The most atmospheric of the places where the attaching and detaching of the various coaches of the ACE took place was lonely Halwill Junction in north Devon, the Clapham Junction of the Withered Arm. All the best country railways had junctions in places miles from civilisation – mini-Claphams or -Crewes. These lonely points of arrival and departure in the middle of nowhere often had romantic names, such as Melton Constable, a tiny Norfolk village that became the nerve centre of the old Midland & Great Northern, or Three Cocks Junction in Brecknockshire, the knot tied in a small bundle of railways that meandered through mid-Wales.
The atmosphere at Halwill, even as recently as fifty years ago, was unlike anything we would recognise on the railways of today. Here, far from anywhere, were services connecting in four directions, and when they arrived all at once there would be a cacophony of hooting whistles, the squealing of carriages being shunted, the clamour of porters and the tinging of signal bells. You could hardly hear yourself speak above the engines impatiently blowing off steam. As the choreographer of the performance, the signalman had an extra-tall box with forty levers – which would have been just as handy for counting sheep in this isolated place. And then all would go silent, except for the songbirds and the slow tick of the station clock, which would measure out the hours until it all kicked off again several hours later.
The veins of the Withered Arm passed through other junctions too – at Exeter, Barnstaple, Wadebridge and Bere Alston – but its blood – if it can be so described – flowed most strongly through the long lonely artery of the line of the old North Cornwall Railway from Okehampton, around both Dartmoor and Bodmin Moor to Launceston, Wadebridge, eventually ending on the coast at Padstow, the Southern Railway’s most westerly station, 260 long miles from London.
This remotest of lines offered perhaps the most enchanting country railway journey in Britain. On the face of it, here was a rural landscape of scattered villages and hamlets with many stations far from the places they served. The names of Port Isaac Road and St Kew Highway were a clue to prospective passengers of the long trek they faced at their destinations. Woe betide anyone booking a ticket to Tower Hill, thinking they might explore a famous London landmark. This particular Tower Hill was named not after William the Conqueror’s great fortress but a modest local farm. But oh, what drama otherwise on this romantic Cornish coast, with its legendary historical and literary landmarks – King Arthur’s Tintagel and Daphne du Maurier’s mysterious Bodmin Moor among them. It was through this landscape of harsh weather, swirling mists and intrigue that the North Cornwall trains slowly wended their way.
Few railway lines in history have inspired such powerful poetic impulses as this one. We have already encountered Edward Thomas’s ‘Adlestrop’ on the Oxford to Worcester train, Philip Larkin’s ‘Whitsun Weddings’ viewed from the Hull service to London, and W. H. Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ famously ‘crossing the border’. But no line has touched the imagination so strongly as this Cornish paradise, singled out by Poet Laureate Sir John Betjeman as the ‘most exciting train journey I know’. Betjeman’s early-twentieth-century boyhood summers began aboard the Atlantic Coast Express from Waterloo to Padstow. He wrote that the final stretch of line along the Camel estuary was the most beautiful he had ever experienced, and at its end a different world awaited: one of ‘oil-lit farms’ and ‘golden unpeopled bays’, of shipwrecks and haunted woods. As an adult he continued to make annual pilgrimages to the area, capturing its melancholy and majesty in numerous poems and essays.
A horse and cart would have met him at Wadebridge station and taken him to the Betjeman holiday home at Trebetherick. In his autobiography Summoned by Bells Betjeman evokes his boyish joy and excitement when he would
Attend the long express from Waterloo
That takes us down to Cornwall. Tea-time shows
The small fields waiting, every blackthorn hedge
Straining inland before the south-west gale.
The emptying train, wind in the ventilators,
Puffs out of Egloskerry to Tresmeer
Through minty meadows, under bearded trees
And hills upon whose sides the clinging farms
Hold Bible Christians. Can it really be
That this same carriage came from Waterloo?
On Wadebridge station what a breath of sea
Scented the Camel valley! Cornish air,
Soft Cornish rains, and silence after steam.
