Jump forward forty years and British Rail has gone; but maps and road signs still use Gerry Barney’s double arrow on a red panel to indicate a station on the national network. On arrival at the station, however, the typography of Kinneir and Calvert rarely shows its face on the platform unaccompanied. One common formula adds a lower band of solid colour, to show off the name and logo of the present operating company, invariably in a clashing font – as with First Great Western, First Capital Connect, Arriva and others. The three Southern lines and the new company called London Midland (not to be confused with the old London Midland Region) have all plumped instead for light lettering on a dark ground. Some companies have been unable to resist selling space on their station signs to advertisers, whose messages appear on a parallel board below the name. The results can be unintentionally comic, as at Cambridge, ‘Home of Anglia Ruskin University’; or at Clapham Junction, ‘The home of James Pendleton Estate Agents, a passion for excellence’; or at little-regarded Brimsdown on the Lea Valley line, ‘Home of The Brimsdown Business Area’ (where else, indeed?).
As these company franchises come and go, so their signage and logos change with them. Variant signs introduced during BR’s own 1980s restructuring into sectors rather than regions, such as those for Network SouthEast (with added bright blue, white and red stripes, like toothpaste), have already gone the way of the Big Four. A few stations have customised signage; the old British Railways upper-case lettering and colours of circa 1950 are even creeping back here and there, as at Barnstaple or at King’s Lynn. The latter even has an electronic ticket machine incongruously emblazoned with the British Railways totem, officially superseded half a century before. But for true staying power, there is still nothing to match the impeccable signage of the London Underground and its affiliate known as London Overground (with an orange crossbar in place of the Underground’s red), which has been steadily taking over selected main-line suburban routes since 2007.*** Only in the control of advertising has the Underground suffered a relapse, so that vexing little commercial messages on top of some automatic ticket barriers now distract the eye, and enamelled metal strips have resumed their place on the risers of the staircases, now directing passengers towards sustenance from McDonald’s rather than Iron Jelloids.
Stations in the twenty-first century, large or small, are emphatically not what they were sixty or even thirty years ago. So many functions and facilities have fallen away that it is difficult even to imagine them all – the post, parcels and newspapers, the small consignments and the wagonload freight, the livestock and horseboxes, the special excursions and school trains, troop trains and football specials, the railway-owned hotels, the domestic quarters; all gone. Much else that was once familiar has vanished with them. Clattering strings of BRUTE trolleys – another acronym, from British Rail Universal Trolley Equipment – no longer weave their way through crowded concourses behind little electric tractors. The end came for these soon after 1999, when the railways’ Red Star parcels service was bought out.**** Porters have long gone, too. Even passenger-operated luggage trolleys with their refundable pound-coin locks are becoming scarce, as the wheeled suitcase continues on its mission of global domination.
What we have instead is retail. Passengers with money to spend and minutes to fill are an asset, measurable in terms of footfall and ‘dwell time’. No longer portals through which goods pass, stations have more than ever become places to sell things. This includes food and drink, of course; and the old functions of refreshment room, waiting room and sales kiosk may now be handily combined in one interior, as at Preston or Darlington. But this is basic stuff compared with more recent developments. Mini-supermarkets, such as Marks & Spencer’s station branches at Sheffield and Oxford, now allow the traveller to select an evening meal before boarding. The remodelled St Pancras, with its giant retail concourse at basement level, even offers a ‘Sourced Market’ selling local and seasonal produce. Whenever a city station is renovated, the area allotted to retail is sure to go up. All those redundant parcels offices, long-forgotten waiting rooms, porters’ rest rooms, lamp rooms and telegraph offices can be put to profitable use once more.
One instance of the new model is Liverpool Street, which was reconstructed in 1985–91 as part of a much larger office development, complete with its own malls and upper-level shopping deck. Martin Amis put the new version, ‘a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino’, into his novel The Information (1995): ‘Trains no longer dominated it with their train culture of industrial burdens dumbly and filthily borne. Trains now crept in round the back, sorry they were so late, hoping they could still be of use to the proud, strolling, cappuccino-quaffing shopkeepers.’ And why not? The old Liverpool Street was a dirty, baffling place, little changed from the days when the steam-hauled Jazz trains still plied their trade. The 1991 incarnation with its all-electric trains is bright and convenient, and has even extended the best part of the Victorian train shed in a carefully matching design, while sweeping away the bottlenecks and confusions caused by the original, piecemeal construction process. The old railway ambience may have gone, but cappuccino and croissants smell better than diesel fumes, and polished terrazzo flooring and white-enamelled steel have more appeal than sooty brick and the brownish, magnetised dust from cast-iron brake blocks that formerly clung to every metal surface. After all, railways never set out to be ‘atmospheric’, but to perform a valuable and profitable service; they can survive and flourish only by adaptation, for they belong to the future as well as the past.
Our journey could end here, as we leave the station via its concourse-cum-retail zone and go out into the world which the railways did so much to remake, by accident or by design. Except that there are other kinds of station – now numbering in their hundreds across Britain, including some mentioned in earlier chapters – where the hand of time is stayed, obsolescence is treasured or counterfeited and the staff are probably unwaged volunteers. How on earth did this happen?
