On the Slow Train Read online

  ‘And did you know,’ Jeggo tells me, pouring coffee into his railway-monogrammed mug, ‘that the St Ives line has a special claim to fame? It was the very last in Britain to be built to the broad gauge.’ Even though the great engineer was voted in a recent poll the second-greatest Briton of all time, Isambard Kingdom Brunel made a spectacular error in his insistence on plumping for a different gauge from all other railways in the land. Brunel rejected George Stephenson’s sensible gauge of 4 feet 8½ inches, which went back to the days of the horse tramways and approximates to the width of a horse’s backside. Brunel wanted to be bigger and better than Stephenson, and chose a gauge of 7 feet ¼ inch, half as wide again. His reasons were eccentric, complaining that the ride on Stephenson’s Liverpool and Manchester Railway was so rough that he couldn’t draw a freehand circle, and he claimed that the wider gauge would lead to fewer derailments. Brunel in his arrogance believed that the other railways would fall in with his ideas, but the Great Western was forced to recant and scrap thousands of locomotives at vast cost when Parliament decreed that the standard gauge should prevail. By 1892 it was gone, though why the St Ives promoters were still building the 7 feet ¼ inch gauge in 1877 when other parts of the system were already being converted back again is a mystery Peter Jeggo and I don’t have time to discuss, since I have to catch the next train north-west. There won’t be another for hours because the intensive timetable on the single track between St Erth and St Ives during the main part of the day means the trains are too busy to stop in a backwater like Lelant.

  From virtually sea level here, the line swings with a squealing of wheels around the headland and begins to climb. Across the salt marshes you can see the wharves and warehouses of Hayle, once dominated by the huge foundries set up by the blacksmith John Harvey in 1779, which produced some of the greatest beam engines in the world, employing some of the giants from the age of steam, including Richard Trevithick. Times are harder now: Harvey’s shut down in 1989 and the creamery followed soon after. But things have always been tough in this part of Cornwall. In the book Branch Lines to Falmouth, Helston and St Ives by Victor Mitchell and Keith Smith is a picture of a Great Western Railway emigrant’s ticket to Liverpool, price twenty-five shillings – life savings for some poor wretch who had no alternative but to escape to the New World.

  As the train reaches the mouth of the river it turns north along the cliffs above the open sea, with the whole vast sweep of the estuary, glistening today with that special azure light that has brought generations of artists to St Ives. Fix your eye on the horizon and you can see Godrevy Lighthouse, perched in the spray on a wave-thrashed rock. This was the inspiration for Virginia Woolf’s famous 1927 novel To the Lighthouse. Long before she became part of the Bloomsbury set, Woolf spent many happy holidays as a child near here playing on nearby Upton Towans beach, although in the novel she located the lighthouse in the Hebrides.

  Hikers stride by on the nearby South West Coast Path as the train continues above the vast tidal beach of Porth Kidney Sands – miles of deserted dunes which train passengers have all to themselves since the builders of the railway cleverly cut them off from the nearby roads. Drivers in the slow-moving traffic on the parallel A3074 barely get a glimpse of the coast all the way to St Ives. Then the train dives into a deep cutting across the headland of Carrack Gladden, whose Cornish name translates as ‘rocks on the brink’ and which drips with heather and rhododendrons, before reaching the summit of the line just before Carbis Bay, where I get off to dip my toes in the water alongside the families playing on the beach.

  At the turn of the nineteenth century, the managers of the Great Western Railway had a genius for developing bleak little Cornish towns, where the mines were failing and the fish stocks running out, into thriving seaside resorts for the growing middle classes, who were happy to fork out a family fare from Paddington for two weeks of balmy Cornish weather each summer, to stay in hotels developed by the railway. It’s hard to imagine, as I sip a gin and tonic in the Edwardian surroundings of the terrace of the Carbis Bay Hotel, that near here was the giant Wheal Providence tin mine, where hundreds of men, women and children once laboured in appalling and dangerous conditions. Not much danger here these days, and passengers concerned about safety will be reassured by the photograph of a notice on the bar wall. ‘Conversion of gauge,’ it reads. ‘This is to certify that the line between St Erth and Carbis Bay is ready and the ordinary working of trains between these points can be resumed on Monday May 22nd 1892. Signed, Albert Harris, Traffic Inspector.’

