The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Few line proposals suffered in this process more than that for the Waverley line, which was conceived in bitterness out of the rivalry between the two mighty railways that dominated access to Scotland from south of the border. The Caledonian, whose tentacles stretched into almost every part of Scotland, and the North British, its less profitable rival, were fighting for supremacy from their respective strongholds in Glasgow and Edinburgh. In 1846 the North British opened its main line between Edinburgh and Berwick-on-Tweed, but there was a problem in that further access into England via Newcastle depended on another mighty railway empire, the North Eastern, which would come at a usurious cost.

  But John Learmouth, the ambitious founder of the NBR and a former provost of Edinburgh, had his eye on another way south – through the sparsely populated country of the Borders. In 1845 he spent £120,000 buying a primitive wagon way, the Edinburgh and Dalkeith Railway, and proceeded to drive it on to Hawick, altering the track from 4 feet 6 inches to standard gauge and exchanging horses for the latest products of the steam age. For two wet summers and three harsh winters, sometimes in blinding snowstorms, thousands of navvies slaved to build the tracks at altitudes up to 880 feet to arrive at Hawick on 1 November 1849.

  But the Caledonian was already planning a devastating manoeuvre to prevent access to its stronghold at Carlisle on the west coast route into England, announcing that it would open its own line from Carlisle to Hawick via Langholm, the most populous town in the region. Since this was little more than a gesture to thwart the NBR, it was only to be a single-track secondary railway, but the canny North British outmanoeuvred its rival by proposing a double-track main line through Liddesdale along the valley of Liddel Water. Public support was shamelessly courted by the NBR chairman and local MP Richard Hodgson, who organised a huge party in Hawick in 1858 to get backing for his favoured route. He declared the day a public holiday, throwing a huge open-air banquet for 1,000 people with flags and bunting. Special trains brought guests from as far away as Glasgow and Edinburgh. After a year of parliamentary wrangling, the NBR won the day and the new Border Union Railway was born.

  The first sod of the new line was cut on 7 September by Mrs Hodgson, the NBR chairman’s wife, wielding a silver-plated spade. She was flanked by four navvies carrying a mahogany wheelbarrow shoulder high. But this was the easy part. Now the rest of the line had to be hewn from some of the most unforgiving and remote countryside ever to be encountered by any railway in Britain. Even the celebrated Settle & Carlisle was never more than two miles from a road.

  Armies of navvies marched across the hills, taking their shanty towns with them, building massive embankments and viaducts. Many died during the construction of the dramatic Whiterope Tunnel, 1,208 yards long and 1,000 feet above sea level. Four hundred gallons of water poured every minute from a stream that ran through the mouth of the tunnel, and weather conditions were so unpredictable that the men had to work either semi-naked or wearing heavy overcoats – sometimes alternating within minutes. At Hawick up to thirty men slept in a single hut, twenty-eight by twelve feet, with two or three navvies sharing each bed.

  Further south the NBR constructed what was the most remote major junction on the railway network. Located in the midst of bleak forest plantations and blustered by harsh winds sweeping across the Cheviots, Riccarton Junction (all change for the branch line that wandered over to Hexham in Northumberland), which opened in 1863, was a purpose-built railway community of some thirty cottages, with a three-road engine shed, carriage depot, two signal boxes, a gas plant and a smithy. This hamlet, entirely without road access, was one of the strangest places on the network – an enclosed world that was effectively Planet Railway. Here everything was railway-connected – physically, commercially and spiritually. Close to the station was terraced housing for the drivers, firemen, signalmen, porters, fitters, cleaners, gangers and everyone else for whom the railway provided a living. Two much grander three-bedroom houses were built for the stationmaster and a teacher. Following the social hierarchy of the era, the teacher had an inside toilet, while the less-exalted stationmaster had to make do with one outside. Human needs were served by daily deliveries by rail to the Riccarton Grocery Branch, Hawick Co-op Society shop on the platform. Next to it was the sub-post office and later a telephone kiosk, while the station buffet doubled up as the pub. In later years a train paused three days a week for people returning from the cinema.

