The Railways

  As if to underscore this appeal, catering vehicles were spaces of conspicuous display. The Midland Railway gave out that a new dining car introduced in 1896 had been fitted up by Messrs Gillow, one of the smartest interior decorators of the day, ‘regardless of cost’. Third-class examples too were commonly finished to a higher standard than the corresponding ordinary carriages, and sometimes had seating in individual chairs. Reviewing the stock for the Great Central Railway’s new London extension in 1899, The Graphic found the third-class dining cars ‘so comfortable in appearance, that one wonders whether there should be any first-class’. The provision of such well-appointed catering for third-class passengers was certainly another inducement to give up paying first-class fares.

  The dining saloon of the London & North Western Railway’s American boat train, introduced in 1907 between London and Liverpool. Passengers sat in moveable armchairs, amidst fine panelling and imitation neo-classical plasterwork

  Half a crown for lunch was beyond the budget of many, even so; yet it is surprising how slowly the railways took up the idea of serving basic snacks and liquid refreshment as well as full meals. The Great Central tested the water in the late 1890s by providing buffet cars on some services whose hours did not coincide with the main mealtimes of the day. These were open to passengers of both classes, who were served from an amply curved mahogany bar, like something from one of the extravagant new pubs of the period. The buffets should have been an immediate success, but within a few years they were converted to ordinary restaurant cars instead. Why they failed is unclear; reasons since suggested include a dislike of mixing with other classes of passenger, disreputable associations of the public house and a reluctance to walk along the train to get something to eat, once the custom of having food brought to the seat had established itself.

  Third-class dinner menu from a London & North Eastern Railway restaurant car, 20 May 1939

  Only in the 1930s did the buffet concept begin to come into its own. The testing ground was the London & North Eastern’s service between Cambridge and King’s Cross, beginning with a few low-cost conversions from older carriages. These buffets served simple meals – all cold, apart from the soup – as well as tea, coffee and alcoholic beverages. It was a canny choice: the services proved especially popular with Cambridge University undergraduates, who dubbed them ‘beer trains’, because you could drink your way to London on them. New buffet cars were promptly built by the LNER for other services, and to accompany the ‘tourist’ excursion saloons; the other companies followed suit. The interiors on the LNER paraded their modernity, complete with that totem of up-to-dateness, tubular steel furniture – the setting for a quicker and more casual style of living, in an age already impatient with anything that seemed too Victorian. Deeper matters than mere aesthetics were involved here: the dirt-trapping, germ-friendly frills, folds and mouldings of Victorian and Edwardian interiors, railway carriages included, fell under suspicion in an age in which public design increasingly converged with the promotion of public health. A similar spirit moved the Great Western to fit ‘Vita glass’, transparent to solar ultra-violet light, in its new carriages for the Cornish Riviera Express in 1929, so that passengers could ‘commence their sunlight treatment en route to their holiday destination’.

  So things remained for most of the post-war period, with a choice on long-distance trains between full dining and simpler fare from the buffet. For the ordinary traveller, the balance shifted inexorably away from the restaurant and towards the buffet, and most of the catering vehicles built after the mid 1950s included facilities of the latter type. It was recognised, too, that many passengers wanted to consume alcohol without an accompanying meal. Both were usually consumed within the buffet cars themselves, using washable crockery and glassware, rather than carried back in disposable containers to the ordinary seats; the courtesy of asking a fellow passenger to keep an eye on temporarily abandoned luggage for the duration still prevailed.

