mother starching his “whites” – which of course included his tall chef’s hat,’ she wrote. She enclosed one of his luncheon menus, which included ‘Honey Dew Melon, Dover Sole Colbert, Roast Saddle of Southdown Lamb, Jersey New Potatoes, Lincolnshire Minted Green Peas, Evesham Apple Pie and Devonshire Cream’ and added, ‘How this was produced in that tiny galley, I do not know. But the clients were obviously satisfied. He kept an autograph book that grateful celebrities had signed for him, including Edward, Duke of Windsor, Charles Boyer, Princess Marina, James Mason and Winston Churchill.’

  Today a decent meal on a train is a rare experience. Indeed, many long-distance trains have no catering at all. In the course of writing this book I have endured famished journeys from Euston to Crewe, Birmingham to Marylebone, Charing Cross to Dover and the length and the breadth of Wales with not even the whiff of a packet of crisps or peanuts. Recently ‘first-class’ lunch on a Glasgow–Exeter train consisted of an egg and cress sandwich and a banana. No fine china or glassware, just a mug of the sort you might find in a transport caff and a plastic place mat. No wonder some train companies offer as much free booze as you can drink. This is presumably to get you to forget the awfulness of the food.

  There are rare pockets of excellence, such as Virgin, whose first-class breakfasts are full English and always freshly cooked, with a nice northern touch of a slice of black pudding. East Coast offer a quite decent vegetarian breakfast of red pepper and spinach frittata, mushrooms, grilled tomato and a potato cake. By contrast, on some train operators a first-class ticket entitles you to not much more than a cup of tea and a slice of desiccated fruit cake – if you are lucky. On some days I have consumed so much free coffee that I feel I am travelling faster than the train.

  It’s a far cry from even quite recent times when entire trains such as the Harrogate Sunday Pullman and the Cambridge Buffet Express had names dedicated to the idea of eating and drinking on board. Back in 1869, just before Britain’s first dining car took to the rails, the novelist Anthony Trollope wrote that the ‘real disgrace of England is the railway sandwich’. He described it as a ‘whited sepulchre, fair enough outside, but so meagre, poor, and spiritless within, such a thing of shreds and parings, such a dab of food, telling us that the poor bone whence it was scraped had been made utterly bare before it was sent into the kitchen for the soup pot’.

  In the austerity of the present is it inevitable that we should have to steel our stomachs for Trollope’s railway sandwich once more? The long-serving Rail magazine commentator Barry Doe, who has consistently campaigned against the scrapping of restaurant cars, says, ‘The trouble is that the accountants who run the railways see trains merely as aeroplanes without wings. What they fail to spot is the marketing opportunity of a dining experience that we British regard as very special. On long train journeys operators have a captive audience, and much as they seem not to believe it, passengers do eat. Shame on them for not understanding this!’

  But amid the microwaved burgers from the buffet and the tinned-tuna sandwiches from the trolley there is one company that still hasn�
��t quite given up on traditional dining. Predictably this is First Great Western, which alone among the national train operators has kept the core identity of the days when it really was great – retaining the old title in its corporate branding and even painting one of its diesel engines classic Brunswick green and naming some after the legendary Castle Class steam locomotives of old. And they have stayed loyal to the idea of the traditional dining car, where any passenger, no matter their status, can roll up and take a seat. There have latterly been only ten of them a day, operating to South Wales and the West Country. Naturally, they are a bit of a secret – scarcely advertised and with an atmosphere that has something of the mystique of a London gentlemen’s club.

  There are only seventeen seats in the Pullman car of the 12.06 Paddington to Penzance today and every one is full. Were it not for the white tablecloths and china monogrammed with ‘Pullman’ and the Great Western Railway crest, this would be just another anonymous HST train carriage, but in some ways it is even more agreeable than the great trains of yore. Instead of coaches with female names and snooty male stewards as in the stuffy days of old, there is a team of buzzing woman stewards in smart black trousers and shirts with red scarves. How much nicer that the efficient Jane, Jenny and Carla are human beings rather than carriages.