  Younger children went to school in a superannuated railway coach parked behind the station. Older pupils were packed off to Newcastleton or Hawick aboard a special carriage attached to the 6.30 a.m. freight train to Edinburgh’s Millerhill freight yard. Illness and death were also catered for. If a doctor or minister of religion was needed, a locomotive was prepared and dispatched hastily along the line. Thankfully, the railway provided a concession for those who had departed this life by carrying coffins free of charge to the closest town with a funeral parlour. Only in 1963, just six years before closure, did the community of 130 people get its first road – an unmetalled track provided by the Forestry Commission.

  Despite the heroic efforts to bring it into being and the legendary status accorded to it by railway enthusiasts in later years, the Waverley was always a sickly child that never quite thrived. Journey times were slower than its rivals, hampered by its many gradients and sharp curves. No less a personage than Queen Victoria complained about a journey over the route from Aberdeen to Windsor aboard the Royal Train. Even a partnership with the Midland on that mighty railway’s route to London via Leeds, using carriages and dining cars that were among the most luxurious in the world, wasn’t sufficient to attract the necessary traffic. The fact was the area served by the Waverley route had no heavy industry, and the line was limited to local merchandise, agricultural materials, livestock and coal.

  Its dismal financial performance, where receipts at stations rarely even covered staff wages, are recorded in David St John Thomas’s The Country Railway: ‘The North British Railway Border Union line had eleven stations in the lean windswept miles between Hawick and Carlisle. In 1920, the peak year for railway traffic, before the age of mass motoring and with few buses hardy enough to search there for traffic, the annual passenger takings were as little as £147 at Shankend, £249 at Harker and £281 at Kershope Foot.’ It got worse after the grouping of the railways in 1923, when the Waverley was absorbed into the London & North Eastern Railway.

  Sensibly, the LNER concentrated on the east coast route through Newcastle, with its slick streamliners such as the Flying Scotsman and Coronation making the Waverley line expresses look like plodders in comparison. By the 1950s 80 per cent of local livestock traffic, once a mainstay of the Waverley, was going by road. By the 1960s there were only two through expresses to London – the daytime Waverley and an overnight train. I once travelled on this service from London to Edinburgh and recall stretching out full length in an otherwise empty compartment, waking up at dawn to admire the magnificent Borders scenery in solitude.

  Since the track lifters passed, the Waverley line has slumbered, with the vividness of memory slowly fading. But despite the best efforts of the wreckers of the 1960s, some of its grandest artefacts survive today as permanent memorials in the landscape. None finer perhaps than Melrose station, with its elevated position overlooking the town and the abbey. With its fine Flemish gables and elaborate bay windows intact, the building survives in the slightly less romantic guise of a childrens’ nursery and a pizza restaurant, and – even more humiliating – the Melrose bypass now runs where its platforms once stood.

  Still, it was lucky to survive, having been rescued from dereliction by an English architect, and is now regarded as one of Scotland’s most important station buildings. Equally indelible are the elegant Redbridge Viaduct across the Tweed at Galashiels and the grandstanding Shankend Viaduct further south, whose fifteen semicircular arches, each sixty feet high, march for 199 yards, brooding over the moorland landscape like some prehistoric monument.
/>   But these days there’s no talk of prehistory since, mile by mile, the Waverley line (or at least its northern part) is rising inexorably from the dead. Soon fast modern diesel trains will be speeding down the tracks on schedules that the North British pioneers of old could only have dreamed of. Today’s newly engineeered railway is not the product of Victorian chancers and risk-takers but an injection of public money by the Scottish government, flexing its muscles in an increasingly devolved Britain. Still, the dream is just as bright as it was for the line’s Victorian forebears – with no greater believer than Hugh Wark, project director of the new railway and with the pedigree of having upgraded the London–Glasgow route.

  ‘We’re not just building a railway here,’ he tells me at Network Rail headquarters in a what is effectively a small township of Portakabins at Newtongrange, next to the fossilised winding gear of the National Mining Museum – a perfect juxtaposition of the old and new industrial Scotland. ‘We’re actually putting right an historic injustice. We’re putting the Borders back on the travel map of Scotland once again – where it should have remained.’

