On the Slow Train (9 page)

I travel south to Shrewsbury on the next stopping train, where the passengers seem mostly to be shoppers and students. In the seat opposite me a young mother struggles with a fractious two-year-old. Chester to Shrewsbury is neither a branch line yet nor a main line either – unpretentious, going nowhere very fast – but lines like this in gentle rural surroundings remain the sinews of the national rail system. Their charm, wrote David St John Thomas in
The Country Railway
in 1976,

was no one thing, any more than a superb landscape painting is any one of its ingredients. It was the total railway in the countryside, serving it as part of it, the smell of steam and oil, the people arriving and departing, the ticket racks in the
booking
office from which you could tell how many people had gone where on the previous day – the tail of the signalman's dog flopping on the lino, asking for attention.

If only it were still so. Many of the intermediate stations on this line have closed and their remains flash by – all with names straight out of Flanders and Swann: Whittington, Rednal and West Felton, Baschurch and Leaton. Only the ghosts of booking clerks or signalmen's dogs here. The arrival of the conductor flourishing his ticket machine as we pass through the remnants of Baschurch means I nearly miss one of the famous local landmarks – the hill to the north-east is thought to be Pengwern, seat of Prince Cynddylan, the seventh-century ruler of Powys.

Shrewsbury is perhaps the last major old-fashioned country junction left in Britain. From here lines meander gently through the most rural parts of Wales and the Borders. Until the arrival of the Wrexham and Shropshire in 2008 there had been no through services to London since Virgin abandoned them in 2001. Now the station is operated by Arriva Trains Wales, who have slapped their ugly turquoise house colours on every conceivable bit of paintwork, turning this grand old lady, designed by T M Penson in 1848 in the style of a miniature Houses of Parliament, into something of a tart. But the corporate image has failed to eradicate the charm. It's easy to imagine the young Darwin embarking here after his time at Shrewsbury School for his first journey up to Cambridge. Now the weeds grow through the tracks and pigeons flap under the canopies, defecating on the little stone heads carved into the roof bosses. Long-disused platform ends are a reminder of the days when grand trains of twelve carriages stopped here. Now six coaches comprise a very long train indeed.

As we approach from the north, passing the junction with the Crewe line on the left, the signalman leans from the sliding doors of his box with a wave for the driver. I am reminded of a description by Adrian Vaughan, a former signalman who became Brunel's biographer, in his book
Signalman's Morning
:

Levers were always pulled with a duster. This prevented sweat from rusting the carefully polished steel handles and made pulling more comfortable and easier because the handle had to move in the hand, which it could not do when gripped tightly in bare fists. Not any rag did for this job, but a proper duster – a square of soft cotton cloth with red, light and dark blue lines. The design had not changed in living memory – only the initials, and even in 1960 I was the proud owner of a duster with the magic cipher GWR woven into it.

My stopping service pulls in alongside the last ‘big train' of the day – the 16.07 Wrexham and Shropshire service to London Marylebone. Big, of course, is relative in this part of the world – two coaches plus a restaurant car and a DVT. (DVT stands for the inelegant ‘driving van trailer' in railway jargon. Its purpose is to allow a train to be driven with the locomotive at the back.) This DVT was pensioned off from the Euston line when the Pendolinos took over in 2002 and was designed with a cavernous space for parcels but no seats for passengers. As you might expect, there are no parcels on the slow train from Shrewsbury to Marylebone this afternoon, although the DVT represents fifty tonnes of non-revenue-earning weight.

But the stewards, welcoming a handful of passengers onto the train, look important and busy in their maroon waistcoats, striding up and down the platform. A red-faced German tourist puffs up asking, ‘Is this the quickest way to London?' ‘Well actually, you might do better getting the next train to Birmingham and then the fast train to Euston' is the reply. But he decides to stick with the slower train, which is looking very self-important, with No. 67013 and its grand-sounding Welsh name
Dyfrbont Pontcysyllte
on the front. ‘What does it mean?' I ask one of the stewards. ‘Haven't a clue' is the reply. A call through to the Welsh Assembly press office later reveals it is the name of Pontcysyllite aqueduct, which I'd passed earlier in the day, and means literally the ‘bridge connected to the river'.

