On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  It is a small miracle that this, the farthest outpost of one of the grandest railway companies in the land, which once spread its tentacles from Scarborough to Stratford-upon-Avon and from Newcastle to Neath, should have survived in this inhospitable place. Once you could book a ticket at London’s Marylebone station and travel behind the magnificent green engines of the Great Central Railway, pompously named after the directors of the board, on the line to Wrexham (or Manchester or Sheffield, Nottingham or Hull) without leaving the company’s metals.

  It is hard to imagine on this rainy morning in Wrexham that this was part of one of the most grandly conceived projects of the Railway Age. Back in the 1890s, Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, as the Great Central was then known, had a dream. It wasn’t enough to fill the company’s coffers with the profits from humping coal and iron across the Pennines; he would build a new line to London. Never mind that all the other railway companies had already built their own lines to the capital, he would park his own terminus in the Euston Road to rival Euston, St Pancras and King’s Cross. But Sir Edward, described by one of his contemporaries as a ‘gambler and a megalomaniac’, wasn’t going to stop there. There was an even grander master plan. In 1881 he promoted a parliamentary bill to build the first Channel tunnel, even getting so far as to begin drilling a pilot tunnel into the chalk, where he audaciously hosted a champagne party for investors. Soon, he promised them, it would be possible to travel direct from the industrial towns of northern England to the Continent and beyond. The rewards would be beyond compare.

  But it was all doomed. The magnificent engineering of Watkin’s London extension rivalled that of Stephenson and Brunel, with a generous loading gauge, easy gradients and just one level crossing in its entire length. But despite the huge razzmatazz when it opened in 1899, with a splendid dinner hosted on the station platform, the last conventional main line to be built in Britain was simply too late and never caught on. It was the first main line to lose its passenger services, and fizzled out ignominiously at the hands of Beeching in 1966, when the once-grand expresses, such as the Master Cutler and South Yorkshireman, had dwindled to three semi-fast trains a day to Nottingham, pulled by filthy, wheezing Black Five Class steam locomotives. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, dubbed the ‘Money Sunk and Lost’, had spawned a new acronym in the Great Central, the Gone Completely. But not entirely, as we shall soon discover. Watkin was simply ahead of his time and would have enjoyed the irony that although it took Britain another century to get round to building its next new main line, this one really did run through a Channel tunnel.

  Just imagine it. Book me a ticket from Wrexham to Vienna or St Petersburg. How about Istanbul? Vladivostock even? Yes, and I’d like a first-class sleeping berth too. ‘Rapid Travel in Luxury’ was the slogan. ‘Jason fought for the Golden Fleece in mezzotint panels on the dining car ceilings,’ observed the railway historian C Hamilton Ellis, ‘and as you lounged on a splendiferous pew of carved oak and figured plush, the sun, shining through coloured glass deck lights, gave a deliciously bizarre quality to the complexion of the lady opposite.’

  But hold on a minute. Here I am, the only passenger on a utilitarian little two-coach Class 150 diesel train, which has just growled across the Dee through the grimiest part of industrial North Wales along what is euphemistically known as the Borderlands Line. (Badlands might be more appropriate, I speculate.) ‘Not many people get on here,’ says the conductor. Which is just as well since nobody has bothered to change the destination blind since the train left the depot this morning – it still reads ‘Crewe’. ‘It’s them up at the Welsh parliament that keeps us going. You can’t shut a railway in Wales these days, y’know. Too much pride, boy.’

  But in its own way this is the start of a very special journey indeed, for I am on my way from Wrexham to Marylebone, taking, improbably, one of the most luxurious train journeys in modern Britain, with the kind of service last seen in the heyday of the 1930s and almost entirely vanished from the corporate, privatised railway. And this starting from a town that not even the most optimistic would regard as one of the commercial hotspots of Wales, let alone the UK.

  But first we must suffer the two-minute grind over weed-covered track and rattling curves to Wrexham General, the next stop down the line, where I spy something altogether far grander – a gleaming silver Class 67 express diesel loco revving its engines at the head of the 11.33 a.m. Wrexham and Shropshire Railway express to London Marylebone.

