The Railways

  Timber or iron construction was preferred for footbridges, sometimes on piers of brick or stone. Large railways tended to develop their own standard designs, especially for the basic single-span form used at stations with two facing platforms. Trains along the Newcastle & Carlisle route still pass under seven footbridges of the North Eastern Railway’s graceful type in which arches brace the span over the tracks, all now repainted in versions of the old company’s red-brown and buff colours. The Great Western distinguished itself by providing canopies for many of its footbridges, as may still be seen at such stations as Chippenham, St Austell and Stratford, where the sheltered area extends uninterrupted from platform to facing platform. Twentieth-century railway engineers often turned to prefabricated concrete, including the concrete-loving Southern Railway in the years after 1923. The glum results, kindred to the Southern’s concrete platforms and platelayer’s huts, survive all over its former lines, as in the leafy suburban streets of Mortlake and East Sheen. The company also experimented with making thrifty footbridges from old rails bent into shape, of which Wokingham has an example. Until money for such improvements could be found, passengers were liable to encounter annoyances like that at Sidcup station, where the only permitted route between platforms was via the road approach, under the railway bridge and back up the other side.

  Older footbridges in their original state are becoming less common. Many are falling victim to overhead electrification, which requires higher clearances. Footbridges alongside level crossings, where the contact wire is suspended at almost one metre above the standard height to allow sufficient headroom for lorries, are the tallest of all. Other footbridges are being modified or replaced by new installations with lifts accessible to all – counterparts of the Harrington hump. The results are not necessarily any worse in aesthetic terms, although they sometimes kill the historic atmosphere at stations that have kept a good collection of older buildings. Considered more broadly, the railways’ commitment to equality of access is a logical successor to the national peculiarity of tall platforms. It has always been easier to get on and off trains in the British Isles than elsewhere, and it is getting easier still.

  Footbridges at stations, being simpler and cheaper to construct, are generally more common than subways below the line. Where a station was built on a viaduct or undercroft, however, it was not difficult to contrive a passage through the arches or vaults and up steps to the platform on the far side. Subways at stations that sit closer to ground level are often a sign of reconstruction in the late nineteenth century or after; Blackburn, Huddersfield and Ely are instances from the 1880s. Because people require less headroom than trains, there are commonly fewer steps to negotiate (or less walking up and down ramps) at an underpass than on a footbridge. Sometimes the overhead clearances come down uncomfortably low where the tracks pass overhead, as until recently at Canterbury West. Less claustrophobic examples include the broad concourse-like subways at Cardiff Central station, rebuilt by the Great Western in the 1930s, and the 30ft-wide subway at Bristol Temple Meads, as renovated around the same time. Both these projects were made possible by cheap government loans, introduced during the Great Depression to stimulate employment and demand – another twist in the convoluted relationship between the State and the private railway companies.

  Among the smaller stations to be enlarged under the loans scheme was Carnforth in north Lancashire, which acquired a new platform served by a ramped subway. The renovated station was among those inspected by the film director David Lean (1908–91) while looking for a location to shoot the ‘Milford Junction’ scenes of Brief Encounter in 1945. To allow for nocturnal filming, the station had to be somewhere safely beyond the wartime blackout zone. Carnforth was selected partly because Lean thought that his female lead Celia Johnson would look more dignified and ‘swan-like’ going up and down ramps rather than steps. Life now imitates art at Carnforth, where the refreshment room has been restored to its 1940s state – although the interior scenes in which the hero and heroine meet and fall in love were actually filmed on set at Denham Studios in Buckinghamshire.

