The Railways

  More broadly, preserved railways are so compelling because they offer a closer relationship between appearance and reality than other kinds of ‘living history’. No one actually gets killed, maimed or taken prisoner when Civil War re-enactment societies take to the battlefield; the costumed chambermaids at Hampton Court are not really awaiting the pleasure of an absent queen; no one toils in the mine or has their teeth drilled in the dentist’s parlour at the North of England Open-Air Museum at Beamish; but the visitor to a steam railway buys a real ticket at the booking hall, is shepherded by a real guard on to a real train and travels according to a timetable on real track behind a real locomotive and its crew, under the control of signals worked from a real signal box. Playing at trains is a serious game: from boiler repairs to brakes, exacting standards and procedures must be respected, or the Railway Inspectorate will want to know why.

  Passengers are themselves co-opted into these disciplines. They are trusted not to lean dangerously far out of the unbarred, drop-down windows, or to open the doors between stations. In return, they are granted freedoms forbidden to visitors to most historic houses: to sprawl on the seats, to manipulate the blinds or curtains, to fiddle with the heating controls and light switches (where applicable), to visit the historic lavatory (ditto), with its archaic paper-holder, sink-plug and cake of hard soap. For most, the journey itself is both real and unreal: real in that it carries them through space and time from A to B and back again, unreal in that the experience is itself the goal of the journey, so that the time spent at station B is nicely taken care of by its café, shop and museum, before the timetabled return to station A.

  The status of the railways’ labour likewise challenges the usual categories. A survey in 2003 found that 90 per cent of workers on preserved lines were volunteers, but the proportion varies a lot from place to place. A well-established line such as the Severn Valley Railway, with its sixteen-mile route and heavy engineering workshops, can muster the equivalent of seventy-eight full-time staff, with up to 200 volunteers on duty on an especially busy day. By no means are all of them paid-up railway enthusiasts. Women may be drawn in because of their husbands’ interests, retired people may find the railway a grateful recipient of their professional knowledge or physical skills. Paid staff may themselves have begun as volunteers.

  Like a 1:1 scale model railway club layout, the steam railway has thus become a giant communal enterprise carried on down the generations, a sort of post-industrial folk performance. Too easily dismissed as nostalgic wallowing, each railway in practice brings together a coalition of forward-looking goals and projects, especially where plans exist to extend a route and bring more stations into use. It is a curious outcome for a form of technology that the Victorians experienced, and sometimes denounced, as the wrecker of established social relationships. Even the rites of death have been incorporated: the West Somerset Railway is one of several railways that offer a service by which cremated ashes are tipped into the firebox of a moving train, to be sucked through the boiler tubes and blasted out of the chimney.

  Those who never visit will at least encounter preserved railways on film or television. The Bluebell was first in the game, with a short location sequence in The Innocents (Jack Clayton again, 1961): a version of Henry James’s late-Victorian novella The Turn of the Screw, with Deborah Kerr as the haunted governess. The real breakthrough came with the celluloid version of The Railway Children in 1970, in which the Keighley & Worth Valley Railway’s trains performed to marvellous effect. So many visitors came to the line as a result that an extra passing loop had to be built to increase capacity. This surge was a one-off event, but the film’s enduring popularity and family appeal helped to fix the steam-age railway in the popular idea of the past.

  A symbiotic relationship is now well established. The host railway receives its fee, and perhaps some helpful publicity. In return, the film company can use ready-made locations with on-site facilities, complete with props. All those enamelled signs, platform scales, milk churns and trolleys piled high with old suitcases, the clichés of many a preserved line, create instant atmosphere when framed in the camera lens. Exclusive occupation for filming is another attraction, as long as the high season is avoided. As viewers of period dramas may dimly be aware, their characters’ meetings and tear-stained partings on railway platforms occur suspiciously often in the colder months, amid evocative clouds of steam. The Bluebell does all this especially well, dressing its stations with well-chosen signage, posters and accessories from different periods, late-Victorian to 1950s.