  Nearly twenty years down the line, few would disagree that John Major’s privatisation of the railways in 1994 was a botch. Instead of creating competition and choice for passengers, it simply replicated the monopoly of British Railways by carving up the turf between powerful private firms who bid for the franchises. At the beginning of that century you could have got a rival train from almost anywhere to anywhere – which is how the old Great Central put its tanks on the lawn of the Great Western by building its own station here in Wrexham. At that time there were three other rail companies that could deliver you here: you could take your pick from the Great Western, the Cambrian and the London and North Western companies. Now the barons of the rail franchise fiefdoms mostly rule their territory absolutely. Try travelling from London to Bristol or Manchester and asking the booking clerk, ‘Can I have an alternative, please?’ In Scotland and Wales the private companies exert total monopolies, if you exclude the trains that arrive from England.

  Luckily, there was a small get-out in the privatisation laws, which is how I come to be settling back into the cushions of an armchair in this first class Mark III restaurant car – generally reckoned to be the most comfortable ever built on the railway – where I am already being offered a glass of chilled Pouilly-Fuissé. The reason Wrexham got lucky, compared with posh Chester a short ride up the tracks, was a clause called ‘open access’, which allowed the tiny Wrexham and Shropshire Railway to start the service. Who would have guessed that when BR killed off through trains from Wrexham to London in the 1960s that there would ever again be a service to London, let alone four trains a day, with a choice of operators (there is also a daily return trip to Euston, run by Virgin)? Yet the law allows anyone who can spot a gap in the market missed by the big firms to apply to the regulators to run their own competing trains. Hull and Sunderland – cities down on their luck like Wrexham – have also been put back on the main line map in this way.

  The key to success for these small companies is quality of service. On my 11.23 to Marylebone, the approach is decidedly upmarket, with proper china and cutlery on the tables – a deliberate harking back to the days when trains were unhurried, the staff attentive and the styrofoam cup had not been invented. Unlike Wrexham Central, the General station is full of sleepy Edwardian charm, virtually unchanged since it was built in ‘French pavilion’ style by the Great Western Railway in 1912. You might imagine John Betjeman enjoying a buttered Welsh cake in the tearoom here, where there are real flowers in vases on the tables. At the end of the platform an ivy-covered goods shed slumbers into dereliction. To add to the air of history, this is the last station in Britain to retain the title of ‘General’, once an epithet sported in many towns, including Cardiff and Reading. Most of the stations once entitled ‘Victoria’ or ‘Halt’ or ‘Road’ have now been consigned to the bin of the modern corporate railway, although a few survive. Even the train itself, though modern in concept, is a throwback to a less standardised age, when retired express engines would be relegated to secondary duties with a handful of elderly coaches which may have done service on the main line a long time ago, but are now deemed fit only to creak along secondary routes.

  Our Class 67 locomotive, No. 67012, elegaically named A Shropshire Lad, is one of the most modern on the system – built in 2000 and designed to run at 125 mph. Yet it too is already an anachronism. Commissioned from Alsthom in Spain to speed fast mail trains across the system, the class was made redundant when the Post Office transferred
the mail to the roads in 2004. There’s not much use for the 67s these days. Two are dedicated to the royal train. Others trundle sleeping cars over the Highland lines in Scotland. But the rest potter round the system looking rather lost, without much else to do. There are only three carriages on the train, all still in the British Rail Inter-City grey and blue livery of the 1980s. Once they operated on crack Anglo-Scottish expresses from Euston. But, retired from front-line duty, these well-appointed coaches are modern antiques more highly regarded by many passengers than the Pendolino trains that replaced them, and are especially suited to their present, gentler task. Their expansive legroom, wide windows and – luxury of luxuries on the modern railway – seats that line up with the windows will do nicely to ease us on this May afternoon through some of the best of rural Britain – weaving across the border of England and Wales, through the heart of the Midlands, surmounting the Chilterns into Betjeman’s Metroland, and on through the tunnel beneath Lord’s Cricket Ground into the red-brick and terracotta Marylebone station.

