The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  But that was not all. The railway’s slogan, ‘The Premier Line’, was no hyperbole, since by mid-century the London & Birmingham had become, through its various amalgamations, the London & North Western Railway and the largest joint-stock company in the world. In 1846, by way of celebration, Philip Hardwick, with the aid of his son Philip C. Hardwick, was commissioned to design the Great Hall of Euston station. This magnificent chamber was built in the Italian Renaissance style, and influenced by the Berlin Opera House and the Palazzo Massimi in Rome. No wonder it was called the grandest waiting room in Britain.

  Here passengers could repose in palatial splendour until officials rang a bell and announced the departure of their train. They could either wait on the ground floor or ascend by a double staircase and watch the crowds below from a gallery which surrounded the whole enormous hall. The columns were in the Ionic style, and the chamber was lit by attic windows, which illuminated the elaborately corbelled and coffered ceiling. At 125 feet 6 inches long and 62 feet high, this was believed to be the largest unsupported ceiling in the world. Copied from the church of St Paul Outside the Walls in Rome, it was rivalled in the secular world only by that in the ballroom at Buckingham Palace. The cost of this sumptuous waiting room was a mere £150,000. (Although the keen price may have encouraged a degree of jerry-building, with a column collapsing during construction, killing three workmen.)

  There were further marvels. The circular counter in the station’s refreshment room marked the first appearance in Britain of a bar where it was possible to stand and drink or eat. Thereafter the habit became common at stations long before it arrived in pubs. (Even at the most primitive village inn customers’ wants were met by serving maids, and it was the railway station refreshment room that inaugurated this new way of buying drinks.) During this period too a royal waiting room was built in the Greek style with white and buff walls, featuring a private entrance from the street and French windows opening out straight onto the platform so Her Majesty could step directly aboard the train.

  Euston had other distinctions. The station was renowned, for instance, for the variety and comprehensiveness of the items contained in its lost property office. One reporter in 1849 gave a minute inventory of its contents: ‘It would be infinitely easier to say what there is not, than what there is, in the forty compartments like great wine bins in which all this lost property is arranged. One is choke-full of men’s hats, another of parasols, umbrellas and sticks of every possible description. One would think that all the ladies’ reticules on earth were deposited in a third.’ But there were items of great value too. ‘Some little time ago, the superintendent, upon breaking open, previous to a general sale, a locked leather hat box which had lain in this dungeon two years, found in it under the hat 65 pounds in Bank of England notes, with one or two private letters, which enabled him to restore the money to the owner, who, it turned out, had been so positive he had left his hat box in a hotel in Birmingham that he had made no inquiry for it at the railway office.’

  But none of this counted as the age of pygmies dawned a century later. In 1960 Euston’s death knell sounded as British Railways proposed total demolition. The line to the north was to be electrified, and the fuddy-duddy old structure hardly fitted in. Demolition was approved by Transport Minister Ernest Marples, whose family firm’s main activity was the construction of roads, notably the Euston line’s rival and Britain’s first motorway, the M1. He didn’t stick around to see the results of his decision, fleeing to his chateau in France to avoid being arraigned for tax fraud in 1975.

  Despite the outcry from preservationists (Betjeman called the arch ‘the noblest thing in London’), the London County Council and even the Royal Fine Art Commission, nothing could prevent the architects of British Rail from destroying the majestic old Euston. In a final bid to save it, the editor of the Architectural Review, J. M. Richards, went to lobby Prime Minister Harold Macmillan. As he recalled, ‘Macmillan listened – or I suppose he listened … He sat without moving with his eyes apparently closed. He asked no questions; in fact he said nothing except he would consider the matter.’

  Even the demolition contractor, Frank Valori, was distraught at having to destroy the portico so loved by Londoners, and he offered to number the stones and re-erect them at his own expense on a site chosen by British Railways. The government ungraciously refused this offer on the flimsy pretext that no site could be found. The sad Mr Valori presented to the newly formed Victorian Society a silver model of the propylaeum, which the late Lord Esher, the society’s chairman, received with the observation that it ‘made him feel as if some man had murdered his wife and then presented him with her bust’. Valori later used some of the stones from the arch in his own house at Bromley in Kent.

  Betjeman later wrote sourly,

  What masterpiece arose on the site of the old station? No masterpiece. Instead there is a place where nobody can sit; an underground taxi entrance so full of fumes that drivers, passengers and porters alike all hate it. A great wall of glass looks like a mini-version of London airport, which it seems to be trying to imitate. On its expanse of floor and against its walls passengers lie and await trains … Hygienic and slippery buffets may be glimpsed on upper floors and less hygienic and more slippery bars are entered from the hall itself. The smell of sweat and used clothes, even in winter, is strong in this hall, for there is something funny about the air-conditioning. In hot weather, it is cooler to go to the empty space in front of the station where the portico could easily have been rebuilt. In cold weather, it is advisable to retreat into one of the shops. The only place where the air approaches freshness and reasonable temperature is down to the Underground station, with its manifold passages.

  Not much of the old station survives today. The bronze statue of Robert Stephenson by Carlo Marochetti presented to the LNWR by the Institution of Civil Engineers in 1870 still stands disdainfully outside All Bar One – abused by commuters, who wedge coffee cartons and discarded copies of the Metro free newspaper between his feet. The twin Euston Road lodges, designed in 1869 in Portland Stone by the company’s architect J. B. Stansby, are now real-ale and cider bars where City boys neck impossible quantities of alcohol, anaesthetising themselves for the commute home. You don’t need a pint to be dazzled by the impressive list of destinations once reached by the LNWR, carved into the lodges’ quoins. Now long out of date, they include such unlikely places as Swansea, Cork, Cambridge and Newark – a reminder of the fierce competition between the old railway companies. Of the seventy-two stations listed, only thirty-seven were ever on reasonably direct routes.

  With the destruction of the arch, the spirit of the old Euston disappeared. Right at the beginning the carriages had been hauled by a cable up the steep slope to Camden Town, but in its heyday, the years before and after World War II, it was home to the mightiest locomotives – the Duchesses, Princesses, Royal Scots and Patriots, and their crews – aristocrats of labour at the controls of the fastest expresses. Here is the Reverend Roger Lloyd, known as the railway canon, writing in 1951 in his book The Fascination of Railways.

  Come and stand at the far end of the No. 12 platform at Euston. It is the only spot from which every train passing in and out of the station can be seen; and there is a blackened signal post on which somebody (probably one of the small boys who are invariably to be found there) writes in pencil the names of some of the famous Camden drivers who bring their engines down to the platform to join their trains – Bishop, Copperwheat, Laurie Earl and others.

  There it was I met a little tiny man with a very humorous expression waiting to take the 10.08 Perth train with a streamlined engine. It was a lovely June day, but he perversely disapproved of that, since he wanted a March gale, the only ‘right weather’ for the Carlisle run. ‘It’s not my sort of day. What I like is to drive through the lonely hills around Shap when it’s wild and stormy. You get the wind in your lungs and it’s grand.’ The whistle blew, and off he went up the Camden bank, and a porter ca
me up to me and said: ‘Do you know who you were talking to? That was Laurie Earl.’ There was reverence in his voice.

  But there is hope yet. In our present, less philistine age we have come to understand the virtues of what we have lost. The millions spent on the recent restoration of St Pancras and King’s Cross along the road have undoubtedly made them nicer places. How much more pleasant to scoff a gourmet meal in the restaurant that occupies the old booking office at St Pancras than to join the queue, as one did in the old days, for a grumpy British Railways ticket clerk. However, even where the great stations have been preserved and survive, much of the paraphernalia that added to the atmosphere has gone. The clatter and chatter of the mechanical arrival and departure indicators, the racks of roof boards bearing the names of grand expresses, the pigeon baskets and milk churns, the machines that stamped the names of excited children on a little strip of aluminium, water tanks with hoses for replenishing restaurant cars, chocolate dispensers with clunking drawers, glass cases with models of the Rocket with wheels that would rotate for a penny in the slot to help widows and orphans in the various railway homes. And that late-evening burst of excitement as the newspaper vans raced up from Fleet Street fresh with the smell of ink, and the thumps and thuds as the bundles were tossed onto the trains that would speed them to distant destinations.