  These days Carbis Bay is very genteel – no Blackpool this. It’s full of nice families from Wandsworth or Wimbledon, trying to recreate wholesome holidays of the past, although there’s a fair chance visitors will encounter the many Germans who come here to pay homage to the novelist Rosamund Pilcher, who was born near the village. In Britain she is regarded as a bit Mills and Boon, but her most famous novel The Shell Seekers has almost cult status in Germany, where many of her stories have been adapted for television. If you are lucky you may arrive on St James’s Day, when once every five years people flock to an obelisk erected nearby by John Knill, an eighteenth-century mayor of St Ives. Under the terms of his will, ten girls of under fourteen years of age, dressed in white and accompanied by a fiddler and two widows, dance for one and a quarter hours while they sing the hymn ‘All People That on Earth Do Dwell’ and a song imploring ‘Virgins fair and pure as fair to fly St Ives and all her treasures, fly her soft voluptuous pleasures.’

  I have the ‘voluptuous pleasures’ of St Ives in mind as I resume my journey to the town, across the four seventy-eight-foot-high stone arches of the Carbis Viaduct, and past the old baulking house, from where a ‘huer’ would cross a special bridge over the line to watch from the headland for shoals of pilchards. He would use a hand-held signalling device to the men in the boats below as they set out their huge seine net. At one time pilchards were more important than passengers here. In the first twelve months of the line’s operation, the takings from St Ives station were: ‘passengers £1874; fish £5245’. ‘Once,’ according to the GWR’s Cornish Riviera guide of 1934, ‘seventy-five million were netted in one day and St Ives was £60,000 the richer. It is, however, a precarious business. The pilchards come in millions or not at all, and of recent years the huers have scanned the waters in vain for many weary months.’ It quotes a story of St Ives men whipping a hake through the town to warn its fellows not to touch the pilchards.

  Too late to whip a hake or anything else through St Ives these days – the humble pilchard became a victim of fashion as well as overfishing. Although a clever marketing exercise has rebranded the pilchard the ‘Cornish sardine’ and repositioned it from the cat’s plate to barbecues on smart Islington patios, it has been too late for St Ives. The canneries have closed and what remains of the industry has moved down the coast to Newlyn.

  On the last stage of its journey down the hill into St Ives, the train passes through a heavily wooded cutting. When Paul Theroux came this way in 1983, he wrote, ‘There was never any question that I was on a branch line train, for it was only on these trains that the windows were brushed by the trees that grew close to the tracks. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows – the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms.’ You might expect from all the grandeur of the journey that the arrival into the town would be especially splendid. And so it is – in one sense. As the train emerges from the cutting and over the Porthminster Viaduct the view is heart-stopping. Here is a panorama of the whole bay with its silvery sands, the twisty streets of the town like barley sugar and the headland, all bathed in the pearly light that has inspired generations of artists.

  But wait. Where is the station to match the unspoilt Victorian charm of the town? Sadly, the bulldozers reduced it to a pile of rubble in 1971, just six years before the line’s centenary. All that remains to greet the modern passenger is a prefabricated bus shelter and a single concrete platform with an automatic ticket
machine marooned in the middle of a car park. All the more poignant is the fact that the original granite walls around the perimeter of the old station still stand – a reminder of how extensive the tracks here once were. It was the complete country terminus – four roads, a solid little booking office with canopy. There was a goods office and a little engine shed, a couple of camping coaches and a siding for the trucks that would speed the fish up to market along with that other perishable Cornish staple, the broccoli harvest, now also sadly lost to the area.