  There is probably no line in Britain more evocative of the secondary railway of yesteryear than this one, heading south through the Welsh Marches, passing through rolling countryside with splendid castles and towns steeped in history. It has a special place in the hearts of railway enthusiasts since it was on the bottom leg of this line, from Hereford to Newport, that steam returned to the British Railways main line in 1971, three years after everyone thought it had gone for ever. The run, by the Great Western Railway’s most famous locomotive King George V, heralded a revival of steam which culminated in 2009 with the completion of the Tornado, the first brand new steam express locomotive built in Britain since 1960.

  Heading south from Wrexham, there are wooden signal boxes and traditional semaphore signalling, where signallers still pull wires on pulleys that raise or lower heavy pieces of machinery in a tradition that goes back to the very birth of the railway. This is a world of technology that has barely heard of the microchip, let alone the LED, yet is as safe, in its clunking mechanical way, as anything that has come since. The train picks up speed past the spoil tips that once defined this former coal and steel town, now overgrown with grass. There is evidence of its other heritage too. The hillside to the west was once home to twenty-four chapels and three churches, though these are now swamped by dreary modern housing estates. We pass through the remains of several little wayside stations, closed in the 1960s but with solid buildings refusing to die amid the undergrowth, and eventually pull up at Ruabon, whose Tudor-style stone station is sadly boarded up, leaving today’s passengers to huddle in a miserable bus shelter on the platform. Here you could once change trains for Llangollen (‘alight here for the Eisteddfod’) and Barmouth on the coast – though luckily a stretch of this line survives as the Llangollen Railway, one of the most popular preserved lines in Wales.

  Running through the remains of Cefn station, closed in 1960, even before Beeching, those with keen ears can hear a change in the note of the wheels on the track as the train rattles onto the Cefn–Mawr Viaduct. Built in 1848 of the local pale golden stone this spectacular structure has nineteen arches and is 147 feet high. The local landowners who opposed it so vigorously at the time of its building could hardly have imagined its mellow fit with the landscape today. Such was the level of local opposition that the Scottish designer Henry Robertson had to carry out his surveys by night, since objectors threatened to ‘throw the man and his theodolite into the canal’, according to reports at the time. But, as in so many cases with railways such as this, the engineering was done with supreme good taste, using good local materials. After all, who wouldn’t want a bit of distinguished architecture at the end of your estate, built by the likes, in this case, of the most distinguished civil engineer of the day, Thomas Brassey? The truth was that the wealthy landowners who threw tantrums were merely after the best compensation terms. Afterwards, they sat in their country houses and enjoyed both the cash and the trains.

  On the east side of the line there is the great loop of the River Dee; on the west the view is of Offa’s Dyke, and a mile upstream you can see the famous Pontcysyllte aqueduct built by Thomas Telford to carry the Llangollen branch of the Shropshire Union Canal. Completed in 1805, it is the longest and highest aqueduct in Britain, a Grade I-listed building and a World Heritage Site. But don’t muse on the idyll for too long because round the curve is an almighty slap in the face from the giant Krononspan MDF works, the third-largest in the world, a smoking and fuming vision of hell, spreading across a hundred acres amid mountains of wood pulp. But at least the logs for processing arrive in an ecologically sound way – by train from Eskdalemuir in Scotland.

  Serenity is restored as we pass the magnificent medieval fortress of Chirk Castle in the woods to the west, the last Edward I castle still lived in today, and emerge from a cutting onto Chirk Viaduct. This is a breathtaking sight, the line soaring over the river Ceiriog and the border into England on sixteen arches of honey-coloured stone. On the east side, almost touching it but a little lower, runs the canal on the matching masonry of Telford’s 1801 aqueduct. The water is contained in a vast iron trough, the plates for which were cast at nearby Ketley. This is a transport archaeologist’s paradise, since below is the trackbed of the little narrow-gauge Glyn Valley Tramway, built to carry slate across the valley. It closed in 1935, but now a group of enthusiasts are hoping to reopen it. How do we know we are back in England? Because Gobowen station is the first on the route without dual language signs. GOBOWEN FOR OSWESTRY it announces grandly in large wooden letters on a huge black and white sign, unchanged since Great Western days. It is a prompt for me to get off, since waiting on the platform is the man who probably does more to promote the line than any other. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ he asks.