Rhapsodic experience though it was, the North Cornwall Railway came very late and was only a few years old when Betjeman first experienced its charms. The LSWR first obtained an act to build the line in 1882, but the difficult terrain and a shortage of funds meant that it didn’t get to Wadebridge until 1885, finally arriving in Padstow in March 1899.
Although the route ran for many miles through unpopulated, often treeless territory above the 300-foot contour line, with the breakers of the Atlantic Ocean crashing on the rocks on one side and the granite mass and peaty bogs of Bodmin on the other, there were also some choice commercial jewels in the crown. Launceston and Wadebridge were prosperous market towns, exporters of cattle, sheep and pigs. Wadebridge, on the Camel, was a busy little port too. Then there was the vast slate quarry at Delabole along the way. And the remoteness of the fishing village of Padstow had its compensations; its role as an emigrant port had meant that it had until hitherto been in better communication with Canada than London. Now tourists poured down from the ‘Smoke’ and fresh fish headed in the other direction. How good for business was that?
It was a truly auspicious day on Thursday 23 March 1899 when the new railway finally reached Padstow. A light snow had fallen overnight as dignitaries from the town, contractors and London & South Western Railway bigwigs assembled on the quay. Joining them amid the crowds was the lord of the manor and six sea captains. The first train steamed in at 12.30, breaking a tape across the line, while the Padstow Artillery and Delabole brass bands played ‘See the Conquering Hero Comes’. A royal salute of twenty-one guns was fired from the quay before the serving of a leisurely lunch, punctuated by toasts and speeches. Special trains were run up to Wadebridge, where 600 children were each treated to a Cornish pasty, and in the evening a splendid cold meat tea was served to the locals. Such was the confidence that the coming of the railway bestowed on the town that, while the crowds were celebrating on the quay, workmen were simultaneously putting the finishing touches to the vast new Metropole Hotel above the station, still the largest building in Padstow.
In those early days we might have travelled along the line behind one of the elegant T9 Class locomotives of the London & South Western Railway, which made their first appearance here when Victoria was on the throne and stayed with the line almost until its 1960s closure. Unlike today’s rickety buses, these venerable engines truly earned their nickname of greyhounds. But let’s move on in time to imagine ourselves on a post-war summer Saturday, in the line’s heyday.
Heading west on holiday are mother and father, just emerging into the never-had-it-so-good world of post-austerity Britain, along with their eager children clutching tin buckets and spades and scuffed copies of Swallows and Amazons and Enid Blyton’s Famous Five stories to read on the journey. The boarding house and the golden sands beckon. We have been able to stay in the same carriage all the way from London, after an engine change at Exeter, where we swapped our Merchant Navy for one of the equally impressive West Country Class Pacifics, perhaps Wadebridge, Camelford or Yes Tor. Maybe even Padstow herself? How privileged we are that such a railway backwater should lend the names of its towns to such magnificent express locomotives.
Continuing west past Okehampton, our train edges its way across the fragile-looking lattice piers of the romantic Meldon Viaduct, with its six 86-foot spans on stone plinths, 150 feet above the plunging ravine of the West Okement river. Even in the early 1950s the railway here was pretty much as it was built. All along the line were commodious stone-built stations (so solid that many survive as priva
te homes today). Most of them still had sidings to handle the goods trains that kept the shops of the West Country stocked with the finest products of British factories and food from the empire, while transporting the farm products of Devon and Cornwall to the breakfast tables of London.
Pausing briefly at Halwill Junction to disgorge passengers for Torrington and Bude, we might note the prosperity the railway has brought to this tiny place, with its post office, police station, bank, pub, cottage hospital, garage, shops and egg-packing station. Here we might pass one of the mixed trains of freight wagons and passenger coaches that survived on this line long after they had disappeared from other rural railways. Then off we head down the valley past Ashwater, Tower Hill and over the Tamar into Launceston – ‘the gateway to Cornwall’, also served by the rival Great Western, whose own station was adjacent. Many members of the large staff here, ranging from stationmaster to booking clerks, porters, shunters, cattle checkers and shop assistants in the platform branch of W.H. Smith, would still have been bustling away in their jobs – unlike today, when there is no railway at all.
