The mission to the wider world was also resumed. A demonstrator unit spent two years fruitlessly touring the United States. Another made sorties to Belgium and Sweden, with the same outcome. A two-car unit was shipped to Thailand for trials, then to Malaysia, where the authorities decided to buy a rival design from Hungary instead. Finally, the unit went to Indonesia, where it seems to have disappeared from the records. Asia liked the units no more than America, and no orders were placed there either. So the Yorkshire fleet remained alone of their particular kind, working until 1997. The story might have ended there but for the railways of the Islamic Republic of Iran, which bought up most of the redundant units as a job lot a few years later. Until recently, the suburban lines around Tehran were the stamping ground of these fuel-efficient, non-air-conditioned units, a surprising initiative by an oil-rich country with maximum summer temperatures approaching 100 degrees Fahrenheit.
Things moved forward – a little – with the Class 142 (built 1985–7) and their successors. Their bodies were wider, and less obviously bus-like inside. The ‘Pacer’ name applies properly to these units, a near-meaningless label which served to distinguish them from the sturdier, more expensive and altogether preferable ‘Sprinter’ DMUs introduced around the same time. One Pacer unit spent some time in Belgium, in yet another doomed attempt to stimulate export trade. Another was singled out for stardom at the transport-themed Expo at Vancouver in 1986, where it operated a shuttle service through the site. There the train managed to attract one remarkable passenger, granddaughter (as it happens) of a cloakroom clerk at Grantham station, but notorious for her aversion to railways at home: Margaret Thatcher. It was almost as if British Rail had contrived an ambush. The Prime Minister was visiting the Expo for its ‘British Day’, 12 July, where she made a speech laying emphasis on the UK’s aspiration to share in the technology of the future. Fine words, in the general sense; but no one can have been much surprised when Vancouver’s Pacer came back without having generated a single order.***
The Pacers’ habitat consists of provincial and rural lines, especially in the north, the industrial Midlands and South Wales. It is possible to live in south-east England and travel a great deal by rail without once stepping on board one of these noisy, bucking, rattling, cramped and draughty trains, whose engine note at speed suggests an imminent risk of something bad happening down below. The commuter to Cardiff, Manchester or Leeds may even suspect a metropolitan conspiracy.
Less obvious is a regrettable economy within the standard Mark 3 carriage, concerning the relationship between the seats and the windows. In the days of compartments, each had its own window, or windows, centrally placed; there was no other way. The open carriages that succeeded them retained this alignment between seating bays and windows. Thus the immediate predecessors of the Mark 3 came in two types, seven-windowed for first class, eight-windowed for second, the greater width of each seating bay in first class accounting for the difference. The Mark 3s were long enough to accommodate eight seating bays in first class, each again with its own window, but for the sake of economy the same bodyshell was used for second class as well. With their closer spacings, many second-class seats were therefore out of step with the windows. In the worst cases the hapless passenger was lined up directly with one of the solid piers between them. Those wanting to gaze properly at one of the marvels along the line – Durham Cathedral on its rock, say – were forced into a double manoeuvre: first, squashing back into the seat for a right-angled glimpse through the slot made by the overlap with the window behind, then craning uncomfortably forward to where the next window began.
Forty years on, and the question of an adequate outside view seems to matter to the designers of British railway carriages even less. That is the only possible conclusion to be drawn from the layout of the ‘Pendolino’ trains, which replaced the Mark 3s on the West Coast main line from 2001. Their seating plans can be inspected on the website of the operating company, Virgin Trains. Seats described as having ‘limited/no view’ are coloured blue. In standard class there are 449 places, of which almost one-third – 146 seats – are blue. Even first class has a few blue spots, like the dud seats at the outer edges of the circle at the theatre. ‘No view’ is no exaggeration: some seats truly do adjoin a blank carriage wall. Seats in groups of four are comparatively scarce; by dispensing with tables, more can be squeezed in. The preferred configuration is in long defiles facing the same way, and because seats are now much taller than they were in the 1970s and 1980s, the passenger’s view directly in front is of the headrest of the next seat along. It also happens that the tops of the windows of these trains finish unusually low down.