  Will the day ever dawn when the rails stretch all the way from Edinburgh to Carlisle again? Who knows? Even today, amid the windswept ruins of Riccarton Junction, huddles of enthusiasts can frequently be found paying homage, collars turned up against the weather and ever hopeful that the express trains might one day power over the entire length of the Waverley route once more. Is that the wind in the hills? For the dreamers it could be the approach of a sparkling green Gresley Pacific pounding out of the mist up the gradient at the head of The Waverley. And who’s to say they are wrong? On the line that came back from the dead, anything is possible.

  Acknowledgements

  Though you might imagine that the people who run our fast-paced modern railways would be too busy with the present to bother with the past, quite the opposite is true. I’ve had huge support in writing this book from today’s train companies, many of whom are only too keen to recall their legacy and heritage. Special thanks to Mark Hopwood and Sue Evans of First Great Western, Ken Gibbs and Damien Henderson of Virgin Trains, John Yellowlees of Scotrail, Lucy Drake of Eurostar, Tim Shoveller, Emma Knight of South West Trains and Emma Wylde of the train division of the travel company Belmond. East Coast Trains, whose head of communications John Gelson is a true friend of railways past and present and sponsored my travel from London to undertake research in the National Railway Museum at York.

  Thanks too to a host of others – generous not only with their wisdom but also with large tranches of their time. Richard Burningham, Anthony Coulls, Peter Davis, Philip Haigh, Brian Janes, Chris Milner, John Robinson, Russ Rollings, Gordon Rushton, Ross Shimmon, Andy Thompson and Christian Wolmar read and commented on the manuscript. All sorts of support and guidance were also given by a diaspora of folk who might be termed Friends of the Railways, including Paul Bigland, Hazel Bonner, Neil Buxton, Rupert Brennan-Brown, Richard Clinnick, Ian Dinmore, Barry Doe, Roger Ford, Nigel Harris, Anthony Lambert, Paul Prentice, Jo Guiver, Hassard Stacpoole, Alexa Stott, Michael Whitehouse and Dawn Wolrich.

  I owe a huge debt of gratitude too to Michael Max, one of the most prolific collectors of railway lore and literature, who allowed me to use his magnificent private library before it was sadly dispersed. Likewise the staff of the British Library at St Pancras, the Search Engine archive at the National Railway Museum in York and the National Archive at Kew, who were always patient in my requests for the most abstruse information from the past.

  Biggest thanks of all to my ever-supportive wife Melanie, to whom this book is dedicated, and to my schoolboy son Edmund, a fellow railwayac. Many were the ideas he contributed in railway conversations late into the evening after homework was over. And, as always, I’ve had unflagging support from my publisher Trevor Dolby at Preface, who had the inspiration for this book, and my agent Sheila Ableman, always calm as I raced headlong along the tracks to my destination.

  Finally, a cautionary note. I recently asked a leading celebrity with a widely known interest in railways why he didn’t write books on the subject. They would clearly be popular, I suggested to him. ‘You know,’ he replied, ‘there are so many experts out there in the railway community that I’d be terrified about getting things wrong.’ Well, I’ve taken that risk with this volume. So I hope readers will bear with me in my aim here – not to produce a scholarly work of history or topography, but to enter imaginatively into the world of the railways of the past and to summon up for the modern reader at least the spirit of the trains now departed.

  I take full responsibility for any errors, and I’d be delighted to hear comments and suggestions from you, the readers, many of whom will be vastly more knowledgeable than me. Please get in touch via michael@michaelwennwilliams.co.uk. All comments will be acknowledged and corrections incorporated into future editions of the book.

  Sources and further reading

  It’s surprising given the never-ending outpourings from publishers of books on trains that there has been relatively little of what you might call writing about railways. Sure, if you are seeking something entitled Track-Tamping Machines of the Early BR Era or Pictorial Memories of Golden Days at Snoozington Junction then you may find plenty of what you need. But I’m inclined to agree with George Ottley, the bibliographer of railways, when he wrote, ‘One’s first impression upon entering a railway bookshop is that nobody reads books today, for so much of what is on sale consists of albums of illustrations with captions and a brief introduction the only textual support.’ ‘Middle-depth writing’ – let alone solid scholarly publications about Britain’s railway heritage ‘in the fullness of all its aspects, woven in the weft and warp of social and economic development’ – had, according to Ottley, drowned in a sea of egregious pap.