  Other railways make use of diesel as well as steam, hosting locomotives and multiple units built under the Modernisation Plan of 1955, or more recently still (there is even a Pacer Preservation Society). These may display the blue-and-yellow corporate colours of the 1960s–80s, or some of the more hectic liveries of the sectors and private operators that followed. The boundary between preserved and non-preserved modern traction has become porous on the privatised railway, as operators hire or buy back locomotives for revenue-earning use on the national network. Types that were banished to preserved lines or museums three decades ago have suddenly reappeared earning a crust on short-term contracts, like the fifty-year-old Deltic express diesel that was summoned to haul freight in Northumberland in 2011. Diesel power in bygone or passably contemporary-looking livery can be a useful resource to the film-maker too. The preservationists who have rescued the Ongar branch, John Betjeman’s old fantasy retreat, promote it online as ‘Railway for Hire’, conveniently close to London, with clips to show it in both late twentieth-century and contemporary roles.

  A diesel muttering at the front of the train may disappoint many visitors, but an inclusive policy also helps to draw in younger generations of preservationists whose railway memories begin in the 1970s or later. For a sector that depends on volunteer labour, this is important. Soon no one under retirement age will have adult memories of main-line steam. Most of the volunteers who grin out from the photo pages of 1960s and 1970s railway magazines are young men; most of those working on a typical line today are middle-aged, or older. The need to look to rising generations for future volunteers partly explains the emphasis on education and outreach on some lines, some of which – the Bluebell is one – now incorporate museum displays that would pass the Cossons test of expert interpretation to a wider audience. Many more lines operate children’s services of some sort, typically ‘Santa Specials’ in which a gift from Father Christmas is included with the ticket, or Thomas the Tank Engine trips. If the railway can afford the stinging licence fee to the company that owns the rights to Awdry’s creations, a bright blue shunting locomotive may lurk somewhere round the back of the engine shed, with an eager face painted or clipped on to its smokebox door. Main-line engines have too much prestige to be much Awdrified in this fashion, but the boom in all things Harry Potter has generated another invented livery, applied to a Great Western ‘Hall’ that currently masquerades as Hogwarts Castle.

  Amid the clamour of competing attractions for children’s free time and parents’ money, these initiatives seem unlikely to recruit many youngsters to the ranks. Reversing the relationship between fiction and reality, so that real trains imitate fictional appearances in children’s books, is a double-edged policy; earlier generations became fascinated by railways not because they were child-friendly, but because they belonged unmistakably to the adult world. Meanwhile, prices paid for locomotive nameplates suggest that a crucial demographic peak may already have passed: at the time of writing, seven of the top ten were clustered in the years 2002–6. After half a century of growth, the middle decade of the twenty-first century may mark the start of the inexorable decline of railway preservation.

  We can end where this book began, with a railway journey. One barrier to ‘authentic’ operation on preserved lines is their speed limit, generally fixed at a sedate 25 mph. It is possible to travel much faster behind steam by booking a ticket for one of the special trains that run on the nation
al network, to a total of several hundred every year. Depending on the engine’s driving wheel diameter, these are permitted to touch up to 90 mph. Tornado is in the top group for speed, with wheels that measure a generous 6ft 8in across.

  The carriages too are like nothing else now in ordinary service. Varnished wood will greet the eye inside many of them, indicating a construction date in the 1960s or earlier. Dining may be available en route, for those willing to pay. Dining or not, passengers can expect to be the centre of attention. A steam-hauled express arrives like a visitant from another world, a sort of industrial unicorn or dragon. At each stop, magnetised crowds gravitate to the locomotive, milling around with vague smiles while taking bad photographs in which backs and heads figure prominently. Bystanders all along the way stop to gaze at the train’s passing, or hurry to the lineside to catch a glimpse in time, as if to confirm the unlikely evidence of their own ears. Others – the clusters of men hunched over tripods on platform ends and overbridges – may have travelled a long way just for this encounter. Fields and hedges offer the still stranger sight of lone photographers perching on their stepladders, awaiting the decisive moment.

  The living world joins in the commotion. At the unfamiliar sounds of cylinder-beat and steam-whistle, horses and cattle hasten away across their fields, alarmed but unharmed. Startled flocks of birds rise into the air, passing in and out of the clouds of exhaust for mile after mile. Made vivid again, here is something that transcends Nature, an amazing work of man; what H. G. Wells, writing in 1901, proposed as the best symbol for the century that had just passed, ‘a steam engine running upon a railway’.