  By Slough I am tucking into a proper cheese soufflé, a rarity in a restaurant these days let alone on a train; curiously the last time I enjoyed it as much was in London’s Garrick Club. At Reading I’m selecting from a menu including ‘Silver Mullet with Roasted Garlic’ and ‘Grilled Somerset Fillet Steak’. By Exeter I’m wondering if I can squeeze in the ‘Chocolate and Salted Caramel Pudding’ as well as the ‘Artisan Cheese selection with Quince Jelly’. As we pass along the coast at Dawlish, one of the most sublime views from any railway carriage in the world, I’m seriously starting to wonder if this could be the Second Coming. Well, at least of the Golden Age of Travel.

  As we pull into Plymouth at 3 p.m. Chef Neal, weary from a 5.45 a.m. start, explains the secrets of cooking the perfect soufflé (‘Get the oven hot at the start’) and a medium-rare steak (‘Regard each piece of meat as an individual’) on a train. But the future is uncertain. His kitchen dates from the British Railways days of the 1970s, and soon a new generation of Japanese-built trains called IEPs will come on stream. Let us pray that dinner in the diner, like Neal’s today, might once again become routine on the trains of the future. But in the world of the modern railway, where newer often means worse, we shouldn’t perhaps hold out much hope. I cannot help recalling the words of my British Pullman steward Alan as I stepped down from Audrey onto the red carpet at Victoria, bathed in nostalgia, after my time shift back into the golden age.

  Here is the accumulated wisdom of nearly four decades as an old-school veteran of dining-car service: ‘The problem with catering on modern trains is that they have to get people ever faster from A to B. Our passengers come on board simply for the pleasure of enjoying a good meal on a lovely old train.’

  Chapter Twelve

  The country railway terminated

  Thousands of miles of secondary railways once passed through the villages and hamlets of rural Britain. None was more typical than the Withered Arm, Betjeman’s favourite, running into the loveliest and loneliest reaches of Devon and Cornwall.

  MIGHT THERE BE anything closer to paradise? It’s a golden midsummer evening and I’m dangling my legs over the old station platform by the quay at Padstow. From here I can watch the trawlers bobbing home over the bluest of seas, while chomping on the flakiest and freshest battered hake from the upmarket chippie run by celebrity chef Rick Stein. Once it was the fish trains that defined this place, now it is Rick, who has transformed a fading north-Cornwall resort into a mecca for supercool urban foodies.

  Long gone are the insulated vans dripping with ice that raced along the North Cornwall Railway in double-quick time to deliver the cod and haddock to London’s Billingsgate Market with the bloom still gleaming on their scales. These days posh Londoners flood down the A39 to tuck into Rick’s fashionable fish – witness the families in their Range Rovers and BMWs stuffing down a salt and vinegary supper in the car park where the fish sidings once were.

  As for the rest of us, getting to Padstow – surely one of Britain’s prettiest towns without any trains – has been the journey from hell ever since the railway closed in the 1960s. In recent memory you could board a mighty express at Waterloo and arrive here without leaving your seat – apart from strolling down the corridor for a three-course meal served on the crisp white tablecloths of the restaurant car. Now it could not be more different. Stepping down from the London train at the nearest station, Bodmin Parkway (nineteen miles from Padstow), I stand forlornly at the roadside waiting for the delayed 555 service of bus operator Western Greyhound.

  But no greyhound this – rattling along the lane is a delivery van with seats, which clatters for a stomach-churning hour over switchback roads to reach its destination. So packed is it that the driver is forced to leave a party of elderly people behind at a remote wayside stop to wait an hour for the next one. It is a reminder of how the legacy of Beeching, now half a century old, still hangs heavy over rural Britain.

  Padstow was the furthest-flung outpost of what was famously known as the Withered Arm, perhaps the most perfect example of the country railway networks that threaded the land in their own undisturbed way until the national cull of the 1960s and 1970s. Self-contained and enclosed in their own worlds, they were the main form of communication for the small communities of Britain for up to a century. These railways were as much part of the rural scene as cricket on the village green, Mothers’ Union jam-making, church fetes and labourers working in the fields at harvest time.