  Big stations such as the rebuilt Cardiff mostly have platforms of the island type, with railway lines on both sides. The same principle was also used at stations with only two running lines, where the tracks part and rejoin on either side of the platform, like twin streams of a river. An island platform could be reached from beneath or above, depending on the level of the line. One common arrangement was to place the station buildings above the platform and parallel with the access road, bridge-fashion. The road could then be carried conveniently across the railway line without interruption by a level crossing. The Great Central Railway adopted this model for the lesser stations on its London extension, of which two Leicestershire examples (Rothley and Quorn & Woodhouse) have been impeccably preserved. Travellers will be vaguely aware of passing through large versions of bridge-type stations because of the dark interval when the train approaches or leaves the platforms, an interval too short to be accounted for by a full-scale tunnel and too long for a simple road bridge. Leicester and Nottingham are outstanding examples, both rebuilt by the Midland Railway around the turn of the twentieth century. Going still deeper, some Tube stations in London may be interpreted as dug-out versions of the bridge type: a long staircase descending from a street-level building, with platforms on either side at the bottom. The arrangement is explicit when trains in both directions draw up at a narrow island platform placed within a single broad chamber. This nerve-racking arrangement now survives only at Clapham North and Clapham Common on the Northern Line.

  To get adequate circulation into the body of a very large station, it was sometimes necessary to provide both subways and footbridges. Clapham again provides an example: its sprawling Junction station, joint offspring of the London, Brighton & South Coast and London & South Western railways, already had both kinds of access by 1900. In that year, two porters were cut down by a train as they transferred luggage across the tracks. They could use neither subway nor footbridge, because these were insufficiently wide to take barrows without impeding the flow of passengers. The following day the station’s platform staff petitioned the Board of Trade to make their lives safer (‘Our lives are nothing but a series of thrilling adventures and hairbreadth escapes’). Before long the station was reconstructed with a splendid new footbridge, broad enough to entrain a regiment, and equipped with luggage lifts that eliminated the need for porters to convey trunks and milk churns across the running lines. The footbridge also included an extra station building and booking hall at one end, thus making Clapham Junction into a hybrid of the bridge and subway types of station.

  These categories, and combinations of categories, could be multiplied almost endlessly. There are through stations that include bay platforms that finish with buffers at one end, as at a terminus; stations where lines cross at different levels, as at Willesden Junction and Tamworth; stations built as separate enclaves by different companies that have since been knocked through, as at London Victoria; and multiple combinations of these types and features. But enough has been said to show that stations should not be understood simply as pieces of architecture, rather than as diverse facilities within the greater system that is the railway itself.

  When railways still carried goods and parcels, the phrase ‘at the station’ carried associations of trade, delivery and despatch that have now largely been lost. Another casualty of recent decades is the expectation that there will be anyone on duty there at all. Even the sale of tickets depends less and less on face-to-face transactions. The first great reduction in everyday sales was due to the season ticket, which has a history almost as long as that of the passenger railway itself. Initially these were offered only to first- and second-class travellers, saving them the chore of queueing to buy a daily ticket. Next, tickets became available from machines at some stations, or from the guard or conductor after boarding the train. Now they can be booked online in advance, at any time and from anywhe
re in the world. Fewer and fewer travellers turn up at the station with the purchase of a fresh ticket in mind.

  Machines for selling railway tickets go back a long way in Britain. They were already in place at a few busy stations before 1914, but made slow progress until after the Second World War, when British Railways began to install machines that could print tickets on demand. The first London terminus to achieve full mechanisation of its ticket-issuing equipment was Euston, in 1960 (which was just after the decision to demolish the entire station and start again). Later machines were networked electronically, so that centralised records could be kept. Portable ticket machines for use on trains were also developed. These methods have now converged, and a growing proportion of the tickets bought on board are issued using the same software system, called AVANTIX, which is used for online and station sales. It may surprise many to learn that AVANTIX belongs to the transport division of the French multinational company Atos, better known in the UK as the beneficiary of lucrative outsourcing contracts for IT services to public bodies and the assessment of disabled people for fitness to work.

  The de-staffing of stations is among the economies that distinguish the modern network from the essentially Victorian model that Dr Beeching set about hacking into shape. Yet Beeching himself failed to grasp the potential of liberating the issue of tickets from the fixed points represented by station booking offices. The curious story of the East Suffolk line shows what might have been achieved had matters turned out differently.