The summit of the line is reached just after the delightfully named Otterham, nearly 800 feet above sea level and nearly two miles from the village it purports to serve. In contrast to the image of jolly sunlit holidays, here is a bleak, windswept location. So chilly and damp are the squalls that blow off the Atlantic that the walls of the station building have had to be faced with slate to protect passengers from the cold. But rolling down to Wadebridge, with its busy little port on the Camel, all is different once again: sidings busy with livestock and farm produce, even consignments of ice cream heading off to fill cornets on the beach at Newquay. Hard to imagine in 2015, when the old station buildings house a day centre for the elderly, that the stationmaster here once had a staff of 140 under his command.
A treat here too for young trainspotters leaning out of the windows past the engine sheds, who might cop one of the ancient Beattie Well Tanks – the oldest design of locomotive in service on the railway. These old ladies, built for service on London suburban trains between 1863 and 1875, survived because they were the only locos with a small enough wheelbase to work the sharp curves of the mineral trains to Wenford Bridge on the flank of Bodmin Moor. Astonishingly, two survive in running order in 2015.
And soon to come is one of the most beautiful views from a train carriage in Britain. The vistas along the Camel estuary as the service steams slowly west from Wadebridge to Padstow exceed, in the opinion of many, every other carriage window seaside view in the land – including the waves foaming on the Dawlish sea wall, the blue Atlantic and golden sands of the St Ives branch or the North Sea panorama from the London to Edinburgh train as it races along the Northumbrian coast. Here, along the fringes of the Camel, the blue water, golden sandbanks and green fields herald journey’s end for weary travellers as our London train pulls in after its haul of more than five hours from the capital. How we must regret in modern times that it was never part of Beeching’s remit to save railways such as this simply for their outstanding scenic qualities, or the Padstow line would be with us still.
But the pleasures to be had along the line were not just linked to the scenery. The passengers on these lonely country routes were part of an exclusive club, who could enjoy their own company in a non-corridor compartment labelled to seat ten or twelve. ‘Windows open, shoes off and feet up on the seats opposite, itinerary and timetable, refreshments and reading matter organised nearby, case and coat on the seats to discourage other passengers,’ write David St John Thomas and Patrick Whitehouse in their book The Great Days of the Country Railway. ‘This was your private room, ambling along at seldom more than 30 miles an hour, filled with the sounds and smells of the locomotive, as well as those of the countryside through the window, too.’ But there was still ‘rich companionship’ to be had – ‘with staff, driver and fireman during those long pauses for water; with the guard, and sometimes even with other passengers. Here were strangers from all walks of life – all had an interesting tale to tell when you had their interest in such a gentle environment. Business, education, entertainment, romance were there for the taking …’
At some stops along the Withered Arm you were more likely to witness a rabbit boarding the train than a passenger. This is no exaggeration. At Bridestowe, south of Okehampton (if you were local, you knew to pronounce it Briddystoe), T. W. E. Roche reported that ‘a statistician had worked out that the station sent away annually more rabbits than passengers. Certainly, when warrening was a considerable industry on Dartmoor, the rabbits were very much in evidence, boxes and boxes of them, their tootsies tied together, standing up on the platform. There were never many passengers.’ And yet, in its excellent timetable, which rendered the Withered Arm superior to almost all other country railways, there was a daily service from Waterloo, in the shape of the 3 p.m. down, which got you back at 7.43 p.m. – in time to see a golden sunset over the Atlantic on a summer’s night.
Daily life along the Withered Arm would have been typical of all country trains in pre-Beeching days. David St John Thomas describes the contents of the guard’s van on these trains:
As well as the passengers’ belongings there would be bottled gas, empty flower, fish and poultry boxes being returned to their owners, pigs and day-old chicks, pigeons (always being consigned everywhere), bags and parcels from a national food or other manufacturer to be cast off in twos and threes at stations along the line, mailbags, the railway’s own registered letters and parcels, the pouch in which the stationmaster sent his daily takings and received weary official communications, boxes of glass, trees and shrubs, bins of ice cream. Return trips would bring back the produce of the countryside, including growers’ specialities … calves to be exchanged with farmers elsewhere as genetic standards rose (nor should we forget the benefit to rural human genetics brought by the railway; with less intermarrying the ‘village idiot’ has disappeared).