  Was the demolition retribution by British Railways managers for the refusal to let them shut the line? I am about to meet the man who can tell me, since he is arriving on the afternoon train. ‘You’ll recognise me,’ Richard Burningham explains, ‘because I’ll be the only person getting out of the carriages wearing a suit.’ It is even a pinstriped one – appropriate in a way, since Burningham is in a sense the ‘Fat Controller’ for the line. As the representative of the Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership, he is responsible for the sustenance and development of all the railway lines west of Exeter, spearheading an alliance of train operators, passenger groups and local authorities. ‘Hmm,’ he says, squinting at the map of St Ives at the end of the platform. ‘We could do with a better one of these.’

  We retire to the Pedn-Olva Hotel over the road and join elderly ladies in Lloyd Loom chairs in the lounge overlooking the bay for a pot of tea. Since British Railways applied its scorched-earth policy to the station, the hotel is now the town’s closest thing to a railway refreshment room. Burningham is passionate about the lines in his charge and has given me a faded copy of a press release from the Ministry of Transport dated 20th September 1966. Buried inside the officialese is the story of how the line was snatched back to safety from under the nose of Beeching’s executioners by the Labour transport minister Barbara Castle. Castle was one of the most notorious or most effective transport ministers in history, depending on your view. She introduced the breathalyser, the 70 mph speed limit on motorways and car seat belts, but also presided over 2,050 miles of Beeching cuts in a betrayal of Prime Minister Harold Wilson’s pledge to reverse them.

  Even before Beeching, BR was swinging the axe in the West Country, Burningham tells me. The line from Gwinear Road to Helston shut in 1962. The Plymouth to Launceston route followed in the same year, though the piskies sabotaged the plans of BR managers in London by stranding a train at Tavistock in a snowstorm, preventing the closure of the line. Beeching was ruthless, set on obliterating almost every branch line west of Plymouth, including Bere Alston–Callington, Bodmin– Wadebridge–Padstow, Liskeard–Looe, Lostwithiel–Fowey, Okehampton–Bude, Okehampton–Padstow – and St Erth–St Ives. Flanders and Swann could have written an entire song using just the names of the stations on the main line from Plymouth to Penzance that passed from the timetable in 1964 – Boublebois, Grampound Road, Chacewater, Scorrier, Gwinear Road and Marazion.

  But Mrs Castle clearly had a soft spot for St Ives as well as the little line from Liskeard to Looe, eastwards along the coast. You can hear the forthright northern tones coming through the faded typescript.

  I have refused to close the branch lines serving St Ives and Looe in Cornwall. In spite of the financial saving to the railways, it just wouldn’t have made sense to transfer heavy holiday traffic to roads which couldn’t cope with it. Nor would expensive road improvements have been the answer. At St Ives, these would have involved destroying the whole character of the town. It would be the economics of bedlam to spend vast sums only to create greater inconvenience.

  ‘You know,’ says Burningham, ‘this line is probably the most scenic in Europe, if not the world. Just imagine if it hadn’t been saved,’ he says, pointing out the huge crowds getting off the train over the road. To see what might have happened at St Ives you only have to listen to the words of the historian David St John Thomas, who travelled on the last train on the neighbouring Helston branch.

  Platform, refreshment room, approach road milled with onlookers. Cameras flashed as a party of boys in top hats laid a wreath on the locomotive and a sandwich board mockingly declared ‘the end is at hand’ . . . the crowd sang ‘Auld Lang Syne’ as the engine exploded detonators and the train disappeared into the night. Nobody hurried to leave; people talked of the old days, of when everybody came and went by train, of father telling how he had helped build the line, of how uncle had lost money on it, of grandson aged seven who had taken his first train trip that afternoon. From Monday anyone coming from London could no longer change from the Cornish Riviera Express straight into a waiting train at Gwinear Road; many local residents would have to change cars or change jobs.

