The Trains Now Departed Read online

  Contents

  About the Book

  About the Author

  Also by Michael Williams

  Dedication

  Title Page

  Introduction: The romance we lost

  1: The Holy Grail of lost railways

  The Slow and Dirty it may have been for some, but the old Somerset & Dorset remains, for its many devotees today, the most romantic and alluring of all the vanished lines of Britain. Did its origins in Glastonbury help weave the spell?

  2: Final ticket for the boat train

  The exotic life and death of the Night Ferry from Victoria to the Continent, haunt of spies, diplomats, starlets and sultans. Even in today’s Eurostar era, its memory stands proud as Britain’s only truly international train.

  3: Kippers and champagne on the Tube

  A saunter through Metro-land to the London Underground’s farthest outpost. It’s buried under weeds today, but once the Pullman trains ran from here, serving the most splendid of breakfasts to commuters up to Baker Street.

  4: The railway that touched the sky

  Beeching butchered the bleak Stainmore line over the Pennines, in its day the highest in England. But the old viaducts still stand tall, and the tales of the tough men who worked it live on as the stuff of legend.

  5: The glamour that ran out of steam

  The Flying Scotsman, the Cornish Riviera, the Coronation Scot – such speed, such luxury! In days gone by almost every main line had its named expresses. These glamorous trains are a fast-receding memory in the corporate world of today’s franchised railways.

  6: The train that got ahead of its time

  Scousers knew it as The Docker’s Umbrella. In its heyday the Liverpool Overhead Railway was a state-of-the art urban transit system; now it is just a memory on Merseyside. But its vision is emulated round the world.

  7: On the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting – the railway that time forgot

  The charms of the old Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction Railway, meandering through the rural heart of England, were legendary. But don’t try to get anywhere in a hurry on this, one of the slowest trains in the land.

  8: In the company of ghosts on Britain’s spookiest service

  Could there be anything creepier than a journey aboard a deserted train that runs just once a day through forgotten Yorkshire? Yet this zombie of the tracks opens a door into the mists of early railway history.

  9: 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.

  10: Engineering genius in the scrapyard

  So many of the fiery marvels of the steam age were lost for ever, sent prematurely for scrap. Let us mourn them, including Sir Nigel Gresley’s Cock o’ the North, the Patriot, the mighty Big Bertha and the steam engine that thought it was a diesel.

  11: Last call for the dining car

  Crisp tablecloths, silver service and six-course gourmet meals. The railway restaurant car was once the acme of civilised travel. Now, in a world ruled by the soggy bacon roll, it is all but vanished. But not quite …

  12: 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.

  13: Final whistle for the grand stations

  Victims of a barbarous age, the mighty cathedrals of steam such as Birmingham’s Snow Hill, London’s Broad Street and Euston, with its heroic Doric arch, fell cruelly to the wrecker’s ball. There were others, too, less famous but no less glorious. A journey among the ruins …

  14: 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 …

  15: We do like to be beside the seaside

  Pack your bags and load up those crates of ale for a railway excursion to the seaside. Today we’re heading for Blackpool’s Golden Mile. Tomorrow we could be making merry on a day trip to Scarborough, Morecambe, Bridlington or Bournemouth. Hurry, though. The tickets will soon be gone.

  16: The line that came back from the dead

  It was the most romantic and scenic line ever to be axed in Britain. The loss of the Waverley route from England through the Scottish Borders was the bitterest of the Beeching closures. But now, miraculously, the old line has risen from the ashes amid glorious scenery …

  Acknowledgements

  Sources and further reading

  Index

  Copyright

  About the Book

  Sometimes you come across a lofty railway viaduct, marooned in the middle of a remote country landscape. Or a crumbling platform from some once-bustling junction buried under the buddleia. If you are lucky you might be able to follow some rusting tracks, or explore an old tunnel leading to ... well, who knows where? Listen hard. Is that the wind in the undergrowth? Or the spectre of a train from a golden era of the past panting up the embankment?

  These are the ghosts of The Trains Now Departed. They are the railway lines, and services that ran on them that have disappeared and gone forever. A lost legacy of lines prematurely axed, as well as marvels of locomotive engineering sent to the scrapyard, and grand termini felled by the wrecker’s ball. Gone, too, are the vanished delights of train travel, such as haute cuisine in the dining car, the grand expresses with their evocative names, and continental boat trains to romantic far-off places. Such pleasures have all but vanished in our modern homogenised era of train travel.

  The Trains Now Departed is a journey into the soul of our railways, summoning up a magic which, although mired in time, is fortunately not lost for ever.

  About the Author

  Michael Williams is the best-selling author of On the Slow Train, On the Slow Train Again and Steaming to Victory. He is a journalist, academic and author – writing, blogging and broadcasting on railways and other subjects for many media outlets, including the Independent, the BBC, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the New Statesman, as well as the specialist railway press. He is also a travel writer, having covered the world for a variety of publications. He lives with his family in Camden Town, not far from St Pancras – Britain’s most splendid railway station.