And so we are off, heading for the capital, the hooter of
Dyfrbont Pontcysyllite
echoing off the castle walls, past the remains of the Benedictine abbey built by Roger de Montgomery, William the Conquerer's favourite lieutenant, in 1083, and wrecked not in any battle between English and Welsh but by Thomas Telford, who built the road to London, cutting the journey time from four days to sixteen hours, destroying much of the abbey in the process. A more modern monument is the great Severn Bridge Junction signal box, built by the London and North Western Railway and the largest surviving mechanical signal box in Britain, with a frame accommodating 180 levers. Many of these are no longer used, but from his perch the signalman here controls a vast network of upper quadrant, lower quadrant and colour light signals, which fortunately are set to remain operated in their quaint nineteenth-century way for the foreseeable future.

We can no longer travel on the Great Central's original main line, since much of the track on Edward Watkin's route from Nottingham to London has long been lifted. (Although a group of enthusiasts have preserved the stretch from Leicester to Loughborough as a splendid Edwardian time capsule – the only double-track preserved railway in Britain and the only place where two steam locomotives regularly pass at speed travelling in opposite directions.) Instead, we are to traverse the old Great Central's second-best line, through High Wycombe, which it built jointly with the Great Western Railway to relieve congestion on the approaches to Marylebone. This really was the last main line of the steam era. Expensively constructed, it was opened as late as 1906 and widely condemned as an imperial extravagance, already redundant at the dawn of the motor age. Yet it survived Beeching and now carries a busy service from Birmingham to London.

There are only a handful of us in the first-class restaurant car for the journey through the Chilterns on this sunny evening. Shame, since this is one of the last opportunities to dine in style on any service train in Britain. Thomas Ableman, who does the marketing for the line, is pleased with his product. He joins me
for
the rest of the journey, and although he appears too young to remember the nationalised railway, let alone Beeching, and with his thick-rimmed glasses looks more like a don than a railwayman, he has just seen off an attempt by rival Virgin to run their own regular service to Wrexham. This would have provided two extra trains a day but, ever sensitive to bad publicity, the canny Virgin boss Richard Branson backed off. In fact it was misleading, as some newspapers did, to portray W & S as a minnow squashed by a corporate giant, since it is part of the mighty Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway, which also owns Britain's biggest rail freight company and Chiltern Railways, the lucrative franchise that runs through the Buckinghamshire stockbroker belt into London, not to mention a half-share of the London Overground – the newest part of the Tube. And wasn't this the kind of cut-throat competition that rail privatisation was supposed to be about?

We gather speed through Wellington, with the 1,300 foot bulk of the Wrekin to the right blocking out the setting sun, and stop at Telford, where our restaurant starts to fill up with tired-looking reps, laptops under their arms and ID cards dangling like necklaces. As well as providing restaurant cars, Ableman tells me, the company's strategy has been to undercut the peak-time fares of the big operators. ‘So how can you make money with just three carriages pulled by one of the thirstiest diesels on the network?' I ask him. It's called growing the market, he says.

But it's an odd sort of market. We stop at Wolverhampton but are not allowed to pick up passengers because of what are called ‘moderation of competition' rules, which do not allow our tiny train to compete against bigger firms who have shelled out billions to buy their franchises. We are not permitted to stop at Birmingham at all and so are forced to rattle around the edge of the city over freight lines past endless metal-bashers' yards, to rejoin the Euston main line at Stechford, where the train has to wait for six minutes every night to allow the Birmingham to London Pendolino express to pull ahead. ‘But at least it's good for the mobile phone signal,' offers Ableman. Coventry? No stopping
allowed
here either, so we are diverted over the branch line to Leamington. At least this line, once freight-only, has a new lease of life. But now we are able to speed up, since the only competitor on the remaining journey to London is sister company Chiltern Railways. But this is primarily a commuter line, and we have to be patient behind the Clubman multiple-unit trains shuttling their way to and from Marylebone.

But why should speed matter when we're pottering through the Chilterns, the chalk hillsides glistening golden in the setting sun, and dining from a menu that would not disgrace a top West End restaurant. I have wild mushroom soup, lamb shank in red wine and rosemary sauce, followed by chocolate torte. And, in deference to the German proprietors, I choose the Munsterer Pittersberg 2007. And yes, the food is freshly cooked on the train, Brian the steward, a dead ringer for Graham Norton, informs me. He is proud the train's staff all come from North Wales and not from the capital. ‘It's where the quality is, darling,' he tells me. ‘And why don't you have a teensy-weensy bit more?' I settle for the cheese board. ‘Was the service all right?' he asks, taking my plate away. ‘You know I sometimes let myself down like a cheap pair of braces.'