  In the restaurant cars, the target customer was increasingly the businessman or bureaucrat, travelling at his employer’s expense. The change was reflected in the layout of the diesel-powered ‘Blue Pullman’ trains introduced on selected main lines from 1960. Older Pullmans had seats in single facing pairs on either side of the gangway, suggestive of leisured couples dining à deux, but their replacements had off-centre gangways with facing seats grouped two-plus-two on the wider side, so that business meetings could be more easily conducted over lunch. Prices were increasingly set high, not always justified by the quality and choice available. A straw in the wind was the abandonment of croutons with the soup course, after the Pullman company was finally absorbed into the nationalised system in 1962. And as trains became faster and journeys correspondingly more brief, there were fewer services for which the provision of a restaurant vehicle could be warranted at all. In 1969, three-fifths of first-class passengers (and one in five from second class) still took full meals where these were provided, but patronage was shrinking fast. Declining expectations during the 1970s were reflected in the changing make-up of the High Speed Trains (Inter-City 125s). The first batch, put to work in 1976 on the old Great Western main line to Bristol and South Wales, had both restaurant car and buffet, comprising fully one-quarter of the eight passenger-carrying coaches. The later series had a buffet only, or a composite vehicle combining kitchen, buffet counter and a small dining saloon.

  Meanwhile food technology was transforming the railway kitchen. In the 1970s microwave ovens were installed, at first used chiefly to speed up cooking times, followed a decade later by the full embrace of the ‘cook-chill’ meal that could be prepared off-site and reheated for serving on the train. First to adopt the latter was the Euston-to-Manchester service, in 1985. The new menus were launched as ‘Cuisine 2000’; an awful name, but also a mark of imminent liberation from the derided Travellers-Fare brand, which had yoked together on-board catering with the much more basic food provided at station cafés and buffet counters. No longer did the kitchen shift begin with heating the oven in readiness for roasting the daily joint; railway catering now came into line with the methods of the airlines, except that certain dishes that were beyond the powers of the microwave to revivify – fried eggs, toast, bacon – were still cooked from fresh. Released from the constraints of fresh preparation, the cook-chill menu was able to welcome back some superior but fiddly dishes that had vanished from railway menus generations before – poached asparagus with Hollandaise sauce, baked salmon with lobster butter – as well as expanding the range with Asian and Mediterranean flavours unknown to the Edwardians. Outwardly, the new methods of preparation were barely apparent: British Rail understood the attractions of silver service, tablecloths, china plates and proper cutlery, measured against the horrible tray-borne, cellophane-wrapped eating experience of the captive airline passenger. And yet the new service was actually symbiotic with the air industry, for the food-supply contracts for Cuisine 2000 were placed with Trust House Forte’s airline kitchens based at the airports at Luton and Manchester.

  These innovations should have saved the restaurant car, but they did not. Since the privatisation of the railways in 1996–7, the airline model for business travel – standardised meals, included in the ticket price and served to all first-class passengers – has steadily triumphed over the optional system, by which anyone willing to pay for the privilege can walk through the train, take a seat and pick up the menu. In one sense, this is a reversion to the original Pullman model, except that meals designed to be served to all and sundry cannot afford to be ambitious or varied. The last major redoubt of the old, inclusive order was the East Coast main line, including the Great Northern Railway’s route from London to Doncaster on which the first British dining cars had been introduced in 1878. Their successors were withdrawn in 2011. A handful of ‘Pullman Dining’ trains on First Great Western and two services across Wales now keep up the tradition, of which First Great Western’s cater strictly for first class only.

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p; A similar shrinkage continues on other lines. Now that the custom of taking a seat in the buffet car has died out, its facilities typically consist of a windowless bar-type counter, supplemented by self-service displays of consumables and magazines. On some lines this installation is called the ‘shop’, dropping any suggestion of a place to eat. The reusable trays once provided for taking away purchases have gone, mostly replaced by the familiar brown paper bags that will join the scatter of plastic glasses, empty drink cans, milk capsules and other travel waste gathered from the carriage at the end of the journey. Even the relatively modest space required for a buffet counter is no longer considered cost-effective on many routes, shrinking the options further towards the standard railway diet of boxed sandwiches, crisps, chocolate bars and floppy Danish pastries, with a premium-priced apple, orange or banana for the health-conscious. All too often, the advice of The Railway Traveller’s Handy Book rings down the years from 1862: better to take your own choice of something to eat on the train.