Safety culture explains some of this, including the requirement for ever greater structural resilience at high speeds, especially when crossing in tunnels. That means a higher proportion of solid to void in the carriage sides, in contrast to the less demanding rules applying to those built for slower routes. Some of these, such as the Electrostar commuter units now operating in Essex, Sussex and Kent, have saloons with wonderful near-continuous windows. So now the rule of thumb is, the longer the maximum journey, the worse the likely view.
The airline model: inside a Class 370 Pendolino, standard class
All of this presents quite a rebuff to anyone who holds to Ruskin’s precept that the world is worth looking at. It is poignant that the Pendolinos should operate over the same route used by the great critic to reach London from his Lake District home. The shrinking windows also fall woefully short of the ideals represented by the Design Panel, and the awakening sense in the 1960s that railways should compete against other modes of transport partly by providing a more appealing and distinctive experience. Instead, the Pendolino interior seems to want to converge with the cramped and claustrophobic cabin of the airliner, the dominant mode of long-distance transport for the new century. Visually, perhaps the most obvious difference is that each carriage contains seats facing both ways, sometimes unsettlingly juxtaposed across the aisle. As the rules preventing airline passengers from using mobile phones and wireless devices during flights are relaxed, railway passengers are losing their competitive edge in streaming movies, or spending the journey texting and chattering by mobile phone. Not everyone likes the resulting hubbub, of course – hence the introduction of the ‘quiet coach’, a new distinction in permitted behaviour between different spaces, now that smoking is forbidden.
Where heavy luggage is concerned, most passengers now have rigid wheeled suitcases of the type designed to withstand the rigours of airport handling. These can be found obstructing the aisles and vestibules of crowded trains, being often too large for the overhead racks – especially so on the Pendolinos, which are not generous in the matter of headroom. The name offers a clue to why the space is so cramped: Pendolino is the Italian word for pendulum, a reference to the hydraulic tilting mechanism attached to the bogies, by which the carriages lean inwards as the train takes curves at speed. This tilting allows a much faster journey, liberating the timetable from many of the speed restrictions on lines built to Victorian standards of curvature. In order to stay within the loading gauge, the carriage sides taper inwards from around waist height.
The tilting principle was developed by British Rail at the same time as the High Speed Train, and embodied in its prototype electric Advanced Passenger Trains of the late 1970s. A maximum operational speed of 155 mph was anticipated, as against the 125 mph service limit of the diesel-powered HSTs. Here, it was hoped, was a world-class design that would permit the modernisation of the network without the vast cost of building new high-speed routes with minimal curves, like those of the Japanese bullet trains and French TGVs (Trains à grand vitesse). Yet the début of the APT on the London-to-Glasgow run in 1981 was a dismaying affair. Many of the passengers on the first trial trip – journalists, railwaymen, ministers and civil servants – claimed to have been made nauseous by the tilting motion. Only later was it discovered that a less mathematically exact compensation for
the bends was kinder to the human frame, so that passengers felt a slight sensation of tilting to match the visual evidence through the carriage window. Worse, the tilt mechanism failed on some early runs, leaving the carriages stuck humiliatingly on one side. Even the hydro-kinetic brakes that were meant to allow fast deceleration proved liable to freezing. After less than a week of public service, the prototypes were therefore withdrawn for modification.
Trials resumed successfully three years later, by which time the senior management had lost confidence in the commercial case for the service. Unlike the HSTs, the new trains were also operationally hobbled by the placing of their gangway-less power cars in the middle of the train, so that two restaurant-buffet cars had to be provided, one for each group of carriages on either side. Before long the trains were quietly scrapped, not many months after Mrs Thatcher’s declaration of faith in the future of British technology at the Vancouver Expo.