  Lucky the redoubtable Mrs Castle stayed the axe at both Looe and St Ives. She clearly repented later in life of some of her more draconian actions, and Burningham shows me a poignant note that the ninety-one-year-old politician sent to him on 9 May 2001, shortly before she died. ‘Dear Richard,’ she writes,

  I am very sorry not to be able to be with you today but unfortunately a slight injury has put me out of action for a few weeks. I would have enjoyed immensely helping you to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the line from Liskeard to Looe, which passes through some of the most beautiful country in England. I have an almost maternal feeling for it since I was able in the 1960s to save it from the slaughter of the innocence [sic]. Long may it and you continue to flourish.

  And so does St Ives on this sunny day, with the town’s five species of gulls, identified by the famous ornithologist W H Hudson, squawking overhead and children sucking cornets and foraging in rock pools. Hudson was a frequent visitor to the town, staying in a cottage in Lelant. Where once the train brought in lumps of rock for Barbara Hepworth’s sculptures, clay for Bernard Leach’s potter’s wheel and canvases for its other great son, Ben Nicholson, now their disciples pour in to queue outside the hugely successful Tate St Ives and to dine in the town’s smart new restaurants. There are still pasties and clotted cream galore to be found around town, but the new St Ives set are more likely to be found eating curried Cornish monkfish in the Porthminster Café, a former deckchair repair hut transformed into one of the trendiest restaurants in the West Country. And even though the old station has gone, the ghosts of the railway are to be found everywhere in the town. In the Tate I buy a postcard of a 1960s painting by the self-taught artist Tom Early of a single-coach train crossing the Porthminster viaduct. Farther along the quay, in the St Ives Museum, among the dusty jumble of ephemera so typical of small-town museums, is a section on the local railway. Here is the nameplate from Castle Class No. 5006, named Tregenna Castle after the Great Western Railway’s famous hotel in the town – the first railway hotel to be opened away from a major terminus and purely for the benefit of the holiday trade. The hotel flourishes today, although the suites where elderly dowagers from Belgravia once came to take the sun have been turned into holiday apartments for families. The locomotive, the museum tells us, was withdrawn in 1962 having run a total of 1,809,297 miles. ‘She hauled the Cheltenham Flyer, which achieved a record time on the journey Swindon to Paddington – 77¼ miles in 56 minutes 47 seconds on 6th June 1932 – thereby becoming the world’s fastest train.’ Here too is a group portrait of the ‘Staff of St Ives Railway station, c.1955’, which tells us everything about why the St Ives line went into decline. In the centre sits Mr M J Rich, the stationmaster, with his splendidly braided hat, along with six porters, two signalmen, four clerks, an engine cleaner and a carriage cleaner. There are twenty-three of them in all. No wonder Beeching took fright when he looked at the books.

  But have things gone too far the other way? Jeremy Joslin thinks so. I meet the president of the Hayle Chamber of Commerce in the Badger Inn at Lelant on my way back to St Erth and Paddington. The old inn was once a favourite of the Stephens, Virginia Woolf’s family, when they came on the train from Paddington for their summer holidays. Joslin is one of the line’s most fervent supporters and dreams one day of taking it back into local owne
rship. ‘The people up at Paddington run it like any other railway. But the problem that Beeching identified is still there. The line is just too seasonal. I’d put bums on seats in the winter by running steam trains and dining cars. One of our biggest supporters is the local vicar and he’d love to do weddings on board the trains.’ There’s a gleam in his eye as he talks of plans to bring in low-cost trains powered by a flywheel and distribute goods to the shops in St Ives using mini-containers that would fit onto specially adapted motorbikes.

  Will there be change? Maybe. But the truth is that the St Ives Bay line, with its summer trains packed to the doors, is quite successful as it is, thank you. As I squeeze aboard, joining exhausted but happy families heading back to the park-and-ride, I wonder: can there be any other branch line in the land whose future has been secured by the motor car?

  CHAPTER TWO

  THE 15.03 FROM CARLISLE TO THE ROOF OF ENGLAND