On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  At Dent I am the only passenger to alight. I’m here in the darkness by chance because of a man I met on a train. It was on a journey to Edinburgh six months previously that I had struck up a conversation with Robin Hughes, a surveyor from Guildford, who had bought the old station buildings there and was busy restoring them. ‘It used to be the second-highest in Britain until Princetown station on Dartmoor closed in 1956. Now it’s in the record books. Come and try it out,’ he said. ‘I’ve just done up one of the snow huts. I’d be interested to know what you think.’

  But as sharp Pennine gusts and horizontal rain streak across Widdale Fell, I start to wonder if I’ve been rash. As the lights of the last train south to Leeds vanish into the night, I wonder if I have arrived in a place that might make Cold Comfort Farm seem welcoming. A tattered notice by the platform gate proclaims, ‘Dent station is very isolated. The village of Dent is more than four and a half miles away. Very occasionally, people find themselves stranded here. The house near the road is occupied by Roy and Jenny Holmes, who will help you.’ The snow huts at the end of the old goods yard look dark and shuttered, and there doesn’t look like any sign of life in the Holmeses’ house. Will the key be under the mat as promised? (Robin Hughes is unavoidably in Surrey, he has told me.) I begin to contemplate a very cold night on the stone flags of the spartan platform shelter.

  But, hurrah, the key is there, and after a couple of rusty-sounding twists it works. The snow huts, built in 1885, were once primitive billets for gangs stationed there through the winter for the back-breaking job of shovelling away the snow when it drifted onto the track. On the embankment above, silhouetted like stumps of rotten teeth, are lines of old railway sleepers, placed there to hold back drifting snow in the days before global warming, when Britain had proper winters. Fortunately, the only shovelling I have to do is to get the coal into the modern stove and light the newspaper and sticks. I wonder how the old gangers might have reacted if they had known that their damp little billet would one day be equipped with HD television, with halogen cooking and a wet room with underfloor heating. The only thing I have in common with the past is the fact that Dent is famous for having no mobile phone signal, and thus I am out of communication with the world.

  Not entirely out of contact, however, since the legendary Mr and Mrs Holmes appear and offer me a lift into Dent village – ‘Just wondering if you’d had anything to eat, love.’ Roy, now retired, was the local electrician and bought the handsome gabled stationmaster’s house back in the 1970s. It sits high on the brow of a hill (because Settle and Carlisle stationmasters of olden times were too grand to live near the platform). Because of its exposed position, it was one of the first houses in Britain to be fitted with double glazing. It is also graced by a magnificent fireplace made of the local blue limestone, known as Dent marble, which was also used to create the trimmings of Manchester Town Hall. Sleep in my snow hut is blissful, though insomniacs may be rattled from their beds by heavy coal and gypsum trains in the middle of the night.

  Next morning the weather is grim, and the grey sky is still unleashing bucketloads. I take the train south, although it doesn’t run until 10.07 – no commuting to work from here. There is more high opera as we enter the sinister portals of Blea Moor Tunnel, at 2,629 yards the longest on the line. ‘A damp, terrible tunnel,’ one historian called it. ‘A horrible place . . . that drove men mad so they could go underground no more.’ Another wrote, ‘It was a devil to build, a devil to drive through on the footplate, for the enginemen always seemed glad to be out of it. A long dead dank smell of ageless rock and stale engine smoke greets the trains. Windows are hurriedly shut tight, while for two minutes, the vapours somehow find their way into the carriage.’ Even today, engineers have to penetrate the blackness before the first train of the day to chip off the sooty black icicles which form inside the tunnel on winter nights.