  Also by Michael Williams:

  On the Slow Train

  On the Slow Train Again

  Steaming to Victory

  For Melanie

  The Trains Now Departed

  Sixteen Excursions into the Lost Delights of Britain’s Railways

  Michael Williams

  Introduction:

  The romance we lost

  SOMETIMES YOU COME across a lofty railway viaduct marooned in the middle of a remote country landscape. Or a crumbling platform of some once-bustling junction buried under the buddleia. If you are lucky you might be able to follow some rusting tracks or explore an old tunnel leading to … well, who knows where? Listen hard. Is that the wind in the undergrowth? Or the spectre of a train from a golden era of the past panting up the embankment?

  These are the ghosts of the trains now departed – lines prematurely axed often with gripping and colourful tales to tell, marvels of locomotive engineering prematurely sent to the scrapyard, and architecturally magnificent stations felled by the wrecker’s ball. Then there are the lost delights of train travel, such as haute cuisine in the dining car, the gr
and expresses with their evocative names, and continental boat trains to romantic far-off places. Such pleasures have all but vanished in our modern homogenised era of train travel.

  But why should nostalgia be on anyone’s mind in this age of fast, state-of-the-art trains, which routinely whisk us efficiently all over the developed world at speeds of up to 200 mph. Is it merely fanciful and indulgent to summon up some ‘lost age’ of the railways when more of us are choosing to use the rail network than at any time in history. Trains today, the mantra goes, are faster, more frequent and better than ever. Why bother about the past?

  Well, for many of today’s train travellers ‘faster, more frequent and better’ is too often a euphemism, in corporate railwayspeak, for ‘worse’. It is sometimes tempting to wonder if, deep in every railway operations HQ, there is a department whose sole job is to think up ways of corroding the experience of passengers (or ‘passenger experience’ if you go along with the jargon.) Here are seats that don’t line up with the windows, garish plasticky train interiors, an incomprehensible fares system, ticket collectors who assume everyone is a criminal, a cacophony of endless announcements about ‘the next station stop’ and ‘suspicious packages’, and of course the extinction of many of the things that once made rail travel joyous – restaurant cars with white tablecloths and silver service, obliging porters, staffed stations, waiting rooms with blazing fires, a comfy compartment you could snuggle in, luggage in advance … I’m sure you can devise your own list. No wonder the universe of railways of the past seems rose-tinted.

  But let’s not get carried away. There are many tangible things we have lost over the years that it is unreasonable to expect to recover in the modern age. Nor would we want them. That romantic little branch line train was often as illusory as George Orwell’s ‘old maids bicycling to holy communion through the morning mist’. As Paul Theroux wrote,

  There is an English dream of a warm summer evening on a branch line train. Just that sentence can make an English person over 40 fall silent with the memory of what has now become a golden fantasy of an idealised England: the comfortable, dusty coaches rolling through the low woods, the sun gilding the green leaves and striking through the carriage windows; the breeze tickling the hot flowers in the fields, birdsong and the thump of the powerful locomotive; the pleasant creak of the wood panelling on the coach; the mingled smell of fresh grass and coal smoke; and the expectation of being met by someone very dear on the platform of a country station.

  The reality was that the train was often a draughty superannuated relic fit only for the scrapyard, used by a handful of passengers each week and leaching a steady stream of money from the public purse. No one could reasonably expect to revive such services.

  Likewise, present-day ‘railwayacs’ and ‘locoists’ wax sentimental about the colourful liveries and polished brasswork of the steam engines of yore. We may enthuse about the ‘Blackberry Black’ of the London & North Western at Euston or the ‘Improved Engine Green’ of the London, Brighton & South Coast Railway (which was actually yellow), much as a design guru might fuss over a Farrow & Ball paintcard. Yet the truth is that, lovely though they seem in retrospect, steam locomotives were labour-intensive and inefficient machines, and by the 1950s it had become difficult to attract staff to work with them. As for the competition – seen even now as a virtue of the ‘buccaneering’ old days – the reality was that many British towns and villages ended up with more stations and railway services than they could ever possibly need, the result being failure and eventual closure. To recreate any part of this world today would be absurd.

  Yet most of us British, I think, cannot help but view the railways through a prism of nostalgia. The mood seems to be everywhere. Here is Michael Portillo, ubiquitous on our living-room TVs, brandishing his Bradshaw and seemingly endlessly roaming the rails and catching the zeitgeist with his Great British Railway Journeys. Pete Waterman is there too, rejoicing in the greasy world of the steam engine, while Dan Snow adds the gloss of the celebrity historian.

  So what is it about trains that makes us so rheumy-eyed? Is it that, as the nation that invented the railway, we are pining in a postmodern world for our lost industrial heritage? In the introduction to their anthology Train Songs the poets Sean O’Brien and Don Paterson reckon that the appeal of the railways is precisely to do with their relationship to time. ‘The train moves into the future on its iron road while provoking a complex nostalgia that has accompanied it since birth,’ they write. ‘Almost as soon as the railway arrived in Britain it began to depart. After the railway boom of the 1840s the empire of the tracks seems always to have been defending and withdrawing from its own frontiers.’