  Footnotes

  * Even the axiom about frames sometimes faltered. Preservationists restoring Great Western no. 4983 Albert Hall discovered in 1998 that its frames belonged to 4965 Rood Ashton Hall, identities having been swapped during overhaul. In acknowledgement of this divided self, the locomotive has run in recent years with different name- and number-plates on each side.

  ** The OED also finds room for ‘gricer’, the fraternity’s half-mocking, half-affectionate term for its own hard core, thought to derive from an obscure joke shared by some members of Manchester Locomotive Society while on a ramble across a grouse moor in 1938.

  *** For the posthumous fate of this route see Chapter 15.

  **** McKenna’s major publication, The Railway Workers 1840–1970, dates from 1980.

  ***** Two ‘Thunderbird’ nameplates, Tin Tin and Parker, indeed fetched over £4,000 at a charity auction in January 2014.

  SOURCES

  Some standard works used for this book are cited only occasionally below but have been consulted extensively. These include the indispensable Oxford Companion to British Railway History edited by Jack Simmons and Gordon Biddle (1997), the fifteen-volume Regional History of the Railways of Great Britain (1960–89), Britain’s Historic Railway Buildings by Gordon Biddle (2003), Ian Allan’s ABC guides, the Oxford Dictionary of National Biography and the English, Scottish and Welsh series of the Pevsner Architectural Guides. For brevity, I have excluded in the following list some references, from novels especially, for which the source is identified within the text. Citations within the notes are abbreviated as indicated below.

  ‘A Tourist’: The Railway Companion, Describing an Excursion along the Liverpool Line … By A Tourist (1833)

  Ackroyd: Peter Ackroyd, Charles Dickens (1990)

  Acworth: W. M. Acworth, The Railways of England (1900)

  Adams: Charles Francis Adams Jnr, Notes on Railroad Accidents (1879)

  Addyman and Fawcett: John Addyman and Bill Fawcett, The High Level Bridge and Newcastle Central Station (1999)

  Aitken: Jonathan Aitken, Margaret Thatcher (2013)

  Alderman: Geoffrey Alderman, The Railway Interest (1973)

  Alford: B. W. E. Alford, W.D. & H.O. Wills and the Development of the United Kingdom Tobacco Industry, 1786–1965 (1973)

  Allen 1: Cecil J. Allen, The Great Eastern Railway (1975)

  Allen 2: Cecil J. Allen, The North Eastern Railway (1964)

  Allen 3: Cecil J. Allen, Titled Trains of Great Britain (1946)

  Allen and Woolstenholmes: D. Allen and C. J. Woolstenholmes, A Pictorial Survey of Railway Signalling (1991)

  Altick: Richard Altick, The Presence of the Present: Topics of the Day in the Victorian Novel (1991)

  Ambler: R. W. Ambler (ed.), The History and Practice of Britain’s Railways: A New Research Agenda (1999)

  Anderson and Fox: Roy Anderson and Gregory Fox, A Pictorial Record of LMS Architecture (1981)

  Andrews: Cecil Bruyn Andrews, The Railway Age (1938)

  Arnold: Matthew Arnold, Complete Prose Works: English Literature and Irish Politics, ed. R. H. Super (1973)

  Arnold and McCartney: A. J. Arnold and S. McCartney, ‘Rates of Return, Concentration Levels and Strategic Change in the British Railway Industry, 1830–1912’, JTH 26/1 (2005), 41–60

  Atkinson: J. B. Atkinson, The West London Joint Railways (1984)

  Atmore: Henry Atmore, ‘Railway Interests and the “Rope of Air”’, British Journal for the History of Science 37/3 (2004), 245–79

  Atthill and Nock: Robin Atthill and O. S. Nock, The Somerset & Dorset Railway (1970)

  ATYR: All The Year Round

  Ayrton: Michael Ayrton, Golden Sections (1957)

  Bagwell 1: Philip S. Bagwell, The Railway Clearing House in the British Economy (1968)

  Bagwell 2: Philip S. Bagwell, The Railwaymen: The History of the National Union of Railwaymen (1963)

  Bagwell 3: Philip S. Bagwell, ‘The Sad State of British Railways: The Rise and Fall of Railtrack, 1992–2002’, JTH 25/2 (2004), 111–24