Footnotes
* Scholarly scrutiny of Thomas’s notebooks has shown that the poem combines impressions and details from more than one station and journey; but that hardly matters here.
** Consciously or not, Gill was following in the path of the great typographer and first patron of Gill Sans, Stanley Morison of the Monotype Corporation; a lifelong railway-lover, Morison had himself wangled a footplate trip on the Flying Scotsman in 1929.
*** Unlike its older sibling, London Overground is currently managed as a joint venture between MTR of Hong Kong and Deutsche Bahn, the German state railway network, of which the German government is the majority owner – for there are no barriers to foreign state-owned railways joining in the subsidy-feast offered by Britain’s privatised railways.
**** So passengers are no longer baffled by platform-end signs inscribed ‘Brutes not to be left unattended beyond this point’.
– 17 –
ENTHUSIASM
One hundred years after our imagined journey of 1862, Dr Richard Beeching and his wife joined a special train from London to the Bluebell Railway in Sussex. On arrival, Beeching opened a halt on the newly preserved line, inaugurating its second annual season. At a press conference held in a ‘swaying guard’s van’ he praised the little railway, but added, ‘We are preserving a bit too much of British Railways. Our job is not to preserve.’
The Bluebell Railway was something quite new: a section of the former national network, rescued by voluntary efforts and run as a visitor attraction, with a mission to maintain in working order a portion of the railways of times past. A good few historic locomotives and carriages had already been rescued, starting with the decision in early-Victorian times that pioneer locomotives such as Rocket were worth keeping for posterity. Two other passenger lines had already been preserved under the aegis of volunteer societies; but these were self-contained narrow-gauge routes in the holiday region of North Wales, with quaintness and scenic drama on their side. The Bluebell set out t
o operate a standard-gauge line using old rolling stock, to make what was called a ‘live’ museum. It was both a forerunner of many industrial museums that followed, in which obsolete processes and equipment are animated by expert demonstration, and a new kind of leisure attraction that could be enjoyed without engaging with any didactic purpose.
The Bluebell’s line comprised the middle chunk of a little-regarded late-Victorian railway, built to fill a gap between existing routes to East Grinstead and Lewes, and opened in 1882. By 1955 the line was moribund; few services still ran and the timetable had been fossilised to allow for the loading of milk churns that in reality had long since gone over to the roads. Trains stopped running in that year, only for a local resident to discover a procedural flaw that forced BR to reopen the line pending a second, legally watertight closure. In the meantime, three students came up with a visionary plan to save part of the route by means of a preservation society, which rapidly attracted support. The locally current ‘Bluebell’ nickname was eagerly embraced.
Life imitated art at the Bluebell, in the celluloid form of The Titfield Thunderbolt, an Ealing Comedy of 1953. The plot concerns an obscure branch line condemned by British Railways, only to be resurrected by the squire and the railway-loving vicar of Titfield. Financial help comes from a rich resident who can get happily plastered outside pub opening hours, once the little railway acquires its own buffet car. (The bibulous investor is played by Stanley Holloway, whose comic banter featured in the refreshment room scenes of Brief Encounter.) Among the co-stars is Thunderbolt, actually the Liverpool & Manchester’s fantastically antiquated goods locomotive Lion, built in 1838 and lent for filming by Liverpool Museum. The real-life railways helped too, making available for filming a recently closed country line near Bath.
Titfield’s screenwriter T. E. B. Clarke took his inspiration from the Talyllyn Railway, the first of the Welsh narrow-gauge lines to be preserved. Ignored alike by the 1923 Grouping and post-war nationalisation, the line had struggled on in a state of grass-grown dereliction until 1950, when the Talyllyn Railway Preservation Society stepped in. At its head was L. T. C. Rolt (1910–74), the future heroising biographer of Brunel, a man with a developed mistrust of corporatism and statism. With other enthusiasts, Rolt had already helped to kick off the revival of England’s moribund canals through the Inland Waterways Association, founded in 1946.
Clearly, something was in the air. Transport systems that had once epitomised modernity and change became identified with altogether different qualities in their decline. Rural railways now represented localism, tradition and a society of face-to-face relationships. Like several other Ealing Comedies, The Titfield Thunderbolt is a fantasy in which community values and amateurism are permitted to triumph over the impersonal forces of government and bureaucracy. Its politics are finely balanced: the heartless party is the nationalised British Transport Commission, but the valiant railway’s local rival and enemy is the brash operator of a private bus service.
Rolt was far from alone in the early 1950s in his affection towards the old companies. Kindred spirits included the resident of Birch Grove, a country house a few miles away from the Bluebell route, one Harold Macmillan MP. Railways had been good to Macmillan: he served as a Great Western director in the 1930s–40s, receiving a gold pass for a lifetime’s free travel as part of his compensation for loss of office at the end of 1947. Missing the Great Western’s traditions, Macmillan wrote in 1952 to the incoming transport minister Viscount Leathers to urge that its name and colours be revived for BR’s Western Region: ‘The regimental system is a great one with the British and it is always a mistake to destroy tradition.’ Macmillan and his wife were also early visitors to the reopened Bluebell line, even before Dr and Mrs Beeching made the trip. When the Blue-bell rescued a London, Brighton & South Coast Railway tank locomotive in 1962 and repainted it with its original name Birch Grove, Macmillan’s Edwardian nostalgia must have been gratified indeed. But none of this prevented him from setting Marples and Beeching loose with the axe, or giving the coup de grâce to the Euston Arch.