  Gone too are other assaults on the senses. ‘All large railway stations had smells,’ says Gordon Biddle in his book Great Railway Stations of Britain, ‘usually a compound of steam, smoke, hot oil, gas, and near the luggage lift, dirty water that oozed out of a hydraulic cylinder with a distinctive sighing sound’. The railway historian Michael Bonavia writes of ‘spilt milk, stale fish and horse manure blended in as well’.

  But we must be thankful for what is left. Heading back from Birmingham after my homage to Snow Hill, I can just spy from the train out of New Street a classical arch looking curiously like Philip Hardwick’s mighty structure at Euston sitting forlornly in the midst of a wasteland of brick rubble. This is Curzon Street station, the Euston arch’s twin sister and just as handsome, with columns forty-five feet high and a superb carved London & Birmingham coat of arms still surviving haughtily over the original front door – though purists would point out its columns are Ionic not Doric. This was, for a time, the northern terminus of the London & Birmingham Railway.

  Too provincial for anyone to take much notice over the years, Curzon Street quietly slumbered on unscathed as a goods station, but it is now destined for glory as the city terminus for HS2, the new high-speed line to the north. Its resurrection would be a fine revenge for what the wreckers did to Snow Hill. If it happens we should not be surprised if that forlorn statue of Robert Stephenson steps down from its plinth outside Euston and dances with delight.

  Chapter Fourteen

  A day return on the Heath Robinson special

  The wacky world of the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Light Railway, Britain’s most eccentric line, run by railway history’s dottiest proprietor. Even Heath Robinson might have struggled to invent it …

  OUT OF SHREWSBURY station and over a rusty bridge, ducking and diving through some back alleys down onto the bank of the Severn, where I’m sidestepping the puddles and already out of breath. ‘Could you imagine carrying your luggage all this way just to change trains?’ My guide, Mansel Williams, a town councillor with a curious resemblance to the former Labour leader Neil Kinnock, is leading the way from Shrewsbury’s main station to the site of the almost mythical and long-closed Abbey Foregate Street, terminus of the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire Railway, perhaps the most hopeless line ever built in Britain. If there was a prize for the lost causes of British railway history, then this obscure branch line would surely deserve to be the winner.

  ‘It never had much of a chance from the start, since the Great Western and London & North Western Railways ganged up to block its trains, forcing the little railway to open its station in the badlands of town,’ Mansel explains as Shrewsbury proper starts to peter out amid derelict shops. ‘Nearly there,’ he says as a huge Asda looms up in the distance. At least there’s some relief in the form of the glowing red sandstone of the ancient Benedictine abbey, which gave the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire’s mighty HQ its name.

  Mighty? Well, that’s how it liked to think of itself. In reality, it was a platform and a modest single-storey building, with the stone pulpit where monks once preached against sin in the Benedictine refectory sternly overseeing the arrival of passengers at the end of the platform. And woe betide any passenger with bladder issues, since the construction budget did not run to the provision of toilets.

  Astonishingly, it is nearly all still there, complete with pulpit though minus track, more than half a century since the last passenger trains ran. Spiders scuttle away as Mansel turns his key in the booking-office door, and here is the old ticket-issuing window, surrounded by peeling chocolate and cream paint, where once you could buy a day return to Wern Las or Chapel Lane. One day Mansel and his group of enthusiasts are hoping to have it restored to its former (non) glory. ‘Can you imagine buying a ticket here?’ A faraway look appears in his eyes. ‘And one day we may even lay some track …’

  Yet the omens for Mansel’s dream and a Shropshire & Montgomeryshire revival may be no better than they ever were. By a bizarre quirk, the clock on the abbey tower uses the letter F instead of the Roman numeral X, so a quick time check (it is now around 11 a.m.) reveals the word IF.

