Ticket to Ride

by Tom Chesshyre

  Further afield, China has more high-speed train lines than the rest of the world combined: 19,000 kilometres and growing, most of which have been laid in the past dozen years. Proof, if it were needed, that where there's a will and an autocratic government with cash to blow, there's usually a way. Indian Railways has steadily widened its web of trains and carries an average of 23 million passengers a day, looked after by an army of 1.3 million employees. Many multibillion-rupee projects are planned, including bullet trains on a 1,375-mile stretch between Delhi and Chennai.

  Just about everywhere you go across the globe – if you discount Africa (because of its many political troubles) and the polar caps (because they're mainly populated by penguins and polar bears) – it's an exciting time for trains. Sure, it may not always feel that way in major cities, where commuter services are usually so appalling – and don't I know it during the morning rush hour to Waterloo – but a rail revolution is under way.

  This book hopes to explain why. The passion for trains runs strong, and not just in Crewe, as I am about to discover on a series of journeys from the depths of Siberia to little-visited parts of Kosovo, the forests of Finland, the badlands of America, the mountains of India, the paddy fields of China, the tea plantations of Sri Lanka and the dusty plains of Iran.

  My aim is to capture the simple pleasures of trains; the gentle joy that comes from seeing the world as the wheels rattle and roll, and the miles tick by. The sounds, smells, sights, feel and the taste (in buffet cars) of train journeys – the reasons we seem to love trains so much.

  It is not, however, all about my point of view. Far from it. It's about those of the people I meet along the way. One of the appeals of train travel is, of course, its sociability, especially if you are on a long ride. Trains offer a completely different social environment to planes – Theroux's nightmare of awful food and delays in which interaction with neighbours often boils down to asking if you can pass to go to the loo. And as for cars: what chance have you got of making pals on the M25, unless it's with a breakdown services employee?

  Before I begin, though, let me return to Crewe.

  I chose the station not just because of its renowned trainspotters, but also because of its place in the railway history of Britain – the country where passenger railways began back on 15 September 1830, when Robert Stephenson's Rocket pulled the first carriages on a proper line. The distance of this inaugural journey between Liverpool and Manchester was 35 miles, and on this first ride the Rocket touched 35 mph; so fast that some feared cows in passing fields would be frightened and cease producing milk, while others believed that passengers' eyes might be damaged.

  In 1846 this historic line merged with two others to create the London and North Western Railway, considered by some to be the world's first major railway. It was a big moment, but the owners were in two minds about where to base the crucial 'works' to build locomotives and carriages. After toying with Edge Hill in Liverpool, Crewe was selected as it marked a convenient midpoint between Liverpool and Birmingham.

  'Before that time there was nothing here: just fields,' says Mike Lenz, general manager at the Crewe Heritage Centre.

  The pre-railway population of Crewe was about 70. The town and surrounding area are now home to 84,000 residents, plus a football team nicknamed the Railwaymen. If it wasn't for the railway, Crewe – as we know it – simply would not exist.

  I meet Lenz at his office in a back room of the heritage centre, next to a display hall with a model railway. He's wearing a highvisibility jacket, leaning back in a swivel chair and looking slightly eccentric with his legs crossed and his eyes glancing through a tall glass window.

  A train zooms by – a metre or so beyond the window. I almost jump backwards, it's so close.

  'Great, isn't it,' says Lenz, his eyes fixed on the carriages as they thunder past.

  The train disappears. And then I notice another sound. It's the grumble and grind of a different train, and it's coming from a monitor on his desk.

  'Webcam,' says Lenz. 'Captures the sounds of the trains on our site.'

  The heritage centre, which opened in 1987 and is run by a trust, is located within a V-shape of tracks right by Crewe station. Warehouses and yards are packed with old railway paraphernalia, shiny locos and carriages.

  'Bombardier still has some works in Crewe,' says Lenz. He's referring to the Canadian aerospace and transport company. 'Locomotives were made until about 1990. Now it's just component repairs. They fix bogies.'

  I ask what a bogie is.

  Lenz looks at me in disbelief. 'A bogie is what the locomotive sits on.' I gather from this that he means the wheels and the chassis. The words 'trains' and 'steep learning curve' are suddenly springing to mind.

  'All we have now is about 250 or 300, but there used to be 10,000 or more,' Lenz says, talking about staff numbers at Crewe Works. 'It's sad,' he says. As is another matter that seems to be weighing on his mind: 'Volunteers. Now we have guys in their forties and fifties, but it's getting the younger ones interested.'

  By 'younger ones', Lenz means younger train volunteers who will enjoy rolling up their sleeves and getting their hands dirty polishing and repairing old locos and carriages.

  'Are there just not enough trainspotters these days?' I ask.

  He looks at me askance. Once again I appear to be demonstrating my train ignorance. 'I think that "rail enthusiasts" is now more appropriate,' he says, as another locomotive bombs by.

  'What is the image of a rail enthusiast these days?' I ask.