  We emerge from the gloom onto the treeless Blea Moor itself, whose very name reeks of desolation, and which might as well still be in the Ice Age, dotted as it is with drumlins – ancient piles of stones untouched for aeons since the glaciers met here. The train slows for the mighty Ribblehead Viaduct, now secured with concrete injected inside the piles. But only one train is allowed over at a time – just in case. On the ground more than a hundred feet below nothing grows and very little lives, although some enginemen claim to have seen wild cats – descendants of the creatures of the navvy camps and shanties that grew up here during the building of the line. Two thousand men lived here in primitive and squalid conditions during the five years it took to build the viaduct. The camps had names such as Sebastopol, Jordan and Jericho, derived from biblical locations and battles of the Crimean War. There were scenes of wild carousing and bloody drunken battles as the navvies struck terror into the local people. Records show that, in true Mayor of Casterbridge style, one man was prosecuted for selling his wife for a barrel of beer. Many died, not just from accidents but also from smallpox and other diseases. Now nothing is left of the camps except traces of the roadways where their huts once stood, though some say – as the evening mists swirl down the slopes from Whernside – that ghostly laughter can sometimes be heard echoing under the viaduct.

  I get off at Ribblehead station in search of more tangible evidence of their memory. There’s a little visitors’ centre on the platform here, but this morning it’s closed. Over my shoulder, as the rain turns to sleet, I can just glimpse the dirty grey hilltop of Whernside, whose 2,416-foot bulk dominates the Eden valley below. To the north, the sleet billows along the River Greta and over the arches of the magnificent Ribblehead Viaduct to grit-blast my cheeks.

  There’s a ballad, which I once heard at a folk club, which runs

  And when the winter came it froze them to the floor.

  It blew them off the viaduct and it killed them on Blea Moor.

  Some died of the smallpox and some of cholera;

  Chapal and St Leonards have many buried there.

  And so I am crunching along a track to the little church of St Leonards, Chapel-en-le-Dale, in search of memories. My toes are frozen after the thirty-minute trek, but here is the little grey-slated church cloistered among the trees. And, sure enough, inside is the memorial, partly paid for by the guilty men of the Midland Railway itself. Was it enough to compensate for such human sacrifice in the cause of a commercial enterprise? Mr Allport and the members of the Midland board clearly thought it was.

  TO THE MEMORY OF THOSE WHO THROUGH ACCIDENTS LOST THEIR LIVES, IN CONSTRUCTING THE RAILWAY WORKS, BETWEEN SETTLE, AND DENT HEAD. THIS TABLET WAS ERECTED AT THE JOINT EXPENSE, OF THEIR FELLOW WORKMEN AND THE MIDLAND RAILWAY COMPANY 1869 TO 1876

  Darkness is gently falling as I get back in the train, which rattles down the gradients towards kinder country and eventually civilisation. But there are still sights, though less dramatic, to be seen, including the magnificent wrought-iron canopy at Hellifield station, the longest of its kind in Britain. Delicately set in the spandrels, heraldic wyverns, symbol of the Midland Railway, stand guard over the deserted platforms of this once-busy junction. Settle station, gateway to the Dales, by contrast is packed, and the train is suddenly filled with rucksacks, sweat and hiking boots. We have now left the Ribble Valley, and the train follows the River Aire all the way to Leeds, past Ilkley Moor, stopping briefly at Keighley, junction for the Keighley and Worth Valley preserved line, which in the summer dispatches tourist hordes to Haworth (alight here for the Brontë parsonage). It was on this little railway that Jenny Agutter once waved the red flag in that iconic film The Railway Children. Now we are sandwiched between electric commuter trains as we run into the Leeds/Bradford suburbs past the restored mohair and alpaca mills of Titus Salt’s model working-class community of Saltaire, now home to the aspirational young middle classes of West Yorkshire.

  Arrival in Leeds could not be more of an anticlimax. In few places in the world is such a heroic journey concluded in such modest style. The driver switches off the engine, slings his bag
over his shoulder and vanishes into the crowd of home-going commuters. Even as recently as the 1960s our train would have been striding ahead on its next leg to St Pancras. Maybe it would have been a famous named express like the Thames–Clyde Express or the Waverley. Quite likely it would have had a sturdy Royal Scot Class steam loco, all brass and Brunswick-green paint, proudly on the front. (No. 46117, Welsh Guardsman, from Leeds Holbeck shed, was a favourite on this run.) White-coated stewards would be turning up the lamps and setting out starched tablecloths and silverware for dinner. A glass of champagne would be in prospect, as the aroma of sole bonne femme and beef Wellington wafted down from the kitchen car.