  ‘If only …’ might be the motto of the line. The S&M fulfilled every stereotype of the uneconomic bucolic branch line at its most hopeless, with slow, unreliable services, creaking tracks, rickety bridges, remote stations in the middle of nowhere and the most bizarre assembly of clapped-out rolling stock ever assembled on a British railway. Think of Rowland Emmet’s cartoon engine Nellie, crossed with the Reverend W. Awdry’s Thomas. Add a dash of Heath Robinson, the Titfield Thunderbolt and Oliver Postgate’s Ivor the Engine and you are almost there (or not, if you happened to be unlucky enough to be a passenger on one of Shropshire & Montgomeryshire’s interminable journeys).

  For the whole of its struggling life the Shropshire & Montgomeryshire was like a railway purgatory, where ancient locomotives and carriages lived on in a kind of rusty limbo of dark sheds and overgrown tracks, conveying passengers like lost souls on their way to Hades. (Fortunately, Freud’s couch was way in the future when the line opened, and psychoanalysts specialising in S&M had not yet been invented, although the initials may be applied perfectly to the little railway’s penchant for self-flagellation.) Yet its survival for a century through bankruptcies, closures and yet more closures until its final demise in the 1960s has given it legendary status in the pantheon of lost railways.

  The whole doomed empire was presided over by perhaps the most eccentric entrepreneur in the history of the railways, in the form of Colonel Holman Fred Stephens, a civil engineer and the son of Frederic George Stephens, the eminent Pre-Raphaelite painter and critic, some of whose works are in Tate Britain. Stephens planned, built and collected a whole portfolio of failing small branch lines around the country and ran them with evangelistic fervour from a terraced house in Tonbridge, Kent. There was nothing too hopeless, too woebegone, too run-down that this patron saint of lost railway causes couldn’t espouse.

  But we cannot blame the colonel for bringing this unfortunate railway on the English–Welsh borders into the world.Even by the overexcitable standards of the mid-nineteenth century’s railway speculators, it is fair to say that any individual who had the idea of making money from a railway connecting Shrewsbury to the tiny border village of Llanymynech (population 887) was either clinically deluded or the most outrageous optimist and probably both. The route originated as the only constructed portion of a grandiose scheme to connect the Staffordshire Potteries with the mid-Wales port of Portmadoc. Originally promoted as the West Midlands, Shrewsbury & Welsh Coast in 1860, revived five years later as the West Shropshire Mineral Railway and later renamed the Pott
eries, Shrewsbury & North Wales, none of these titles exactly rolled off the tongue. The idea was to concentrate on goods and minerals, and if the occasional passenger came along, well, this would be a bonus. Oh, what dreams were encapsulated in the geographical reach of those titles. It was under the latter name that the line set out bravely from Shrewsbury, only to have its ambitions resoundingly crushed not long afterwards.

  The Potts, as it was known, never managed to get further east (so no lucrative traffic from Stoke-on-Trent), and westwards it only struggled as far as the Welsh border. Even so, minus any connection with the capital of the world’s ceramics industry, the line’s nickname stuck for a century. Optimism lived on too. Years later, in dusty booking offices along the line the railway still carried printed tickets for the use of ‘Shipwrecked Mariners’, even though a terminus at the Welsh coast would never materialise, and there weren’t many shipwrecks in Shrewsbury!

  For its whole life the line would teeter on the edge of financial ruin, occasionally plunging over the fiscal cliff before being recklessly hauled back up again. There were never going to be many passengers in this lush but thinly populated part of Shropshire in the flood plain of the River Severn, where the small farming villages and hamlets had scarcely changed since medieval times. But even worse – before the tracks were laid, there was a terrible augury. The company was refused permission by the combined might of the Great Western and London & North Western railway companies to operate into the main station at Shrewsbury General, and was banished to the edge of town to a little station with no connections to anywhere.

  The trains eventually got under way on 13 August 1866, and according to the Shrewsbury Chronicle crowds of passengers turned up at Abbey Foregate to try out the new service. Many were walkers heading for the scenic Llanymynech Hill; others were loaded with fishing tackle for a bit of sport on the River Vrynwy. But a different kind of liquid flowed through Llanymynech too, since the English–Welsh border ran down the middle of the high street. Its legendary pubs, where drinkers from dry Wales could get legless on Sundays merely by crossing the road, attracted tipplers for miles around.