The story does not end there. The technology from the tilting mechanism was sold to the railway division of Fiat, who incorporated it in their own tilting-train programme. Thus it came about that the world’s first regular public service by tilting train ran between Rome and Milan instead of London and Glasgow. When orders were finally placed for tilting trains to run on the privatised West Coast main line, they went to the French company Alstom, the new owner of Fiat’s railway arm. Having effectively exported its own technical lead, Britain had to buy it back from abroad.
So the record of the British passenger railway is altogether mixed. The Pacers illustrate the unevenness of British Rail’s own design policy; further back, the braking saga shows that British railways were not always in the forefront of innovation, nor receptive to the best technology from abroad. Yet the system endures, and over the last twenty years its use by passengers has risen in almost every year. The crowding that has prompted more compact arrangements of carriage seating is a sign of this healthy demand. Further evidence of this growth is the rise in the number and frequency of ‘interval services’ on long-distance routes, by which trains leave at regular intervals throughout the day. In 1838, when the London & Birmingham Railway became the first route to link the capital with another city, there were just a few short trains each day; now, fast trains over the same route leave Euston every twenty minutes during waking hours.
The fate of the Flying Scotsman is a representative story of the modernised railway. Like the naming of locomotives (see Chapter 17), bestowing titles on individual services was a special weakness of Britain’s railways: the Railway Magazine has listed upwards of 260 of them, from The Aberdonian to The Zulu. The one everybody recognises was in informal use for generations before its official adoption in 1927. The name applied to the simultaneous 10 a.m. departures from Edinburgh Waverley and London King’s Cross, the two identically named expresses passing each other every weekday somewhere between York and Darlington. In its inter-war heyday this was truly a train to remember. Running non-stop throughout, it was equipped by the end of the 1930s with its own hairdressing salon, cocktail bar and ladies’ retiring room, as well as the expected restaurant car. An on-board newsboy plied his wares up and down the corridors, to make up for the lack of intermediate stops at which reading matter could be obtained. Not all of these novelties survived the Second World War, but in the 1950s the crack express was still the obvious choice for St Custard’s school excursion in Geoffrey Willans and Ronald Searle’s Molesworth books (‘Now the mity trane rumble over the royal border bridge and soon we are in scotland. we go back to our smoker and lite up our cigs’). But there is no economic case now for a single non-stop run between London and Edinburgh, nor is there anything distinctive about the timings or facilities of any particular service on the route. Too good to discard altogether, the famous name lingers spectrally as the title of the 05.40 departure from Edinburgh, which is hardly the same thing.
The disappearance of prestige services of this kind is part of the price paid for the standardised, accelerated and sometimes rather boring railway network of the twenty-first century. Efficiencies and economies of scale now work against any non-standard practices, excepting the superficial variety presented by the liveries and finishes of the private operating companies. As a sign of how different things were a century ago, consider London & North Western Railway carriage 1513, preserved on the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. Built in 1913, it was one of three observation saloons specially built for the spectacular route between Llandudno and Blaenau Ffestiniog in North Wales. For a surcharge of sixpence, passengers could enjoy the views through its huge windows and glazed ends. The direction of their seats could be reversed, by means of pivoting backs like those used on tramcars, so that everyone could face in the optimum direction. It is almost as if John Ruskin himself had been appointed design consultant.
Not that romance is wholly dead on the twenty-first century railway. It survives most fully where sleeping cars still operate – and these deserve a chapter to themselves.
Footnotes
* They did these things differently abroad; the Imperial Railway Office of Bismarck’s newly united Germany insisted on air brakes, and got them.
** Mere coincidence perhaps, but the future Prime Minister also helped Bulleid by signing off his application to build the double-deck units, in the young MP’s other role as Chairman of the Treasury Allocation of Materials Committee; see Callaghan’s foreword of 1984 to the memoirs of Sidney Weighell, leader of the National Union of Railwaymen.