This sequence of events is significant, because it shows that the impulse to preserve steam-hauled railways preceded the ravages of Beeching’s report. The choice of candidates for rescue widened hugely after that, and by the early 1970s some half-dozen defunct lines had been reopened for steam-hauled services, mostly by volunteer initiative. Many others have followed, and now there are well over a hundred preserved lines across the UK, standard or narrow gauge, as well as museums and other preservation sites wholly or partly devoted to historic trains. No other country has anything like as many.
This was not just playing at trains; almost every job of work on the national network has to be undertaken sooner or later on its preserved counterparts, from track maintenance to locomotive overhauls. Invaluable help came from professional railwaymen, either in retirement or visiting at weekends and holiday time. The Talyllyn drew on the expertise of the shedmaster from Norwich locomotive depot, who described the week he spent in the little railway’s repair workshops as ‘one of the most enjoyable holidays of his life’. Trains on the Bluebell in its first years were driven by retired veterans from the main lines.
That so many were willing to devote their free hours to unpaid work on these railways was the source of some wonderment, even among railway enthusiasts themselves. One of the first attempts to make sociological sense of it all came in 1969, in an article by Derek Hanson in Railway World magazine. Hanson placed the preservation movement in the context of contemporary debates about the nature of the affluent society, in which a combination of rising incomes and disposable leisure time made it possible for the first time to ‘pay for the privilege of voluntary labour’. Volunteering thus became a form of emancipation from ‘the commercial pressures of capitalist society’. Warming to his theme, Hanson identified an affinity between the weekend track gangs lugging sleepers about on the Bluebell Railway and the rebellious students of ’68 with their chants of ‘Marx, Mao, Marcuse!’
A lively correspondence followed, and quantities of cold water were poured on some of Hanson’s suggestions. It was pointed out that railway enthusiasts were more often lower-middle than working class, and unlikely to succumb to Maoism. Also, that their attitudes were generally backward-looking and indulgent towards the old system of private railway companies, and that this defiant industrial nostalgia à la L. T. C. Rolt was poor preparation for the future, which in 1969 was widely imagined as an idyll of technocratic leisure funded by constant economic growth. One letter noted matter-of-factly that railway work had merely joined other activities, such as gardening, photography and music, which some people did for a living and others chose to pursue unpaid in their spare hours.
Unmentioned in 1969 – perhaps taken for granted – were the broader historical pre-conditions for volunteering: the victories of trades unions in shortening working hours on and off the railways, the advent of paid holidays and state pensions and the improvements in public health that enabled a growing number of Britons to pass into retirement in good enough shape to lend a hand on the line. The motorways and improved trunk roads that had done such harm to BR’s ordinary business also had the opposite effect on its preserved offshoots, fostering leisure travel and widening the hinterland from which volunteers could be drawn. More broadly, by the late 1960s the inheritance of the Victorian and Edwardian past was valued more highly than it had been even ten years before. As city after city was violated by ring roads, concrete shopping centres and office-block slabs, the qualities of what had been so heedlessly lost began to glow again in the popular consciousness. Planning laws were changed to reflect this mood. The Civic Amenities Act of 1967 allowed local authorities to designate ‘conservation areas’, within which ordinary but non-listed buildings received a measure of protection. In effect, most preserved railways were private, linear conservation areas, with a mission to protect any structures and paraphernalia that could enhance the sense of the past.
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nbsp; All of this is necessary explanation for the preserved railway cult, but falls short of being sufficient. Inland waterways partly excepted, no other shrinking or obsolescent technology called forth such battalions of volunteers to keep bits of it in working order. Copies of the Railway Magazine, Trains Illustrated and Railway World were stock items on newsagents’ shelves, but no one founded hobby magazines called Jute Mill Enthusiast, Glue-boiler’s World or Hydraulic Accumulators Pictorial. Why this should have been the case can best be understood by tracing the story back beyond the twentieth century, to the last years of Queen Victoria.
As we have seen, railways were received with excitement and wonder when they were new, followed by a complex mixture of dependence and mistrust. Some imaginative minds were repelled by them; others found much to admire. Railways generated technical and financial literature too, but these served a strictly practical purpose, and the lavish pictorial folios devoted to some early lines had no successors after the 1840s. The existence of a broader interest is suggested by books such as Michael Reynolds’s engine-driving manifestos, or F. S. Williams’s Our Iron Roads, which went through seven editions between 1852 and 1888. Williams understood how to draw out the romance and excitement inherent in the railways; how, in the words of the modern economic historian John Kellett, ‘the apparatus of transport is invested with infinitely more glamour than that of production’. But the Victorians consumed books about many subjects, and it is unsafe to infer from a handful of successful titles that railways were high up the list.
The Railways Page 63