  The East Suffolk line runs between Ipswich and Lowestoft, with no great centres of population or traffic in between, and was accordingly earmarked for oblivion in Beeching’s report. Its saviour was the manager of BR’s Eastern Region, Gerard (‘Gerry’) Fiennes (1906–85; properly Twisleton-Wykeham-Fiennes). Fiennes directed that intermediate stations should be largely de-staffed – which was easily done once goods and sundries traffic was given up – and fares collected on the trains instead, using portable ticket machines. The idea was hardly new; for example, the little Keighley & Worth Valley line had adopted on-board ticket sales back in 1955. With no lineside goods depots, the trackwork could be simplified accordingly and the line run as a ‘basic railway’. Later, the removal of semaphore signals and signal boxes (replaced here with early radio-operated signalling) allowed the East Suffolk line to operate still more cheaply. By that time, the gifted railwayman who reformed the route had got himself sacked, having been excessively candid about the shortcomings of railway management in his book I Tried to Run a Railway (1967).

  Friends of the railways have argued that Fiennes’s basic model might have brought other lines on Beeching’s hit list within acceptable financial limits, had they been given the chance. Something similar was indeed tried elsewhere, but without the same cutbacks of station staff and goods facilities. These were the lines on which the puny four-wheeled railbuses described in Chapter 7 took over loss-making passenger services from the late 1950s onwards. As these trains had conductor-guards who sold tickets, it was also possible to add new stopping places in the hope of attracting extra custom: little unstaffed platforms known as halts, the nearest railway equivalent to a bus stop, where trains called only on request. So the names of a few extra rural stations flickered briefly on the railway map – and there cannot be many surviving habitués of Trouble House Halt (1959–64, named from a pub on the Tetbury branch), or Ballifurth Farm Halt (1959–65, Speyside line) – before their lines closed altogether.

  An earlier wave of halt building had come in the years after 1900, stimulated by the invention of the steam railmotor. A precursor of the diesel railbus, this was powered by a midget four-wheeled locomotive enclosed within one end of the carriage. A Great Western railmotor has recently been restored, reviving after a gap of more than sixty years the compelling sight and sound of a single, self-propelled steam carriage hissing and panting its way along the rails. The powered end is betrayed by the exhaust plume from the carriage roof, and by the little wheels and motion (the collective term for the coupling and connecting rods and cylinder valve gear) busily working below. Like tramcars, railmotors could be driven from either end, which saved time and labour when reversing. Their passenger sections were designed on the tramcar principle too, as a single open compartment. The Great Western’s featured tram-type seats with hinged backs, which could be pushed either way so as to face the direction of travel.

  Encouraged by the potential of the railmotor, the Great Western became especially keen on halts. At first the company tried to keep a distinction between stations proper and these new stopping places, which were classified either as mere halts (sometimes spelled ‘haltes’) or as ‘platforms’. ‘Halts’ might be no more than an area of timber decking alongside the track, to which retractable steps could be lowered from the carriage door. The waiting area might be lit, or it might not. A ‘platform’ was more likely to be of regulation height, but had only a cabin-like shelter by way of a building. One of these platform-grade facilities has survived, complete with two of the Great Western’s distinctive pagoda-like shelters: it is Denham Golf Club station, in the Buckinghamshire commuter belt, not far from the site of the studio where Brief Encounter was made.

  Now that so many stations have been de-staffed, the crucial distinction is between those where timetabled services always stop and those that are served only on request. An element of unpredictability has thus entered many railway journeys. Approaching Dyffryn Ardudwy, Corkickle, Scotscalder or scores of little-frequented stations like them, the driver must scan the platform for waiting passengers, unless the conductor-guard has already advised that someone already on the train wants to get off there. The same routine is followed after dark, when it may take the driver a little longer to obtain a clear view. Changes in the pitch of the engine as a request station comes into visual range betray any necessary slackening of speed. Those waiting at the platform must be careful too: however vile the weather, it is no good huddling invisibly within the shelter on the assumption that the longed-for train will definitely stop.