  Could it happen again? Only in dreams. But the tough folk of the Friends of the Settle and Carlisle believe that their cherished railway will once again host Anglo-Scottish expresses that will speed all the way between London and Glasgow. They got it right once in the battle with British Rail bureaucrats that halted the closure of the line. And who is to say they are wrong now?

  CHAPTER THREE

  THE 10.53 FROM RYDE – THE TUBE TRAIN THAT WENT TO THE SEASIDE

  Ryde Pier Head to Shanklin and Wootton, via Smallbrook Junction

  HERE IS A riddle. I’m on a Tube train. I’m certain it’s a Tube because it’s painted in that comforting red which has been the uniform of London Transport since time began. The motors have that familiar whine and it smells reassuringly of the usual cocktail of dust and grease. As it rattles along, the driver poops that poop that is characteristic of all Tube trains and the sliding doors shut with the usual ker-thud. Yet there’s something wrong here. Very wrong. (Although, curiously, it doesn’t seem to bother my fellow passengers.) As we rattle along the track, there are views of an ultramarine sea and yachts with billowing sails, and little thatched cottages are strung along the shoreline. Pigs and cows are dotted around the fields. And so far we have only encountered one short tunnel. Hold on. Where are we? Is this some jaded city worker’s Monday-morning dream? No, we’re in the time warp that is the Isle of Wight.

  Ever since the railway building mania of the 1840s, the Isle of Wight, just three miles across Spithead from Portsmouth, has been home to one of the most surreal and eccentric railway operations anywhere in the world. Given its mostly rural aspect and tiny population of 132,000, it is astonishing that the Isle of Wight ever had any railways at all, yet until the 1950s there were fifty-two miles of branch lines covering the entire island. In the 1960s the islanders not only fought Beeching’s plans to close down all but one and a half miles of track, but actually succeeded in getting one of the busiest sections electrified and retaining parts of the two existing branches as other seaside communities in the south of England, such as Swanage and Lyme Regis, lost their trains altogether.

  So my 10.53 to Shanklin service, sitting in the platform in Ryde Pier Head station, has many reasons to feel proud of itself, its red livery looking especially splendid on this sunny morning. Formed of two former Tube cars which spent most of their lives carrying weary Northern Line commuters from the West End and the City to the northern and southern suburbs of High Barnet, Edgware and Morden, the train and its sisters are the oldest in regular service on the national rail network, built more than seventy years ago. (I know this because the provenance is embossed in metal plates below each door: ‘Built by Metropolitan-Cammell Carriage and Wagon Co. Ltd, Saltley, 1938’.)

  But this is no heritage train, and there is no gracious retirement by the seaside for this little Class 483 unit. The Island Line stations are as much part of the national network as Waterloo or Clapham Junction, and the services are run by the South West Trains franchise, whose hard-headed boss Brian Souter is not famous for nostalgia. ‘Do you know that we’re the most efficient railway in Britain?’ the guard tells me as he sells me an Island Liner ticket for my eight-and-a-half-mile journey to the end of the line at Shanklin. ‘And these old girls run like a dream.’ He reads from a piece of paper with the official performance statistics for the past four weeks: ‘Punctuality 99.4 per cent. Reliability 100 per cent. You can’t argue with that, can you?’

  Back in the pre-Benidorm, pre-Ford Anglia era of the 1950s, the platforms here would be thronged with hundreds of thousands of families dressed in their holiday best, arriving on the railway company paddle steamers from Portsmouth. There was once a glorious dome-roofed ballroom here, where if you were lucky you might hear the latest hits of Victor Sylvester before going home to your B & B in Seaview (H & C running water, interior-sprung mattresses in every room). Today’s foot passengers zip over on fast Australian-owned catamarans, and most of the people who still choose the Isle of Wight over Faliraki or Phuket arrive on the car ferries that dock along the coast at Fishbourne. Today, the day after a bank holiday, Ryde Pier Head station has a rather melancholy air. There are fifteen minutes before the train goes, and I buy a Minghella ice cream (‘famous in Ryde since 1950’ but more famous still for being made by the parents of the late Oscar-winning film director Anthony Minghella) and chat to two boys fishing over the edge of one of the platforms next to a notice saying DO NOT FISH HERE. Nobody seems to care. ‘We got four wrasse and a bream today – really nice ones.’ The train is busy enough, with mothers and pushchairs, business types with sharp haircuts and suits over from Portsmouth and elderly couples tugging suitcases on wheels, taking the traditional route for a late-season holiday, perhaps to a ‘nice guest house’ in Shanklin or Ventnor. Sadly, there are no longer any porters, and the stand telling passengers to insert a coin for a luggage trolley is rusting and empty, the trolleys probably having been tipped into the ocean long ago.