  Bagwell and Lyth: Philip Bagwell and Peter Lyth, Transport in Britain: From Canal Lock to Gridlock (2002)

  Bainbridge: Beryl Bainbridge, English Journey (1984)

  Baker: Anne Baker, A Question of Honour: The Life of Lieutenant General Valentine Baker Pasha (1996)

  Banks: Chris Banks, British Railways Locomotives, 1948 (1990)

  Barker: Nicolas Barker, Stanley Morison (1972)

  Barnum: P. T. Barnum, Life of P. T. Barnum, Written by Himself (1888)

  Barringer: Tim Barringer, Men at Work: Art and Labour in Victorian Britain (2005)

  Barson: Susie Barson, ‘“A Little Grit and Ginger”’, in Holder and Parissien, 47–73

  Baxter: Alan Baxter & Associates, Great Western Main Line Route Structures Gazetteer (2012)

  BDP: Birmingham Daily Post

  Bede: Cuthbert Bede, The Adventures of Mr Verdant Green (1853–7)

  Beebe: Lucius Beebe, Mansions on Rails: The Folklore of the Private Railway Car (1959)

  Beeching: The Reshaping of British Railways (The Beeching Report) (1963)

  Beer: Patricia Beer, Mrs Beer’s House (1968)

  Beerbohm 1: Max Beerbohm, And Even Now (1924)

  Beerbohm 2: Max Beerbohm, More (1898)

  Beerbohm 3: Max Beerbohm, Yet Again (1909)

  Belloc: Hilaire Belloc, On Nothing and Kindred Subjects (1908)

  Bennett: Arnold Bennett, ‘The Death of Simon Fuge’, in The Grim Smile of the Five Towns (1907)

  Betjeman 1: John Betjeman, First and Last Loves (1952)

  Betjeman 2: John Betjeman, Trains and Buttered Toast: Selected Radio Talks, ed. Stephen Games (2006)

  Bewley: Marian Bewley, The British Building Industry (1966)

  Bills and Knight: Mark Bills and Vivien Knight, William Powell Frith (2006)

  Binding: John Binding, Brunel’s Cornish Viaducts (1993)

  Bonavia: Michael R. Bonavia, A History of the LNER (1983)

  Booth: William Booth, In Darkest England, and the Way Out (1890)

  ‘Bourne’: ‘George Bourne’, Change in the Village (1955)

  Boyes: Grahame Boyes, ‘The British Road Haulage Industry since 1954’, Railway and Canal Historical Society Journal 34 (2002–4), 514–24

  Brailsford: Dennis Brailsford, British Sport: A Social History (1992)

  Bra
y: Maurice I. Bray, Railway Tickets, Timetables & Handbills (1986)

  Brendon: Piers Brendon, Thomas Cook (1991)

  Briggs: Julia Briggs, A Woman of Passion: The Life of E. Nesbit, 1858–1924 (1987)

  Brindle: Steven Brindle, Paddington Station: Its History and Architecture (2004)

  Brodie et al.: Allan Brodie, Jane Croom and James O. Davies, English Prisons: An Architectural History (2002)

  Brogden: W. A. Brogden, Aberdeen: An Illustrated Architectural Guide (1986)

  Brooke 1: David Brooke, ‘The “Lawless” Navvy: A Study of the Crime Associated with Railway Building’, JTH 10/2 (1989), 145–65

  Brooke 2: David Brooke, ‘The Railway Navvy – A Reassessment’, Construction History 5 (1989), 35–45

  Brown, F. A. S.: F. A. S. Brown, Nigel Gresley: Locomotive Engineer (1961)

  Brown, F. M.: The Diary of Ford Madox Brown, ed. Virginia Surtees (1981)

  Bryan: Tim Bryan, The Great Western Railway: A Celebration (2010)

  Bryson: Bill Bryson, Notes from a Small Island (1996)

  Buchanan: R. Angus Buchanan, Brunel: The Life and Times of Isambard Kingdom Brunel (2002)

  Burghclere: A Great Man’s Friendship: Letters of the Duke of Wellington to Mary, Marchioness of Salisbury, ed. Lady Burghclere (1927)

  Burton: Anthony Burton, The Railway Builders (1992)

  Byatt: A. S. Byatt, The Children’s Book (2009)