  Those who failed to dine on a British express train even once – perhaps lacking the nerve, or not realising that standard-class passengers had the right to do so – should kick themselves now. The opportunity to sit for hours in a first-class seat on a budget ticket was undeniably part of the appeal, but it was not the highest pleasure. Nor was the food the primary attraction somehow, although standards in the final years of the service were high; nor did the kindly effects of the wine explain more than part of the magic, though they certainly helped. What made the experience so marvellous was a sort of fusion of all the components, from the soothing and unhurried attentions of the staff to the shifting and fading of the light across the landscape, so that a potentially boring journey became a lovely sequence of anticipated pleasures, separated by space as well as time. The tinkle of the heavy cutlery, occasionally sliding a little across the tablecloth, was calming or amusing rather than irksome. Conversations were struck up between strangers, regular diners as well as infrequent customers, as if united by a sense of gratitude at the sheer unlikeliness of it all – a high achievement of industrial civilisation that deserved to remain for everyone, but which has now gone the way of the airship and the ocean liner. Much of the nostalgia concerning railways is partial, even false; not this.

  Most railway journeys past and present have always been of the non-dining kind: short suburban trips, daily commuting runs, modest cross-country jaunts. Here there was less innovation to boast of in the years after 1945. Away from the main lines and fast trains of British Railways, the old order of carriage design continued alongside the (relatively) new. Well into the 1950s, carriages for local services were built on the age-old compartment principle, wasting no space on corridors, gangways or toilets. In no sense was the form considered archaic: even the new electric trains introduced on Tyneside in 1955 were partly compartmented, a form not seen on those lines for half a century previously. But the toll of easy vandalism, as well as long-familiar fears of crime, helped not long afterwards to tip the scales the other way.

  Secure from official inspection, compartments had always been easy game to the destructive. The London & South Western was moved to put on display a carriage with slashed seats in 1859, with a warning to the public that cushions might have to be taken away altogether if the nuisance recurred. The press were excited by the case of two drunken first-class passengers who ‘completely disembowelled’ their compartment on the South Eastern ten years later, especially after one of the gentleman-miscreants fled to the Continent. As for writing and scratching, a letter to the Railway Record complained as early as 1847 that some carriages on the London, Brighton & South Coast had been defaced in ways that made them ‘totally unfit for a respectable modest female to enter’, and F. S. Williams deplored the indecencies inscribed on carriage window panes by ‘brainless fops who wear diamond rings’. A dedicated scribbler could get a lot done during a railway journey: the artist Michael Ayrton confessed to having whiled away a night journey to Stoke-on-Trent in 1944 by pencilling the whole interior of an unlit compartment with drawings of cats and fishes, accompanied by his friend, the composer Constant Lambert; the two lay in the luggage racks in order to cover the ceiling.

  Pilfering was an attraction too. The Mid-Suffolk Light Railway found that the leather straps of its carriage windows tended to vanish for a new life as strops for sharpening cut-throat razors. Other companies suspected that straps were being taken for boot repairs. When the North Eastern Railway decided to favour its third-class windows with curtains in the 1880s, they were likewise cut off and taken away.

  Matters did not improve after nationalisation, confounding those who had hoped that ownership by the people would usher in a new respect for common property. Working at Leicester (Great Central) carriage sheds as a temporary cleaner in the summer vacation of 1953, W. Elgar Dickinson had to contend with ‘Much uneaten or half-eaten food … dumped down toilets, stuffed under seats, wiped on seats, flattened on table-tops, jammed in ashtrays, stamped into floors, flies buzzing with excitement around this bounty or drowning themselves ecstatically in pools of beer, lemonade and vomit.’ Light bulbs had been taken out and trodden on for the pleasure of hearing them pop, or left in luggage racks or toilets; soap, paper and handtowels were stolen; ashtrays were unscrewed. On one occasion at Leicester, an entire suite comprising washbowl and toilet fitting had gone missing.