  'The image is changing,' Lenz replies, a little vaguely. He stares at me for a second or two. His look seems to be asking: Are you taking the ****? I'm not, though I can see he is unsure. There are so many jokes about the hobby – 'How many trainspotters does it take to change a light bulb? Three: one to change it, one to take down its serial number, and one to bring the anoraks and the flask of soup' – that I'm detecting a definite touchiness.

  'In what way?'

  'They're older. Back in the 1960s you had young children interested,' Lenz says, returning to what seems to be a favourite theme.

  It was the era of steam trains, chugging to its end in the 1960s, when rail enthusiasm was instilled in so many, he explains. The phenomenon of 'trainspotting', which I dare to write (though not mention in the presence of Lenz), has its roots firmly in those days of steam. 'Spotters' are said to date originally from 1942, when a Southern Railway employee named Ian Allan published his seminal (in spotter circles) ABC of Southern Locomotives. This booklet was followed by many further ABC publications produced by Allan, considered by some to be the 'godfather of trainspotters', which allowed those with an interest to tick off steam locomotives they had sighted, or 'copped'.

  Now, despite the absence of inspiring plumes of smoke along most railways, according to Lenz: 'We need those young people again. It's a tall order, but we do need them so they can come to us and learn how to operate and overhaul steam trains. If they don't come, they [the old working steam trains] are all going to disappear.'

  We say goodbye and, as we do so, the monitor on Lenz's desk captures the sound of another Pendolino. His eyes glance down at the desk and I suddenly realise (or maybe I'm just imagining this) that he finds the sound of the wheels on the track somehow reassuring.

  Following Lenz's advice, I take in the APT Prototype, BR Class 370 by the entrance to the heritage centre. And what a fine example of an APT Prototype, BR Class 370 it is: well polished and shiny, with carriages sporting natty checked seats.

  Then I retire to the Crewe Arms Hotel, where Queen Victoria once stayed and where the manager shows me the bricked-up entrance to a tunnel between the hotel and the station that was dug so Queen Victoria could avoid the crowds.

  'Oh yes, an awful lot of trainspotters stay here,' the manager says. 'The ones that take down train numbers.' Apparently, the hardcore rail enthusiasts usually request one of the rooms facing the station so they can indulge in a bit of extra spotting from the comfort of
the hotel. 'It's almost all railway business round here.'

  Many of the other guests are freight-line drivers, conductors or trainees from a nearby Virgin Trains training centre. So that everyone's in touch and on time, there's even a Crewe station departure board in the reception.

  I have a drink in the bar, with old pictures of Crewe Works lining the walls, feeling that this is an appropriate place to begin these adventures. Most people round here – the manager, my fellow guests, the folk not far away at the end of the platforms – seem to love trains.

  I'm in a train-hotel in train-land, and I'm about to set off into a train-world.

  2

  KOSOVO AND MACEDONIA: 'YOU CAN SPOT A GRICER A MILE AWAY'

  I'M NOT DONE with platform-dwelling 'rail enthusiasts' yet, though. Before I dig beneath the surface of the mainstream love of trains – and in order to understand the inner workings of train enthusiasm – I decide to become one for a few days.

  That's right: I'm going to turn my hand at being a trainspotter for a week. A trainspotter on holiday, to be precise – in southeastern Europe.

  This involves signing up to a package tour to Kosovo and Macedonia organised especially for those who are fond of trains. The trip is arranged by Ffestiniog Travel, a company based in north Wales that offers 'rail holidays around the world'. One of its selling points is that the tours are designed for people 'who require their holiday to be as much about the railways as the destination'; in other words, for trainspotters, as well as those who simply get a kick out of travelling by rail.

  The tour operator is a registered charity and something of a rail-enthusiast institution, established in 1974, with profits going towards the restoration of the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland railways in north Wales. The Ffestiniog Railway is the oldest narrow-gauge railway company in the world, dating from 1836 and running for 13 miles from the harbour at Porthmadog to Blaenau Ffestiniog, using locomotives that are more than 150 years old. Meanwhile the Welsh Highland Railway, also narrow gauge, runs for 25 miles from Caernarfon to Beddgelert, the longest such heritage railway in Britain. Linked and covering a combined ascent of more than 700 feet into the foothills of dramatic mountains, the railways were originally built to transport slate from inland quarries to ships, using gravity to roll down to the coast with full loads and horses to drag empty wagons back up; until steam locomotives were introduced in the 1860s, that is.

  The term 'narrow gauge' refers to the width of the tracks, which are precisely 1 foot 11½ inches apart on the Ffestiniog and Welsh Highland railways (I am reliably informed), whereas standard tracks in the UK, and 60 per cent of all train lines in the world, are separated by a gap of exactly 4 feet 8½ inches. This standard gauge was established by George Stephenson, the engineer behind the Manchester–Liverpool railway that opened in 1830 (and father of Robert, the designer of the Rocket). His picture used to be found on the back of the British £5 note. Standard gauge is also known as 'Stephenson gauge'.