  Martin Evans runs the ticket office here, although he is not employed by a railway company. He rents part of the station building, where he runs a private travel agency and also acts as booking clerk. Without him, Gobowen would be as cold and bleak as the other boarded-up and unstaffed stations along the line. Chairman of the Shrewsbury–Chester Rail Users Association, Martin is one of the army of people who fiercely guard the welfare of country railways across the land. Neither professional railwaymen nor train buffs, they believe passionately in the future of their local rail line. Any future Beeching should beware of people like Martin.

  ‘It was terrible the way they cut the line back from the days when the Kings and Castles would steam in from Birkenhead with the London trains in the 1960s,’ he tells me as we drink coffee from GWR-monogrammed cups in the snug waiting room, which must be one of the comfiest on the entire network, complete with a library of books for passengers to browse while they wait for their train. Things are looking up now, though. The Welsh Assembly has underwritten a through service from Cardiff to Holyhead, and now there’s the Wrexham and Shropshire with its direct trains to London. ‘Do you know, their guards use whistles? I don’t think I’ve heard the sound of a train whistle for years!’ Martin’s next ambition is to get Network Rail to double the single track between Wrexham to Chester, cut back as part of the Beeching economies. ‘And see that branch down there,’ he says, pointing to a rusting set of lines veering away from the bay platform? ‘We might get that reopened too.’ This was the route to Oswestry, headquarters of the old Cambrian Railway, mothballed by the Department for Transport after it closed in 1971. The company’s magnificent Victorian locomotive works still survives in the town – the ‘Swindon of Shropshire’ as it was once known.

  Before I head on to Shrewsbury to catch the next Wrexham and Shropshire train to London, Martin shows me round the station with its gorgeous Florentine building, complete with campanile, built of ashlar stone. It was recently restored with a grant from English Heritage and painted a gentle powder blue. The old GWR signs are actually replicas, Martin tells me, and one has been taken away for repainting. ‘But, look, take some photographs,’ he urges. ‘There’s a nice view of the signal box.’ I
don’t mention the ugly uPVC windows that have been installed to replace the old wooden ones. There is nothing on Gobowen station of which he is not proud, including a little children’s area made in the shape of an old railway carriage. He presses a book on the history of the line into my hand. ‘Borrow it,’ he says. ‘No hurry about getting it back.’ In Gobowen there’s no hurry. No hurry at all.

  I travel south to Shrewsbury on the next stopping train, where the passengers seem mostly to be shoppers and students. In the seat opposite me a young mother struggles with a fractious two-year-old. Chester to Shrewsbury is neither a branch line yet nor a main line either – unpretentious, going nowhere very fast – but lines like this in gentle rural surroundings remain the sinews of the national rail system. Their charm, wrote David St John Thomas in The Country Railway in 1976,

  was no one thing, any more than a superb landscape painting is any one of its ingredients. It was the total railway in the countryside, serving it as part of it, the smell of steam and oil, the people arriving and departing, the ticket racks in the booking office from which you could tell how many people had gone where on the previous day – the tail of the signalman’s dog flopping on the lino, asking for attention.

  If only it were still so. Many of the intermediate stations on this line have closed and their remains flash by – all with names straight out of Flanders and Swann: Whittington, Rednal and West Felton, Baschurch and Leaton. Only the ghosts of booking clerks or signalmen’s dogs here. The arrival of the conductor flourishing his ticket machine as we pass through the remnants of Baschurch means I nearly miss one of the famous local landmarks – the hill to the north-east is thought to be Pengwern, seat of Prince Cynddylan, the seventh-century ruler of Powys.