On the Slow Train (2 page)

These days, rail travel is not quite so commodious. The current operator of the line, First Great Western, has retained a decent enough respect for its heritage to keep the Cornish Riviera title, along with the names of the other great Cornish trains of the past – the Royal Duchy and the Golden Hind. But these trains are just normal services – bog-standard high speed trains indistinguishable from any other. But there remains one service that can match up to the glamour of the old Great Western in its heyday. I have arrived at St Erth this morning aboard the Night Riviera, the last remaining sleeping-car train running entirely within England. Like the St Ives branch, this too nearly died, when withdrawal was proposed in 2005. But it was saved when passengers organised an 8,000-name protest petition. It may not have had one of C B Collett's famous Kings or Castles on the front, but as I set off on my journey from Paddington to St Erth last night I couldn't deny a quiet thrill (not often found on the British main line these days) when I saw a powerful locomotive backing down onto the train – a rare thing on a passenger service nowadays. This was the Class 57 diesel
Tintagel Castle
, burnished up in the green livery of the old Great Western. Sentiment dies hard at Paddington, even in the modern corporate world. I got chatting with the driver, who told me that the forty-year-old
Tintagel Castle
had been built only a decade or so after the last steam Castles had emerged from the Swindon works – and so the provenance of locomotives named after castles on this line has been almost unbroken since the first ones were built in 1923. Perhaps the only difference is that the elderly diesels used on the Night Riviera these days – unlike the products of Swindon in the steam age – are prone to breaking down. But last night the journey on the 23.45 from Paddington was faultless, and I slept soundly.

My connection to St Ives is waiting cosily tucked into the bay
platforms
, a little lower than the main line, as if in deference to the grown-up expresses that race by, though in reality this is to accommodate the gradient of the branch line as it falls away northwards towards the Hayle estuary. Could there be a more perfect little station? Virtually unchanged since it was built in 1852, with granite buildings, wooden canopies and semaphore signals (authentically ‘lower quadrant' in the GWR style), it looks for all the world as though it has been transplanted from a model railway exhibition. With half an hour to go till departure, I buy the local morning paper, the
Western Morning News
, whose headline reads, ‘Future bright for delightful railway lines'. Although the future is less bright, I think, for newspapers like this one, who are undergoing their own Beeching axe all over the country as declining circulations put the parish pump out of business and the Internet takes over. Who would have bet, back in 1963, that the St Ives line would prosper, yet newspapers, like this once-mighty daily paper of Devon and Cornwall would face oblivion?

‘There were few pleasures in England that could beat the small three-coach branch-line train like this one from St Erth to St Ives,' wrote Paul Theroux in his 1983 book
The Kingdom by the Sea
. ‘You knew a branch line with your eyes shut.' My Class 150 unit is in authentic branch line tradition, using hand-me-down vehicles that have seen better times elsewhere. It wears the livery of Arriva Trains Wales and is well off its home territory, but is comfortable enough and the windows are clean. The signal clatters, and we are off down the branch, slowing to pick up the ‘staff' from the signalman. Funny how the old terms persist – the branch is operated on what is still known as a ‘one engine in steam' basis, which means that so long as our driver has the old-fashioned baton, no other trains can gain access to the line.

A family of shelducks and a couple of tiny egrets flap away as the train pootles along the edge of the salt flats. But the rural spell is shattered at the next station, Lelant Saltings, when literally
hundreds
of people push their way aboard. ‘Have you ever seen the state of the roads in St Ives?' the conductor explains. ‘There are buses and vans scraping each other's mirrors off and running over the toes of the tourists. It's gridlock hell. So a lot of people head for the park-and-ride up here.' And off he goes, his ticket machine whirring, selling four-pound fares to people who probably don't travel on trains from one year to the next.

But I have to interrupt him for the request stop at Lelant – an original little wooden wayside station, its chocolate-and-cream Great Western Railway-style paintwork reflected in the clear tidal waters of the Hayle, which laps at the edge of the tracks. The building was long ago sold off as a private residence, and its owner, a large red-headed man called Peter Jeggo, is sitting in the garden watching the birds across the bay. This is one of Britain's greatest ports of call for migrating flocks, where dunlins, sander-lings, ring-tailed plovers and bar-tailed godwits drop in to take their supper. Jeggo, now retired from his job in London as a supermarket operations manager, sells Cornish cream teas and offers the benefit of his knowledge of the history of the line to anyone who cares to listen.

‘Look at this.' He takes me indoors to show me the original plans for the station, framed on the wall. ‘These date from the year before the line was built in 1877. There's a first-class ladies waiting room, a second-and third-class one and a general waiting room. Can you imagine? Three separate waiting rooms in a tiny station in the middle of nowhere?'

The building of the line was a grand gesture by a consortium of the Great Western, Bristol and Exeter and West Cornwall railways, who saw in the failed mines and uncertain fisheries of St Ives little prospect of success but were persuaded in the vague hope the town might become a tourist resort. The directors of the railway put on a brave show. On the morning of 24 March 1877 the directors' train, consisting of a saloon and six composite carriages drawn by the locomotive
Elephant
, left Penzance station
to
make the inaugural journey to St Ives. According to the
Cornwall Telegraph,
bonfires were lit, tar barrels were set ablaze along the coast and a national holiday was declared. But not everyone in Lelant was happy, particularly about the behaviour of the navvies who built the line. The newspaper reported that there was ‘drunkenness, to a lamentable extent. Last Sunday, from about half past two in the afternoon till late at night, drunken men were rambling about the roads much to the disgust of the decent inhabitants.' To make matters worse, a number of skulls were found along the course of the line, with jawbones full of teeth which the navvies extracted to keep as talismans against getting the toothache themselves.

‘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.