  A cocktail of loss stirred with the recall of vanished pleasure is ever present in the literature of rail travel – moments fleetingly experienced and then lost for ever. Here is Auden’s ‘Night Mail’ ever hurrying on with ‘letters of thanks, letters from banks, letters of joy from girl and boy’. For Edward Thomas it was the sublime moment when his express train paused at Adlestrop and ‘for that minute a blackbird sang’. Philip Larkin momentarily peeks from a train into the romantic lives of strangers in ‘The Whitsun Weddings’. For Thomas Hardy life is never the same after a snatched kiss at the barrier in ‘On the Departure Platform’. ‘Each a glimpse and gone for ever!’ as Robert Louis Stevenson puts it in his famous ‘From a Railway Carriage’.

  Much more than merely agents of commerce and industry, the railways are loved because they encapsulate the whole gamut of human life and experience. They are the focus of emotions and the stuff of memories. The railway station, observe social historians Jeffrey Richards and John Mackenzie, is a gateway through which people pass ‘in profusion on a variety of missions – a place of motion and emotion, arrival and sorrow, parting and reunion’. It is a place of ‘countless stories’ – of drama, mystery and adventure.

  Yet many of these stories belong to a world long gone – lyrically described by Gilbert and David St John Thomas in their charming book Double Headed:

  Railways are in a world of their own; they are segregated from the rest of the nation, and yet they serve it. They are self-contained, definable, understandable even by attentive amateurs and therefore welcoming to escapists; yet they are ubiquitous, infinitely diverse, complex within their own limits and wrapped in their own mystique. They have their own language, their own telephone network, their eating houses, factories and estates; they have their own slums, palaces, mausoleums and rustic beauty; they offer majesty and meanness, laughter, wonder and tears.

  Not much of this could be said of the railways of today. It is hardly surprising then that we should invest so much emotion in romantic nostalgia. Who could disagree with that most poetic of railway historians Cuthbert Hamilton Ellis when he wrote (in 1947),

  Surely it was always summer when we made our first railway journeys. Only from later boyhood do we remember what fog was like at Liverpool Street … or how the Thames Valley looked between Didcot and Oxford when there was naught but steel-grey water upon the drowned meadows. No, it was always summer! Sun shone on the first blue engine to be seen, a Somerset & Dorset near Poole; there was sunshine most dazzling on a Great Western brass dome; the sun shone on an extraordinary mustard-coloured engine of the London, Brighton & South Coast.

  ‘Nostalgic?’ asks Hamilton Ellis. ‘If so, why not?’

  And why not, indeed? This sense of what the railways of the past signify to us has been heightened recently by a renaissance of railway enthusiasm. Gone are the days when those with an interest in railways were derided as trainspotters, anoraks or rivet counters, and mocked in the routine of almost every second-rate comedian on the stand-up circuit. The mark of respectability came in autumn 2014 when the National Railway Museum staged an exhibition called Trainspotting, at which various celebrities ‘came out’ to declare their interest in what twenty years ago was the preserve of the nerd.

  Actually, railway enthusiasm never really went away and – despite t
he mockers – has a long and noble history. The first railway enthusiast can be reckoned to be the actress Fanny Kemble, who in 1830, at the age of twenty-one, just before the opening of the Liverpool & Manchester Railway, charmed George Stephenson into letting her ride with him on the locomotive. The engine, she gasped, was ‘a magical machine, with its flying white breath and rhythmical, unvarying pace’. Recognition of what was to become a national pursuit initially came when Stephenson’s 1825 engine Locomotion was put on public display on a plinth at Darlington station in 1857. Soon, upright professional men were indulging their hobby in a manner not dissimilar to butterfly collecting or philately. By the turn of century they had their own magazine and their own place to go in London, the Railway Club – as smart an institution in its own way as the Garrick or the Oxford and Cambridge.

  Before its decline into unfashionability in the 1980s trainspotting had been a national cult in which men and boys turned out in all weathers on platforms all over the land, accompanied by their bible – a well-thumbed copy of the Ian Allan Locospotters’ Guide. I recall having to fight my way to the ends of the platforms at King’s Cross and Paddington through throngs of boys with notebooks and lapels plastered with enamel badges of their favourite engines. Then we discovered Pink Floyd and girls – and all grew up.

  These days things have come full circle, with hedge fund managers in the City indulging their baby-boomer passions by spending millions buying and restoring vintage express steam locomotives to run on the main line – motivated not by profit but by the sheer joy of the thing. This is probably not surprising, since railway enthusiasm is the ultimate nostalgia in the imagination of what Orwell called a ‘nation of collectors’. And why should such pleasures have to be defended? As the historian Roger Lloyd wrote in his book The Fascination of Railways, ‘I have never met a lover of railways who felt the slightest need to produce any justification for his pleasure. Why should he?’ The National Railway Museum even had the confidence to commission some verse from the poet Ian McMillan giving trainspotting a modern family feel: