On the Slow Train (23 page)

This morning I'm travelling to both, through remote marshes dotted with windmills and pretty riverside villages, underneath the ‘big skies' so characteristic of Norfolk. It could not be a more perfect autumn day for such a journey. The early-morning sun is warming the spire of Norwich cathedral and firing up the red-brick frontage of Norwich Thorpe station. With its huge French elliptical dome and cupola, complete with classical urns, the terminus looks more like a chateau than anything as prosaic as a railway station in the bright morning light. Screw up your eyes and we could be on the River Loire rather than the plain old River Wensum. The pedimented clock on the roof says precisely eight o'clock, and the two-coach diesel forming the 08.04 Wherry Line train to Yarmouth is ready to leave.

First stop heading east is Brundall, on the banks of the River Yare and famous for its boatbuilding as well as being the home of Colin Chapman, the founder of the Lotus sports car firm. But it is neither boats nor fast cars I have come to see today. I am on my
way
to the remote platforms at Buckenham, which has an ignoble place in the statistics books as one of the least-used stations in Britain. According to the latest figures from the Office of Rail Regulation (whether you believe them or not) only ninety-seven passengers use the station each year, a statistic which must be directly related to the number of services that stop there. According to the timetable, the next train doesn't stop at Buckenham for another five days. ‘The trouble with travelling on slow trains to small stations,' observes Ian Dinmore, Norfolk County Council's community rail officer, when I ring him to enquire about the service, ‘is that they tend to be infrequent and infrequently stop.' Quite so. It appears I have no alternative but to walk from the previous station along the line.

To help me on my way, I am fortified with a mug of very strong railwaymen's tea in the porters' room at Brundall, one of the very few rural stations in Norfolk still to have a staff. There's Barry the crossing keeper, Roger the signalman and Steve the ticket collector, plus two others who relieve them on shifts. With its ornate wooden signal box, semaphore signals, fancy finials, wooden level crossing gates and stationmaster's house still intact, it probably comes as close as we can get in modern times to the idyll of the country station in its heyday, as atmospherically described by David St John Thomas in his book
The Country Railway
.

Calves, day-old chicks, pigs and other reinforcements for the local livestock normally came in by passenger train along with the mails, newspapers and local soldiers on leave. The pair of rails disappearing over the horizon stood for progress, disaster, the major changes in life; the route to Covent Garden and Ypres, the way one's fiancé paid his first visit to one's parents, one's children returned for deathbed leavetaking . . . The country railway provided more than transport. It was always part of the district it
served
, with its own natural history, its own legends and folklore, a staff who were at the heart of village affairs, its stations and adjoining pubs places for gossip news and advice.

That world has not entirely vanished from the Wherry Line, which is still run almost entirely with equipment from the Victorian era. ‘That's why it's so special,' says Barry, stroking an Ancient Mariner beard and speaking over the rattle of teaspoons stirring large quantities of sugar into mugs. A chiming clock periodically interrupts our conversation. ‘We do it the old way – the semaphores, the manned crossings, the mechanical locking systems of the signals and points. We even have a man who comes round each week to fill up the paraffin in the signal lamps and on the crossing gates.' Barry reels off the list of signal boxes on the line, all of which still have a human being to pull levers attached to wires that change the points and raise and lower the signals – Yarmouth, Acle, Brundall, Cantley, Reedham, Somerleyton – a recitation which goes on until Roger pings the bell from the signal box, and it is time to swing closed the heavy wooden level crossing gates to let a train pass. ‘The old ways are the safest,' muses Steve. Although he's not entirely right, since on a rainy night on 10 September 1874 a tragic accident happened near here, when the mail train from Yarmouth crashed at speed into an express from London, killing twenty-five and injuring more than a hundred others. ‘One of the most appalling accidents that ever happened in English railway history,' reported the
Illustrated London News
at the time, and it remains so to this day. The graves of the driver and fireman of the mail train can still be seen in the Rosary Cemetery, Norwich.

Buckenham station is so little used that the Ordnance Survey have not even bothered to put it on my map, but it does not seem to matter on this mesmerising walk from Brundall along deserted country lanes lined with holm oaks and sloe bushes. Shiny
blueberries
and fat bullaces – a speciality in this part of Norfolk – are everywhere for the picking, perhaps because the art of transforming them into a kind of damson jam is lost. I follow the line of the track until I come to a little gated crossing over the line, and here is a surreal sight. The surroundings of the crossing keeper's cottage are festooned with multicoloured gnomes – thousands of them. In a landscape even Disney might find hard to replicate, they are busy fishing, sweeping, gardening, waving and gesticulating with their little staffs, brooms and forks. (The gnomes may be up to all sorts of other things too, for all I know, but I cannot tell since they are crowded into such a congested place.)

‘They belong to the widow of the old crossing keeper,' says a dapper man in a railway uniform who darts out of a hut to let me through. ‘We call this “Gnome Man's Land Crossing”, by the way – you can see why,' he says without any apparent irony. This is Steve, who has one of the quietest jobs on the Wherry Line if not the entire railway network, operating a crossing across the railway which sometimes has only four vehicles a day. This is actually fewer than the number of trains, which run hourly along the line. For this reason, he tells me, the gates are generally set against the road traffic rather than the trains as is standard railway practice. ‘On a busy day I may have twenty-five vehicles. But they can't replace me with a machine. Just look at that dangerous curve as the line comes round the bend there.'

With a wave, Steve lets me through the gates on the other side, which open onto a vast seemingly uninhabited area of reed beds, fens, wet meadows, grazing marshes, scrub and woodland, connected by a maze of rivers, dykes and pools – which is the reason for Buckenham station's continued lonely existence. This is the avian kingdom of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, and home to some of the major bird sanctuaries of Britain. It may seem bizarre that Buckenham station survives with just five trains each way a week – one on a Saturday and four on a Sunday – but all becomes clear when you realise the trains are strictly for
the
birds, or those who come to watch them. As if on cue, a honking flock of Egyptian pink-footed geese flies over and, surreally, in this place which with every footstep appears to be a kind of pantheistic paradise, I bump into a human too. He introduces himself as Tim Strudwick, an RSPB warden, who tells me,

You should see the marsh harriers here – big birds of prey with four-foot wingspans. We've got a big population of them. And then we've got the rare bittern, with their deep booming voices in the spring. There are only about 150 bittern overwintering in Britain, so they are very rare. In the winter the marshes at Buckenham are alive with the sight of huge numbers of widgeon, their white breasts glistening like ghosts – maybe 10,000 flying over at a time.

Listening to the cries of the birds on the deserted Buckenham platform with little other prospect than a five-day wait for the next train or a long walk back to Brundall, it is hard to imagine that the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway was once a busy main line, so important that it appointed no less an eminence than George Stephenson as its chairman and his son Robert as engineer. The Stephensons reckoned the line could be completed in eighteen months, but since there were no tunnels or other major bits of civil engineering, it was actually ready in a year. The opening day on 12 April 1844 was an occasion for rejoicing and feasting on a bacchanalian scale. A fourteen-coach train left Norwich with 200 guests, including the Bishop of Norwich, a government inspector and a brass band in the coach next to the engine. The local newspaper reported that ‘the electric telegraph having performed its office and informed the manager that all was clear, the engine gave forth its note of warning, the band struck up
See the Conquering Hero Comes
, the engine moved forth in its majestic might . . . the hills reverberated its warning, while the puffs of steam, heard long after its departure, sounded like the breathing of Polypheme.' After a brisk forty-four-minute run and
further
celebrations, the day concluded with a dinner in the Yarmouth Assembly Rooms, including ‘spring chicken, green geese, tongues, pickled salmon, plovers' eggs, ornamental jellies, peaches, strawberries and ices'.

But no time to ponder on such delights. I even have to miss the prospect of exploring Old Buckenham's ancient octagonal-towered All Saints church to power-walk back to Brundall to catch my train to Berney Arms. What is officially Britain's smallest station is rather more copiously provided for than Buckenham, with a generous two trains each way a day. But since it has no electric lights on the platform, the last train leaves well before the evening draws in. I have just seconds to spare when I puff up the footpath into Brundall as Barry is swinging back the big gates to let my train through. From Brundall eastwards, the lines divide, the northern section climbing steeply on a single track to Acle and Yarmouth, contradicting Noël Coward's famous line: ‘Very flat, Norfolk.'

The southerly tracks go on to Reedham, where the line splits again – one section going on to Lowestoft and the other swinging north to Yarmouth, via Berney Arms. The views across the flat Broadland as the train heads east are sometimes surreal, with boats seemingly sailing across the fields and fens, an optical illusion created by the river running parallel behind hedges and fences. Sadly, even in our dreams we are unlikely to see many genuine wherries – the square-sailed Norfolk trading barges that have given the line its name. First they were victims of the railways and then of the self-skippered motor cruisers that dominate the Broads, and now there are only two of the original trading wherries remaining. Once there would have been dozens of them bringing beet from the surrounding farms to the huge British Sugar processing plant which dominates the next station at Cantley, with its tall chimney belching exhaust over the neighbouring countryside. Now even the railway doesn't get a look-in. Although there are rusting tracks leading into the factory, where freight wagons would once have brought in beet, coal and
limestone
and take out sugar and molasses, the last freight train ran in 1988. Now all is carried by lorry, much to the annoyance of local residents. And things may get worse. The Cantley village website complains that new EU rules encouraging the refining of cane sugar in the UK could mean another eighty-five lorry movements a day on the narrow local roads.

But in this sleepy landscape we don't have to worry too much about the impact of industry. Reedham, the next station, is a pretty junction with a timber signal box, old semaphore signals and a chain ferry across the Yare. Here our train leaves the Lowestoft line to take a dead-straight trajectory across the
marshes
to Berney Arms. It is so squelchy here that the original engineers had to lay down bundles of faggots to prevent the tracks from sinking into the marsh. Make sure you tell the guard you want to get off before the train whizzes past the stop. The platform is just one carriage long and the driver could easily miss it. But why would anyone want to get off at a tiny platform literally in the middle of a seemingly endless marshy void, with no houses in sight and the nearest public road three miles away? One answer is that the local landowner – Thomas Trench Berney, from whom the station takes its name – insisted that the Yarmouth and Norwich Railway should keep services going ‘in perpetuity' in exchange for building a station on his land. The alternative answer is better – since Berney Arms is what one writer has described as a ‘stepping-off point for an earthly paradise of boundless horizons and reedy dykes'. And silence. Once the train has clattered off into the distance, there is only the sound of a few rooks wheeling overhead and just a whisper of breeze gently brushing the grass. Once there was a small community here. Sheila Hutchinson, a local author, recalls how until the 1940s the railway had a signal box and station cottages that served as the ticket office, waiting room and local post office run by a stationmistress called Violet Mace. Although there was no mains water or electricity, a bell on the wall operated by the signalman would ring across the marshes to announce the arrival of a train. Now there is nothing but grass and sky. The cottages have long been demolished and the current skimpy wooden platform shelter, officially the smallest in Britain, offers all the comforts of an upright coffin. There is a hole cut in the back to prevent the roof from blowing off and to allow the shelter to double as a birdwatchers' hide – not much help in the driving sleet from the North Sea that is typical of a winter's day. And poor Berney Arms station gets no post these days at all.

But wait. Buried among the brambles at the end of the platform is a peeling moss-covered sign that points to
B
ERNEY
A
RMS
M
ILL
.
A
NCIENT
M
ONUMENT
. Cut through a gate, past a swan's nest on a dyke fluorescent with algae, swish through the reeds and there it is, towering over a bend in the Yare: Norfolk's tallest windmill, seven stories high, its cap like an upturned boat hull and its white sails in perfect condition. Although it might appear now as an image of rustic perfection, the original use for the mill was industrial – grinding cement clinker, using clay brought from the Broads by wherry. It was restored to working order by English Heritage in 2007, but the curse of lonely Berney Arms struck again. After the restoration there were never enough visitors coming here to keep it open regularly, and apart from the odd special day it has been closed to visitors ever since. Yet there is one institution in this deserted landscape that still apparently functions – the public house that gives the place its name. Dare I hope the Berney Arms might be open on a quiet lunchtime in the middle of nowhere on an autumn Monday?