We're getting closer to London now, through Bicester, famous for the last-ever ‘slip coach' operation in Britain, where expresses slipped the coupling of a single coach to cruise to a halt at a wayside station, rather than stop the main train itself. Past Princes Risborough with its old GWR signal box and the great Saunderton cutting, the last ever in Britain to be hewn by an army of navvies. Sadly we don't stop at the splendidly named Denham Golf Club station, where for all we know young men straight out of Metroland may already be drinking pink gins with their Joan Hunter-Dunns on this beautiful evening.

London is closing in fast. Here's Wembley already, where Edward Watkin started work on a grand tower that was to be 150 feet taller than the Eiffel Tower in Paris. Known as ‘Watkin's Folly' it never got beyond the first tier and went ignominiously for scrap in 1907. The wine list is clearly going down well, as the Telford
reps
are in boisterous mood. Perhaps it doesn't matter that it has taken us three hours and fifteen minutes to get here.

It's clear how dramatically the fortunes of this last main line have changed as we draw into Marylebone's Platform 1. The canopy is blue with diesel smoke as crowded commuter trains prepare themselves for departure at five-minute intervals from what is now one of Britain's busiest stations. How different from 1971, when the historian L T C Rolt wrote, ‘There was never any rush hour worthy of the name at Marylebone and no-one seemed to be in a hurry. Standing in its quiet spacious concourse, cut off from the fretful sound of the traffic in the Marylebone Road, you half expected to hear the sound of cathedral bells.' Now Marylebone is among the most confident of London termini, perhaps more so than any other apart from St Pancras, sporting two newly constructed platforms, with plans afoot to extend services to new destinations including Oxford and Aberystwyth. But still the spirit of the old Marylebone lives on amid the buzz of shops and fast-food outlets. Peer behind the bottles of Chardonnay in the Marks and Spencer Simply Food outlet on the concourse and you can see the magnificent carved mahogany windows of the old booking office. And why not toast Sir Edward Watkin with a gin and lime in the bar of the old Great Central Hotel over the road, now luxuriously reinvented as the Landmark. Watkin's critics may have considered him an extravagant dreamer. But the old boy certainly knew how to do it in style.

Postscript: the Wrexham and Shropshire Railway went abruptly out of business at the end of January 2011, citing losses of £13 million. Perhaps it was too good to be true. But it is sure to live on in memory as a paragon among modern railway services. Fortunately it is still possible to enjoy this scenic route almost in its entirety by changing trains in Birmingham. A short walk between New Street and Moor Street Stations is necessary, but there is ample compensation in the splendidly restored Great Western Railway buildings at the latter, which recreate the elegant atmosphere of an Edwardian railway terminus.

CHAPTER FIVE

THE 08.38 TO SELLAFIELD – A JOURNEY ALONG THE LINE THAT TIME FORGOT

Preston to Carlisle, via Grange-over-Sands, Barrow-in-Furness, Ravenglass, Sellafield, Workington and Maryport

SOME OF THE
most splendid hotels in the land were originally station hotels – and some still are: the Landmark in Marylebone, the Midland in Manchester, the Queen's in Leeds. However, I'm in the Station Hotel in Millom, on the west coast of the Lake District. Splendid is a word few people might readily use – and as far as Lakeland scenery goes, there are no hosts of golden daffodils to be seen for miles around. Richard, the proprietor, had already warned me. ‘I ought to tell you,' he said when I phoned through my booking. ‘It might look like the Lake District on the map, but I don't want you to get a surprise.' The local lads are screeching round in beat-up Nissans outside, doing handbrake turns; a double vodka and Red Bull is £3.99 in the bar. What was once the town's department store is derelict and boarded up. Even the Job Centre is up for sale. ‘We never recovered since the steelworks closed in 1968,' says Alicia, the waitress in the Da Vinci restaurant. ‘This is the last eating place in town since the Thai closed,' she tells me as she dishes up a pizza margherita. The big local employer these days is Haverigg Prison.