  Denham’s corrugated-iron-clad shelters, now protected by listing, are the last of their kind on the national network. Until a few years ago, Great Western pagodas could also be seen at Appleford station (née Appleford Halt) in Oxfordshire. Now Appleford is equipped with the Paragon Anti-Vandal Shelter, made by Macemain & Amstad of Corby. Developed in response to a brief from Railtrack in 1998, the shelter consists of a prefabricated stainless-steel frame, infilled with ‘vision strips’ of toughened glass and panels of powder-coated aluminium. Some versions have close-fitting roofs, others have canopy-type roofs raised on struts above the tops of the enclosing panels; most have a gap of several inches between the platform surface and the lower edge of the panels. If you have recently perched on a slim metal seat fixture while waiting for a train within a shiny, draughty, practically indestructible platform shelter, it is probably one of Macemain & Amstad’s Paragons.

  Platform shelters of this basic open-fronted type have always been common. They sprang into existence in the 1830s, as soon as buildings began to be provided at stations with more than one platform. Sometimes the old shelter survives in use even after the station building proper has been levelled as redundant; or there may be modern shelters only. Unattended public buildings accessible round the clock are sitting ducks for vandals, and in the worst-affected areas BR’s response was necessarily drastic. The blighted Welsh valleys were particularly hard-hit; twenty-seven stations in that region lost their historic buildings in 1971–5 in favour of grim shelters of brick or concrete, which were described as ‘neater and cheaper to maintain’.

  Elsewhere – especially on rural lines – redundant station buildings have often found new purposes. In a few fortunate places, the passenger can actually enjoy better facilities in sold-off station buildings than they ever offered in their railway-owned prime. Taking the East Suffolk line from Lowestoft to Ipswich, after a nod to the freshly installed Paragon Anti-Vandal Shelters at Beccles, the m
odern traveller will find a ‘traditional butchery and smokehouse’ in the old station at Melton, and a café in the old waiting room at Woodbridge, which has become a bed-and-breakfast guesthouse. Other survivors on the route include Darsham station, now a youth centre run by the Woodcraft Folk, who were founded in 1924 as a co-operative and anti-militarist alternative to Baden-Powell’s Scout movement. Here, at least, the ‘basic railway’ has turned out to be not so basic after all.

  Detached from their platforms, these East Suffolk stations would look like big, plain, somewhat under-windowed mid-Victorian houses, at least when viewed from the road approach. This is hardly a coincidence, for they also functioned as the residence of the stationmaster. To be master of such a station (or a member of the household) was to live ‘over the shop’ – literally so, in buildings where the domestic section was entirely upstairs. For example, the intermediate stations for the Birmingham, Wolverhampton & Dudley Railway, opened in 1854, each had three bedrooms, with parlour, kitchen and wc. This appears to have been a typical level of provision.

  Despite the modesty of his accommodation, the rural stationmaster’s life has often been regarded wistfully, especially in retrospect. Here, perhaps, was the closest commercial equivalent of the parson’s way of life: social recognition and respect, distinctive dress, a loyal and hard-working porter or two in place of a verger, a reliable weekly rhythm of duties and a house to go with the job. Sir John Betjeman, lover of churches and of railways alike, is reported to have named his ideal job as stationmaster at Blake Hall in Essex. This was a characteristic joke. Blake Hall was on the Great Eastern Railway’s branch from Epping to Ongar, opened in 1865, which had been annexed to the London Underground network when that line was electrified in the 1950s. Set deep amid fields, with barely another house in sight, the lonely platform and station building at Blake Hall was the least-used station on the Underground map; just before closure in 1981, it was said to have only six passengers a day. So the stationmaster would have had plenty of time for pottering about, and to tend the roses round his door – for Blake Hall was among those stations with two-storey living quarters rather than a mere upstairs flat, in this case with frontage and entrance facing sideways behind the platform. Now it is a private house, and the Ongar branch has closed too, although preservationists are reviving it.