On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

Carlisle to Leeds, via Appleby, Dent, Ribblehead and Settle

  EAT YOUR HEART out, Trans-Siberian. Take the slow line, Orient Express. This seventy-three-mile railway from Carlisle over the roof of England to West Yorkshire is up there with the grandest and most thrilling train journeys in the world. Blasted across the bleak and unforgiving limestone and black marble of the Pennines, this former Anglo-Scottish main line was the final truly grand gesture of Victorian railway building. It was the last to be constructed using the sheer brute muscle of men working with just pickaxes and dynamite. Hundreds died in the six and and a half years it took to construct the ‘Long Drag’ across the great wilderness of northern England. Many perished from accidents, cold and disease in the unforgiving terrain. Some simply hanged themselves in despair as floods and storms swept away their handiwork. This was truly the Götterdämmerung of the railways.

  Ironically, this – possibly the craziest – enterprise of the Victorian railway mania need not have been built at all. Back in 1869, when the Settle and Carlisle was begun, there were two perfectly good main lines to take passengers to Scotland – the London and North Western route from Euston via Crewe, and the Great Northern route from King’s Cross via York. But back amid the mahogany and crystal of the Midland Railway’s boardroom in Derby, James Allport, the company’s general manager, was restless. The Midland was making a fortune trundling coal, beer, iron and bricks around the Midlands. But this ‘Fat Controller’ of his age wanted something more daring, more glamorous. He’d already marched his forces into London, planting the magnificent Gothic towers of St Pancras station as a taunt to his rivals along the Euston Road. And so the order went out: ‘Hang the terrain. Don’t bother me with trivia! Just build me a railway to Scotland that will be better than all our competitors, by God!’ Allport was a religious man and his vision was messianic in the true Victorian sense. So a pencil line was drawn over the mountains between Leeds and the Borders, and 6,000 men spent the next six and a half years hacking their way across them.

  Since this is to be a journey of superlatives, it seems appropriate that I should be standing as dusk falls on the platform at Dent station in Cumbria, after arriving up the line from Carlisle. A notice underneath the lamp declares that this is the HIGHEST MAIN LINE STATION IN ENGLAND, 1,150 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL. Once there would have been a roaring fire in the waiting room and a cheery porter with a fob watch ready to announce the time of the next London connection. Tonight, there is nobody to be seen on this unstaffed platform. As the lights of the train from which I have disembarked disappear into the blackness and all I can hear is the eerie rush of a gill running beneath the tracks, it is perfectly easy, on this bleak autumn evening, to imagine I might be the last soul left alive in the universe.

  Still, it’s thanks to the doggedness of local folk that the line is running at all. Back in 1981, British Rail decided the entire railway must close because the 440-yard Ribblehead viaduct, striding heroically across the wastes of Batty Moss, was too expensive to repair. Never mind that with its 24 arches, 104 feet high, held up by 1.5 million bricks faced with limestone it was one of the engineering marvels of the Victorian age. No matter that it had a Grade II * listing from English Heritage and that its domination of the landscape is every bit as great as that of Stonehenge, the estimated £6 million cost of repair was deemed uneconomic by the BR accountants in London. But they didn’t reckon with the 25,000 people (and a dog) who put up objections. After a six-year campaign, the bureaucrats, worn down by the gritty folk of North Yorkshire, backed off. It would be a reckless official indeed who ever tangled with this hardy breed of locals to propose its closure again.

  My journey to Dent began on the 15.03 from Carlisle to Leeds, a spartan little two-car Class 158 diesel unit, all vinyl and worn seats, typical of British Rail in the 1980s, when passengers were reckoned to get in the way of the real business – closing down railways. These days it is operated by Northern Rail, a consortium of the Dutch State Railways and a company called Serco, more famous perhaps for operating detention centres and speed cameras on Britain’s highways. This may seem a surreal commercial arrangement in this heartland of traditional England, but such is the nature of the modern privatised railway.