Betjeman, in his regular journeys along the line, was inspired by somewhat loftier matters. ‘I know the stations by heart,’ he told a radio audience on the BBC Third Programme in 1949.
The slate-and granite-built waiting rooms, the oil lamps and veronica bushes, the great Delabole Quarry, the little high-edged fields; and where the smallholdings grow fewer and the fields larger and browner, I see the distant outline of Brown Willy and Rough Tor on Bodmin Moor. And then the train goes fast downhill through high cuttings and a wooded valley. We round a bend, and there is the flat marsh of the Camel, there the little rows of blacking-green cottages along the river at Egloshayle and we are at Wadebridge, next stop Padstow … The smell of fish and seaweed, the crying of the gulls, the warm moist West Country air.
A feast for the boy who was to become poet laureate, and, miraculously, it’s still possible for energetic travellers on foot or with a bike to relive the old route. Setting off back home from Padstow, my 08.30 boneshaker to Bodmin Parkway is late again.‘We’ve got six buses down with engine failure this morning,’ announces the driver. To hell with these old-fangled relics of the transport dark ages, why not set off east to walk along the old track, now converted into a footpath known as the Camel Trail? It’s easy to follow – just head out of the station along the estuary. Not hard to imagine as you stride across the magnificent 133-foot iron spans of the Little Petherick Creek Bridge that you are the regulator of the London express, a scene depicted in a famous Southern Railway publicity poster by Eric Hesketh Hubbard to promote its route into Cornwall.
Still, it’s a stiff walk and not for the faint-hearted. I’m fearing for my blisters when eventually there appears a mirage in the shape of an old Southern Railway station, complete with period green signs announcing BOSCARNE JUNCTION. Here is a stretch of line that is one of the oldest in Britain, opened to transport minerals in railway pre-history in 1834, long before the iron road came to Cornwall let alone most other parts of Britain. For years the haunt of the famous Well Tanks, it lived on to become the very last bit of
the old Southern Railway in north Cornwall in revenue-earning service, staying open for freight until 1983. Today, simmering in the platform is my saviour – a former GWR ‘pannier tank’ steam locomotive at the head of four 1950s coaches and an old-school guard with red carnation in his buttonhole who tells me his train will connect me to the London service at Bodmin Parkway.
No mirage this, but a real service of the preserved Bodmin & Wenford Steam Railway, Cornwall’s only steam heritage line. In pre-preservation days and after the demise of the Withered Arm this was the very last vestige of a passenger rail connection from London to Padstow, finally ceasing on 28 January 1967. Today at Bodmin my train discharges at least a couple of hundred passengers – times are clearly looking up. But to understand what went wrong, we must cast our minds back to when the bureaucrats at British Railways headquarters deemed these local lines to be hopelessly uneconomic. What chance was there for the gnarled fingers of the Withered Arm, as the Ford Prefects and Morris Minors, polished pride and joy of Britain’s growing post-war army of affluent workers, filed nose to tail along the A30?
The omens began to come true when control of the Withered Arm was transferred to the Western Region of British Railways on 1 January 1963. The desire for revenge on the Great Western’s upstart rival had never been forgotten, and now at last was the chance to exact retribution. First the Atlantic Coast Express was withdrawn, departing from Padstow for the last time on 5 September 1964 behind West Country Class No. 34023 Blackmoor Vale. Next to go were passenger trains on the Halwill to Torrington branch in 1965. Since the 1950s this line had had scarcely any human footfall at all; barely one passenger a week used the biggest station at Hatherleigh. Hardly anyone went, nor anyone came, on the neat platform with its tended flower beds and polished brass, even though it was served by two single-coach trains daily. David St John Thomas writes,
The Trains Now Departed Page 22