  These carriages were from an excursion train, by long tradition especially prone to spoliation, for which the railways tended to reserve their oldest and shabbiest vehicles. But service trains suffered too, and in the later 1950s the situation appears to have worsened. Now the press picked up the subject. The Manchester Guardian reported the annual toll on BR’s London Midland Region in 1957 under the heading 15,000 MISSING LIGHT BULBS. Some of the damage was blamed on ‘Teddy boys’, although no age-group was considered especially responsible. Cumulative costs were heavy: in 1960, each repair to a slashed seat was estimated at between £1 and £5, replacement cushions (easily detached and thrown from the carriage windows) at £3 15s upwards, windows at up to £5 each. Worst affected at that time was the Southern Region, where a squad of fifty men was employed every Sunday to patch up the destruction from the night before. These were normal service trains; if the carriages could not be repaired in time, some Monday morning services had to be cancelled. Regardless of the toll inflicted, the maximum fine for damaging railway property remained a mere £5. Nor did the law allow the railways to ban known or suspected train-wreckers from its stations, a sanction limited to violent lunatics or those obviously afflicted by infectious diseases.

  Football trains were especially vulnerable. By 1961 the railways were considering the abolition of football specials in the Glasgow area, after a train was sacked by Celtic fans (who also beat up a waiter in the buffet car). What weighed decisively against the idea was the prospect of displacing hordes of drunken rioters on to ordinary service trains. Similar threats to withdraw the excursion service followed in other parts of the network. Sometimes they were even acted on: midway through the 1963–4 season, Liverpool’s clubs temporarily lost their excursion trains after repeated misconduct by ‘Mersey Maniacs’. A comic joked on television that his fellow Liverpool supporters could be recognised by the railway carriage doors they wore in their lapels.

  When not finding things to break, fans might choose to have fun with the communication cord. The presence of a victorious team on the same train was not necessarily a deterrent. Repeated abuse of the facility caused an exasperated Matt Busby and his squad to go off in search of a road coach at Wolverhampton in the small hours of 5 January 1964, on their return from Manchester United’s third-round cup victory over Southampton. By then their train was over three hours late, due partly to a war of nerves between passengers, police and railwaymen at Birmingham New Street (‘As station staff ran along the line freeing the brakes, supporters pulled the cords again’). Also taking the train home that night were fans of Manchester City, glumly smashing light bul
bs and ripping out tables after a defeat at the railway town of Swindon.

  In an attempt to readjust the balance of costs and benefits arising from excursion traffic, an agreement was reached with the National Federation of Football Supporters’ Clubs in 1967. Henceforth, those who chartered special trains would be liable for damage up to a sum of £900. That limit was no doubt breached by Tottenham Hotspur on 20 September 1969, after a 5–0 defeat at Derby; supporters on the returning train threw so many carriage fittings on to the track, and pulled the communication cord so often, that they were finally ejected by Bedfordshire police at the quiet wayside stations of Flitwick and Harlington. Here some of the 550 unhappy fans ‘went on a stone-throwing spree, terrorising villages, smashing windows, and attacking cars’. Others were last seen walking in the general direction of north London.

  In 1973 the railways tried to take the excursion traffic upmarket, by means of the all-first-class League Liner train. This was a dedicated set of carriages that could be hired, staffed and indemnified against damage by interested clubs, who could then sell tickets to their fans at a profitable margin. One carriage was equipped with screens for showing match footage on the primitive videotape of the day. There was a ‘Kick-off Disco’ vehicle complete with flashing lights and groovy decorations on its windowless walls, to encourage wives and girlfriends to travel with the away fans. But even the twin deterrents of first-class fares and female company did not save the League Liner from vandalistic attack during the three years it lasted in service.