  In most rural areas most comings and goings were by train for at least two generations. As David St John Thomas writes in his classic book The Country Railway,

  The pair of rails disappearing over the horizon stood for progress, disaster, the major changes in life: the route to Covent Garden and Ypres, the way one’s fiancé paid his first visit to one’s parents, one’s children returned from deathbed leave-taking, the way summer visitors, touring theatricals, cattle buyers, inspectors, came. Even when most people made the journey by road, the railway retained its importance for the long, vital if occasional trips to the rest of the world. But the country railway provided more than transport. It was always part of the district it served, with its own natural history, its own legends and folklore, a staff who were at the heart of village affairs, its stations and adjoining pubs places for exchange of gossip, news and advice.

  None of this could be truer than along the arteries of the Withered Arm – so named because its routes, mostly single tracks, meandering west of Exeter across the remotest and most beautiful parts of Devon and Cornwall to Plymouth, Barnstaple, Ilfracombe, Bideford, Torrington, Bude, Launceston, Wadebridge and Padstow, resembled on a map the branches of a rather sickly tree. Born out of a territorial war in the west between Brunel’s all-powerful Great Western Railway and the London & South Western Railway at Waterloo, its smug Great Western detractors revelled in the name because they liked to think that the LSWR had come off worse.

  No wonder they were smug – Brunel’s GWR operated the choice direct routes along the coast south of Dartmoor, feeding the prosperous seaside resorts of Torbay before heading on to the far west at Penzance. The folk at Waterloo, meanwhile, were left with a circuitous route north of Dartmoor and a clutch of rocky, windswept, underpopulated destinations in north Devon and Cornwall. But the connoisseurs knew different. The Withered Arm, right to the end of its life in the 1960s, was always, in the eyes of those who knew, the more romantic, poetic and charming way to the west.

  Its magic is best defined in a famous celebration of the line by the historian T. W. E. Roche, who wrote of his fondness for

  that Other Railway, the Great Western’s rival in the West, whose ‘Withered Arm’, as the cynics called it, stretched its long, tort
uous limbs west and north east from Exeter to the Atlantic coasts of Devon and Cornwall. It shunned the great tourist resorts of the south and sought out the high places and the lonely places; no other main line could look up directly to the towering peak of Yes Tor, no other railway called its engines after it. It was the Dartmoor main line, but it was also the railway which penetrated into King Arthur’s land.

  There were, Roche observed,

  endless stops in all those endless miles. The Withered Arm was a railway of great distances, whose towns were far apart and populations sparse, yet however far apart there were always green coaches proudly flaunting the legend WATERLOO to remind one of the links with the outside world. And to show those remote towns were not forgotten it paid them the compliment of naming the great ‘West Country’ Pacifics after them and actually bringing them to receive their names at the place itself and then to work on those lines afterwards.

  And not just locomotives. The Withered Arm had its own dedicated express train from London too, in the shape of one of Britain’s most celebrated named services. Many would claim that the Atlantic Coast Express was the greatest of all – even more distinguished than its world-famous Great Western rival the Cornish Riviera Express – busier and with more through carriages to the towns and villages it served than any other train in Britain. Its name derived from a competition run by the Southern Railway’s staff magazine, for which a guard from Woking won a prize of three guineas. The man, a Mr F. Rowland, moved to Torrington, one of the most delightful towns served by the Withered Arm, but sadly was killed in a shunting accident not long after.

  This unhappy incident, fortunately, did not jinx the Atlantic Coast Express, which ran from Waterloo every weekday, apart from wartime, until 1964, conveying through carriages to Plymouth, Bude, Padstow, Torrington and Ilfracombe in the far west, sometimes dropping off portions on the way at Exmouth, Seaton, Sidmouth and Lyme Regis. Hardly the Atlantic coast, but who was worrying when the journey was so glamorous, with a polished green Merchant Navy Class, pride of the Southern fleet, at the head. Such was the demand for tickets that on peak summer Saturdays the ACE would set off in five separate sections from Waterloo.