  Ffestiniog Travel began offering holidays after its base in Porthmadog became a ticketing office for British Rail in the 1970s, giving its directors the idea to put together breaks with train tickets included – and not just in Britain, but further afield in Europe too. British Rail had been in the process of de-staffing its smaller stations in the wake of cuts to rural services introduced by Dr Beeching, chairman of British Railways, in the 1960s. These notorious cutbacks, known as the Beeching Axe, resulted in the closure of 6,000 miles of tracks in Britain. The Ffestiniog directors' actions were therefore crucial to keeping a small part of the north Wales network going.

  This is how I find myself on a station platform in the capital of Kosovo with about 30 serious and not so serious (and a few seriously serious) railway lovers. It's a sunlit afternoon in the former war zone in south-eastern Europe. All had been quiet at Pristina station until our arrival. All is not now. We have just arrived at the sleepy spot, but already most of our group have swarmed onto the tracks, brandishing cameras and snapping away merrily, even though there is not a train in sight. Other than us, the only two passengers awaiting the 16:30 to Peja are a pregnant woman and an elderly man wearing shades. Their jaws drop as our motley crew runs amok, taking pictures of the station, the tracks, signal boxes, signs and sidings. Among rail enthusiasts, as I have already discovered during my short acquaintance, it is not just the train that is of interest. It is anything and everything train-related.

  Clambering about the tracks appears to be allowed. A burgundy-capped stationmaster is watching with an expression that somehow combines indifference and complete disbelief. It is a bizarre scene. The rail enthusiasts with their expensive cameras are not at all shy or reserved, as some had been a few minutes earlier on the bus. They are taking over the short platform and establishing themselves, gung-ho and full of gusto. Several have lined up at one end in readiness for our train, which is due shortly. They seem anxious to secure the perfect angle, and a few have bunched together at one spot.

  Pristina station has the look of a gingerbread house, with peachpink walls and arched doorways. Black-and-white pictures of old railways and stations are to be found in the ticket hall. I am standing by one of these, taking in proceedings, when I am joined by Johnnie, an IT consultant from Birmingham in his forties. He is tall and thin, with owlish eyes blinking beneath circular glasses and a 1970s-style moustache that curls round each side of his mouth. He wears faded jeans and prominently large pristine-white trainers. Johnnie shows me the ticket he has just bought to Peja, about 60 kilometres west: a souvenir for the trip, as Ffestiniog Travel has chartered and paid for a private carriage. Then he points at the nearest, caption-less picture on the wall, recognising it.

  'Penn Station before it was demolished and they built Madison Square Garden on it,' Johnnie says, referring to the station in New York which I will be visiting in a few weeks' time. It was torn down, he tells me, in 1963.

  Rail enthusiasts are full of such handy titbits.

  We gaze down the platform. The pregnant woman rises and comes over in readiness for the train. I ask her if she has seen any trainspotters before. She is from Peja and has some English.

  'Nothing like this before. Not in my life,' she says.

  There is a stirring on the platform. Everyone moves to the far end. The big event is coming soon. A faint trail of black smoke can be seen in the distance. The smoke draws closer and soon a big red train with yellow streaks growls into view, rattling up with a blast of its horn and a series of shrill whistles. Cameras click as though we're by the red carpet on Oscars night. There's electricity in the air. This is why Ffestiniog's customers have paid to come to Kosovo, for a journey that's continuing onwards to Macedonia and Albania to the south: trains they've never seen before.

  At this happy moment, I am beside Steve, a 57-year-old retired accountant who once worked for the Shell oil and gas company. He's from Whitchurch in Shropshire and has already quietly confided in me that perhaps he retired too early. Rail enthusiasts are incredibly open about their lives, I am also discovering. Earlier, Steve had been among the more subdued of the group. Now, however, he is transformed: elated and beaming, full of life.

  'A proper loco pulling dead carriages,' he says. 'This is what everyone was hoping for. They're delighted.'

  I ask what he means by 'dead carriages'. It seems there's always some term or other I'm not au fait with.

  'Usually there's an engine under the first carriage,' Steve says.

  'Ah,' I reply, and nod knowingly, as though I really knew this all along.

  Actually, I've just learnt something – and it's only the start. I'm about to discover a whole lot more.

  'Rail enthusiasts get a bad press… but we're fair game for it'

  Pristina to Peja, Kosovo

  We board our dead carriage and sit on old red seats with a thin grey zigzag pattern as the train moves on to Peja. If you don't count a short burst from Mortlake to Vauxhall stations in south London, the Tube and my Virgin trains from London Euston to C
rewe and back, this is the first proper ride of the adventure. We clatter and sway past grim communist-era apartment blocks and tumbledown yards. Smoke from the engine sweeps past the window. There's something pleasing about the way it does this, almost as though we're on an old-fashioned steam train, rather than one that's simply pumping fumes into the sky.

  Alan, our tour leader, advises us to look out for a train depot at a fork in the line. The depot comes into view, prompting another paparazzi-style volley of camera shots. The keenest photographers squeeze lenses out of little windows that open at the top of the main windows. There is no small competition to get the best position to do this. As we pass, all heads turn to regard the ramshackle structure. After this excitement, we continue on through green rolling hills with patchwork fields of crops and the occasional tractor.