*** To be fair, British Rail Engineering Limited successfully exported twelve three-car units of more robust design to the Thai State Railways in the early 1990s.
– 8 –
AND SO TO BED
The idea of a sleeping compartment mounted on rails is not, on the face of it, a difficult one to come up with. Yet it took Britain’s railways over forty years to do something serious about making it happen.
There were a few early ‘bed-carriages’, it is true, identifiable by the low boot-like extension at one end; the type survives in the form of Queen Adelaide’s conveyance of 1842. Once the outer seat-back had been folded away, the extra volume enclosed by the boot made it possible for the occupant of the end compartment to stretch out at full length, parallel to the direction of travel, by means of a stretcher-like contraption with twin poles that spanned the gap between the seats. After compartments became wider, there was enough space to stretch out across both seats with the aid of these sleeping poles. The device may be compared to the footwarmer, which likewise solved a problem by bringing in extra equipment rather than by rethinking the fundamentals.
They did things differently abroad, where greater distances and protracted journeys stimulated innovation. It was to these models that the managers of Britain’s railways looked in the 1870s, when true sleeping carriages were introduced. First in the game was the North British Railway in 1873, for services to London. This followed the French type known as a lits-salon, which owed something to the convertible principle of the bed-carriage and rather more to the family saloon. The carriage had two first-class compartments, with a shared lavatory enclosure between – the first lavatories in a British railway carriage built for ordinary service rather than private hire. The main compartments each had three seats along one side only, leaving plenty of room on the lavatory side. When the time came to turn in, the seat backs could be pulled forward and unfolded horizontally, revealing an upholstered reverse side for sleeping on. In addition there was a second-class compartment at one end for the use of servants, who had to manage without access to the lavatory, and a luggage compartment at the other. Despite the ten-shilling charge, bedding was not provided, although passengers (or their servants) could supply their own.
Other lines rapidly provided a few sleeping cars of their own, likewise self-contained and variously subdivided, and sometimes with the novelty of suspended upper berths, bunk-bed-fashion. In most cases clearly designed with family parties in mind, they were available for shared use by solitary travellers too. In
Robert Louis Stevenson’s short story ‘The Rajah’s Diamond’ (1878), a clergyman flees to Scotland with a snaffled precious stone in his custody, on what is clearly recognisable as a North British sleeper. An adventurer who has designs on the same jewel installs himself in the opposite end of the vehicle. During the night, each man makes a stealthy visit of inspection to the other’s space, through the swaying darkness and unlockable sliding doors of the lavatory enclosure.
By the time Stevenson was writing there was another way to go to bed on the train. It is here that George Mortimer Pullman re-enters the story. He had patented a very different type of sleeping car in the USA in 1865, taking the single, shared saloon as his unlikely starting point. By means of upper berths that folded up against the roof, lower berths that were formed by sliding pairs of facing seats forward until they met in the middle, and retractable panels to divide the head and foot of each bed, upper and lower, from the berths to either side, Pullman managed to do the trick. Privacy was ensured by means of thick curtains that could be buttoned together, on the side facing the central aisle. The design saw widespread use. Its memory was kept alive by Hollywood westerns, in which quarrelling passengers would poke their heads out between the curtains, and perhaps throw a boot or two (footwear had to be removed before retiring, as there was nowhere to put it inside the berths).
Three Pullman sleeping cars of this type were among the vehicles shipped over for assembly by the Midland Railway in 1874. A few other railways followed the Midland’s lead. Like the Pullman parlor cars, these sleepers were provided with an attendant, and had private ‘state rooms’ at each end for those desiring greater privacy. Even so, The Times considered that the ordinary curtained-off berths were sufficient for complete seclusion. Now there was a way for single, servantless travellers to sleep securely in their own space, with an attendant to hand.
The Railways Page 30