  The Express Sprinter unit – a misnomer if ever there was one – sits wheezing and guttering, and shooting clouds of blue fumes over Carlisle’s Platform 1. At least the heaters are working full blast, though the windows could do with a clean, and one of them has so much condensation between the double glazing it looks as though there’s a pea-souper outside. It’s a far cry from the splendour of the first train on the opening of the line on May Day 1876. James Allport had been to America and met a young carriage manufacturer called George Mortimer Pullman (the name was yet to pass into the lexicon as a synonym for luxury). Allport ordered two of George Mortimer’s new-fangled Pullman cars for the Settle and Carlisle and opened up a new era of luxurious rail travel, with flushing lavatories and sprung bogies which gave a ride like silk. ‘Altogether magnificent,’ pronounced the correspondent of the Railway News.

  All the seats are covered in Utrecht velvet, while the whole of the woodwork is of American walnut, with much tasteful gilding and painting. Numerous other comforts, great and little, including a system of warming by hot water pipes, and abundance of curtains, and lavatories for both ladies and gentlemen, raise travelling in the Pullman Palace train from a fatigue to a positive pleasure.

  But it’s not the life of a Victorian sybarite I’m thinking of as our little train rattles over the points to leave the Newcastle line at Petteril Bridge Junction for the relentless ascent for the next fifty miles along the spectacular landscapes of the Eden Valley. For the moment this is gentle country, all fruit trees and pasture in the summer. But it was a different story for the line’s first surveyor, a lanky young Tasmanian called Charles Stanley Sharland, who set out to walk the entire route before it was built, armed with just a compass, theodolite and a few basic instruments. Just as Robert Stephenson had waded across bog and fell to determine the course of the first passenger railway from Liverpool to Manchester fifty years before, so Sharland and a couple of assistants trudged through the mountains, sometimes trapped by snow in lonely fellside inns for weeks on end. Unlike Stephenson, the Tasmanian’s brief was to prepare for the construction of not a local line, but a state-of-the-art main trunk route. There had to be no gradient steeper than 1 in 100, which meant that three and a half miles of expensive tunnels and dozens of viaducts were needed. To this day the Settle and Carlisle is the only fully fledged main line in the world running through such mountainous country. But the unfortunate Sharland did not live to see his work completed. He died at the age of twenty-six, his health broken by his efforts.

  The young surveyor might have been proud though to see the spruce little wayside stations built in ‘Derby Gothic’ style by the architect I H Saunders. We nearly lost them, but thankfully they were reopened in 1986 after a closure of sixteen years when the threat to the line was finally lifted. Armathwaite, Langwathby, Lazonby and Kirkoswald – you almost have to pronounce their names with a Cumbrian lilt as we climb the valley of the Eden, with the river full and fast flowing, never far from our side. On our left are Long Meg and her daughters, an ancient circle dating back 4,500 years – the original sixty-six daughters having been turned to stone after sacrilegious acts on the sabbath, becoming what is now the second-largest stone circle in Britain. The skyline for miles to the left is dominated by Cross Fell, the highest point in the Pennines at 2,930 feet. The white dome on the top of Great Dun Fell, the summit of the Pennine Way, is as sinister as it actually looks, since if we ever scramble our nuclear deterrent, the button will be pushed as a result of an early warning from here. The distant fells on the horizon to the right, looking like a giant iced cake, are those of Ullswater in the Lake District.

  I know all this because I have been joined on my journey south from Carlisle by a retired pharmacist called Tony Iles, a volunteer Friend of the Settle and C
arlisle, who spends his days riding the trains pointing out the sights to anyone who is interested. There’s clearly nobody more passionate about the line than Tony, who wears a maroon S & C jumper, and along with the rest of the Friends fought British Rail and successive transport ministers between 1984 and 1989 to save it from closure. He tells me,

  It was a devious strategy they deployed on all the lines they wanted to shut. You reduce the trains, cut back on the maintenance, drive away the passengers, and then concoct some story about repairs, claiming the line is not worth keeping open. After we finally beat them, it turned out the cost of repairing Ribblehead Viaduct was nothing like what BR claimed. And passenger numbers shot up from 98,000 a year to half a million.