  While this may be a bit strong, it’s certainly true that the best-written books – and the ones that have inspired me in writing this volume – derive mostly from a more literary era of publishing. I include C. Hamilton Ellis’s The Trains We Loved (George Allen & Unwin 1947), The Fascination of Railways by Roger Lloyd (George Allen & Unwin 1951), Lines of Character by L. T. C. Rolt and P. B. Whitehouse (Constable 1952), The Railways of Britain by Jack Simmons (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1961), The Railway Age by Michael Robbins (Routledge & Kegan Paul 1962), Bryan Morgan’s The Railway-Lover’s Companion (Eyre & Spottiswoode 1963) and The Country Railway by David St John Thomas (David & Charles 1976), as well as the many volumes from the 1940s onwards by the prolific O. S. Nock and Cecil J. Allen.

  This doesn’t mean there hasn’t been some good writing in later decades, notably the definitive Fire and Steam by Christian Wolmar (Atlantic 2007) and the compendious The Railway Station: A Social History by Jeffrey Richards and John M. MacKenzie (Oxford University Press 1986). More quirky but nevertheless a good read are Platform Souls by Nicholas Whitaker (Victor Gollancz 1995), Parallel Lines by Ian Marchant (Bloomsbury 2003) and Eleven Minutes Late by Matthew Engel (Macmillan 2009).

  For most of my sources I’ve drawn on an eclectic range of original archive material, personal memoirs, individual railway histories, face-to-face interviews – and discovered many gems in the following volumes.

  Cecil J. Allen, The Titled Trains of Great Britain (Ian Allan 5th edn, 1967)

  Anonymous, The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book (Old House reprint 2012)

  Robin Atthill, The Somerset & Dorset Railway (David & Charles 1967)

  Martin Bairstow, Railways of Blackpool and the Fylde (Martin Bairstow 2001)

  George Behrend, Gone with Regret (Lambarde Press 1964)

  George Behrend and Gary Buchanan, Night Ferry (Ian Allan 1985)

  John Betjeman, London’s Historic Railway Stations (John Murray 1972)

  Gordon Biddle, Great Railway Stations of Britain (David & Charles 1986)

  Paul Bolger, The Docker’s Umbrella (Bluecoat Press 1992)

  G. A. Brown, J. D. C. Prideaux and H. G. Radcliffe, The Lynton and Barnstaple Railway (David
& Charles 1964)

  Ernest F. Carter, Unusual Locomotives (Frederick Muller 1960)

  Ian Carter, British Railway Enthusiasm (Manchester University Press 2008)

  R. Davies and M. D. Grant, Forgotten Railways: Chilterns and Cotswolds (David & Charles 1975)

  W. J. K. Davies, Light Railways (Ian Allan 1964)

  Andrew Dow, Dow’s Dictionary of Railway Quotations (John Hopkins University Press 2009)

  J. M. Dunn, The Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway (Oakwood Press 1952)

  John Gahan, Seventeen Stations to Dingle (Countyvise 1981)

  A. E. Grigg, Country Railwaymen (Calypus Books 1982)

  Alan and Christine Hammond, The Splendour of the Somerset & Dorset Railway (Millstream Books 2010)

  Chris de Winter Hebron, Dining at Speed (Silver Link 2004)

  John Hadrill, Rails to the Sea (Atlantic 1999)

  C. Hamilton Ellis, Four Main Lines (Allen and Unwin 1950)

  Derek Harrison, Salute to Snow Hill (Barbryn Press 1978)

  Brian Hollingsworth, The Pleasures of Railways (Allen Lane 1983)

  Peter Johnson, The Shropshire and Montgomeryshire Light Railway (Oxford Publishing Co. 2008)

  Arthur Jordan, The Stratford-upon-Avon and Midland Junction Railway (Oxford Publishing Co. 1982)

  R. W. Kidner, The Colonel Stephens Railways (Oakwood Press 1936)