  But now it’s time to MIND THE DOORS, and the train heads down the half-mile length of the pier as purposefully as it must have accelerated out of East Finchley for Charing Cross, past the rusting remains of the diesel tramway, with its own separate tracks, which functioned until 1969. In fact rust and genteel decline have defined the entire transport history of the island, which has always been a kind of anachronism, operating with the equipment of at least the previous generation. In the nineteenth century there were three different companies, with names like the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway, running a ragbag of ancient locomotives over single-track branch lines which mostly seemed to go to nowhere. Between the wars the railways still captured the flavour of the 1890s, when Queen Victoria was in residence at her favourite home, Osborne House, near Cowes. And from the 1950s until the end of steam in 1966 the railway was a perfectly preserved museum of the pre-grouping world before 1923, despite the modern liveries. Little tank engines pottered round single-track secondary routes tugging wooden-panelled non-corridor coaches. And now the Tube trains, which made their first outing when Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, are the biggest anachronism of them all.

  There are many who say that the Isle of Wight never recovered from the death of Queen Victoria, when the smart set – who built their holiday homes to be close to Her Majesty and possibly get invited round for a fairy cake and some iced tea with Tennyson and Dickens – packed up and went home. But it has had moments of modernity since then. Parked on the sand next to Ryde Esplanade station is the Hovertravel hovercraft, waiting for its next flight to Southsea. As every schoolboy reader of the Eagle knows, this was a Great British Invention of the 1950s developed in the Isle of Wight by Saunders-Roe at Cowes. But sadly, like many other Great British Inventions, including flying boats, also built by Saunders-Roe but in the 1930s, hovercraft are no longer so futuristic. Passenger services have fallen out of favour and the Ryde–Southsea service is the last remaining in Britain. ‘Typical,’ people say. The Isle of Wight can’t resist clinging on to its past.

  Even the station name Esplanade – the only one in Britain – is redolent of Ryde’s Victorian heyday (there was once a Promenade station in Morecambe, but this closed in 1994). Esplanades, by definition, are not modern things, and reek of an idealised past – sandcastles, buckets and spades, the Punch and Judy man and donkey rides. Holidays and nostalgia
are always a heady mix, and recollections of childhood summers in south coast holiday resorts are often so frozen in time as to exclude the modern reality of poverty, decline and unemployment which blights so many of them. Even so, Ryde appears rather perky and vibrant this morning, with the little shops of Union Street looking much as they might have done in the days when Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx might have strolled past during their stays on the island. In the Royal Esplanade Hotel on the seafront, Josef, the waiter who serves me morning coffee, is in jovial mood telling me about the ‘motor scooter festival’ that took place the previous day – the world’s biggest. Back in the 1960s the Vespa crowd used to go to Margate for a punch-up; now middle-aged and more respectable, they come to Ryde for tea and cakes. ‘Such nice people,’ Josef tells me. ‘No trouble. No trouble at all.’ A toot on the whistle as the next train south arrives at Esplanade station over the road. It’s all perfectly in period. In its post-war heyday our Tube train would almost certainly have carried passengers to Leicester Square to watch Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn – riding side saddle – on their Vespa buzzing through the streets of Rome in Roman Holiday.

  But now we’re heading through the 391-yard tunnel to Ryde St John’s Road. We must be thankful for the tunnel. Its small diameter is partly responsible for the railway becoming a kind of working museum, since it’s always been difficult to find trains to fit the line. It also explains why the Tubes were such a godsend. Their arrival allowed engineers to raise the floor of the tunnel so that it would flood less frequently at high tide, although there is still an operative pumping station near the Esplanade.