  These days Network Rail is spending more than £100 million on the line – not to improve its passenger services, which are still a mere five through trains a day – but, ironically, because of the decline of another traditional industry – coal. Much of the fuel for Britain’s coal-fired power stations is imported in massive container ships through the port of Hunterston on the west coast of Scotland. It is routed south in vast 1,250-tonne trains over the S & C, securing the line’s future for the foreseeable future. But you can’t please everybody. ‘The enthusiasts complain that the track is too smooth and the tiddly-tat of the old fashioned line has been eliminated,’ says Tony. ‘And now they’re moaning that the old semaphore signals are going to be replaced by modern colour-light ones! You can’t have it both ways. A lot of people think we’re privately owned by a preservation society. I tell you, no heritage buffs could afford the investment to run something like this.’

  We break off as we halt at a station rather more splendid than the rest. This is Appleby, the only staffed station on the line between Carlisle and Settle. No better spot to break your journey than this unspoilt medieval farming town, watched over by its castle, the little cafes and shops on the high street as far away as it is possible to get from modern corporate Britain. The mock-Gothic brick station with its mullioned windows and paintwork on the ornate bargeboards, newly painted in the crimson colours of the Midland Railway, is immaculate in the unweathered fashion of a Hornby toy train layout.

  Appleby station is the fiefdom of Anne Ridley, the station supervisor, a jolly blonde who greets me like a long-lost friend. How nice! Since she does not know me, it is clear she must welcome all the passengers who alight at this isolated town in similar fashion. There’s plenty of time for a natter before the next train arrives, although Anne has been busy this morning, she tells me, feeding the sheep at her farm in the village of Kirkby Thore, along the line. ‘I’ve also been cleaning the toilets and dusting and polishing the waiting room, as well as doing the ticket office accounts.’ She smiles. ‘And then there’s my husband. He doesn’t always come last, though it may sometimes sound like it! Come and have a coffee,’ she says. With its neat pot plants and wood-burning stove, Anne’s waiting room is a homely place. The polished limestone floor is so shiny, you could eat your dinner off it, as Alan Bennett – also from this part of the world and a leading figure in heading off the line’s closure – might say.

  Anne has been queen of Appleby station for nine years, after swapping her career in the police for ‘the best job in the world’, and works in shifts with her staff of two. She also organises the refreshments for all the trains, sourcing her food from local farmers’ wives. ‘I’m a people person, you see, and I love it here.’ Her customers are not just sightseers doing the Yorkshire Dales, but locals heading up and down the valleys – farmers off for tough interviews with their bank managers in Leeds and their teenage children heading for the (relatively) bright lights of Carlisle. ‘Honestly, what would they do without us? It’s unbelievable – you have to take two buses to get into Carlisle, and it takes hours.’

  As I wait for the next train south, it is hard to imagine that the sleeping-car trains from London to Scotland once stopped here, in the middle of nowhere. Nightshirted and nightcapped figures would lean out of the carriages in the small hours wondering where on earth they were. But Appleby station has another, albeit poignant, claim to fame, commemorated by a little plaque on the platform and a shrine of memorabilia in the corner of Anne Ridley’s immaculate waiting room. Back in 1978, the Right Reverend Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield, lifelong railway enthusiast and celebrated railway photographer, suffered a fatal heart attack while photographing trains on the down platform. The ‘Railway Bishop’ was devoted to the Settle and Carlisle, describing it as one of the three wonders of northern England, along with York Minster and Hadrian’s Wall. His memorial service, held on the platform, was attended by 3,000 people, including six bishops – and three steam locomotives. As Anne waves me off, I notice that the station clock, made by Potts of Leeds in 1870, has stopped at twenty to five. Goodness knows for how long. But it seems appropriate somehow.

  It is appropriate too that I should buy a slice of home-made ‘Stem Ginger Shortbread handmade in Dalefoot Farm’ from Anne’s trolley on the train. Delicious. I imagine Dalefoot Farm somewhere out there in this chilly autumn countryside – remote maybe, but with the Aga ever warm and the sheepdog curled up at its side. I ask the guard about the weather up at Ribblehead as we climb relentlessly through an increasingly bleak landscape. ‘Just like it generally is – cold and getting colder,’ he tells me. ‘’Twas much worse at one time, winter after winter. Just watch you wrap up well when you get off! It’s the wind that’s the trouble,’ he says, telling how icy gusts coming straight off the North Sea would blow the coal off the fireman’s shovel in steam days. ‘Then there were the chap whose hat was blown off a train on the Ribblehead Viaduct, sucked right through an arch and ended up back on the train on the other side. One day up at Garsdale station, the wind caught the turntable and it spun like a top for an hour before they could get the loco off.’ Folk memory still recalls the bitter winter of 1947 when the line was closed for eight weeks, buried under twelve feet of snow. Even bonfires were unable to clear the rails. The line was shut again in 1962, when the Edinburgh to London express was stuck in the snow for five days. Passengers lived off tea and biscuits till they were rescued.

  Even at the height of summer this is a wind-lashed landscape of sparse heather, peat bog and raw limestone pavement. Now on this late autumn afternoon we could be anywhere north of Reykjavik. The train’s underfloor engines take on a more determined note as we climb through Kirkby Stephen, once grand enough to have a first-class waiting room. Now it is unstaffed, but with a plaque saying that Prince Charles unveiled the restored station buildings and a little notice on one of the doors proclaiming BIBLE VOICE. This marks a tradition going back more than a century in which local vicars came to these remote stations, carrying altar cloth, chalice and a portable organ, taking advantage of the railway to spread the word of God in remote places. These days, a local couple, Martin and Liz Thompson, run a short-wave Christian radio station from here, broadcasting the word to remote villages around the world, including to India in Hindi. There are other radio connections, too, since nearby is the birthplace of Lord Thomas Wharton, who in the seventeenth century wrote the words of ‘Lillibullero’, the much-loved signature tune of the BBC World Service.

  Kirkby Stephen is a handsome town built of the local ‘brockram’ stone – a mix of sandstone and limestone, which imparts a rosy hue at sunset. But passengers alighting here need a good pair of walking shoes since the town is a mile and a half away, and half a mile lower, meaning a daunting climb from the village to the station. The Midland’s engineers were far more interested in sweeping their long-distance passengers smoothly on to Scotland than bothering with the local communities along the way, and very few of the stations are close to the communities they purport to serve.

  Soon we are at Ais Gill summit, marked by a large maroon sign, the highest point on the line at 1,169 feet above sea level and 1,000 feet higher than Leeds or Carlisle. The train has been climbing for forty-nine miles and in steam days it was a welcome chance for the
firemen to mop their brows and ease off the shovel. But the climb was partly the cause of one of the most horrific accidents in British railway history. On an autumn day in 1913 two loaded passenger trains set off from Carlisle just eleven minutes apart. Both had difficulty raising steam because of a poor batch of coal, and the first train lost power and came to a halt. The driver of the second had climbed out onto the running board of the locomotive to refill the oil boxes, while the fireman struggled to inject more water into the boiler. Both failed to notice the signals at red and the locomotive slammed into the rear of the first train, killing fourteen and injuring thirty-eight. But there was also a less tragic outcome, since the accident led to the more widespread use of the Automatic Warning System, which long since has been a standard way of automatically applying the brakes when a signal is passed at danger. A memorial to the dead, newly restored by the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle Line, can be found in Kirkby Stephen cemetery.

  People say there has long been a pall over this area, known as Mallerstang Common. In the eleventh century, the border warfare was so murderous and destructive that William the Conqueror’s men were afraid to survey the area. Legend has it too that England’s last wild boar was killed on the common. Nearby are the remains of Pendragon Castle, built by Uther Pendragon, who died after drinking the deliberately poisoned waters of a nearby spring. Sir Hugh Morville, one of the murderers of Thomas à Becket, also lived here, adding to the area’s dark history.

  There is a happier story at the next station, Garsdale, which once had water troughs for the express train steam engines to refill their tenders on the move after wheezing up the gradients. The troughs were the highest in England and were steam heated to stop them freezing over. Garsdale is most famous these days for its little statue of Ruswarp, the collie dog who attained fame by putting its paw print on the petition that helped to save the line in the 1980s. Ruswarp (pronounced Russup) belonged to Graham Nuttall from Burnley, the first secretary of the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle. In 1990 Nuttall went missing while walking in mid-Wales. When his body was found eleven weeks later, the dog was still by his master’s side and lived just long enough to attend his funeral. Now Ruswarp is up there in the Settle and Carlisle Hall of Fame.