In the sidings near Sellafield station I count eight flasks of spent nuclear waste from power stations all over the nation. Enough nuclear material here, mixed in the right cocktail, for a new Hiroshima and much more than is at the disposal of the presidents of Iran and North Korea, yet yards away workers are nonchalantly playing golf on an immaculate green in the shadow of the cooling towers. ‘They’re some of the best players in the world,’ the man opposite me on the train remarks, ‘because they’ve got six fingers on each hand!’ Somehow everything seems sinister here when it’s really perfectly mundane. I start to wonder why two watering cranes for filling steam locomotives have been retained on the platform, nearly half a century after steam ended. Conspiracy theorists might ponder on a low-tech evacuation – or did they just forget to take them away? Certainly the ranks of cormorants and herring gulls lined up on the beach like sentries look as fit and spruce as can be.
The line becomes single track most of the way to Whitehaven from here, hugging the coast, and in the days when you could open carriage windows in trains you could almost reach out and touch the sea. No road anywhere in Britain takes you so close to the waves for so long. Domesticity reasserts itself at Seascale, once intended by the Furness directors to be, like Grange-over-Sands, a ‘Torquay of the North’. But only one hotel was brave enough to open and the town is little more than a few grey houses clustered around an expanse of featureless beach. It’s a tough choice which side of the train to sit for the finest views. The railway staff say they never tire of the moods of the sea here, whether the smooth azure ocean of July or the vicious grey sea of winter, when huge waves sometimes crash over the tracks. But the views of the Lakeland fells on the land side of the train are just as exciting – Seatallan, Haycock, Pillar and High Stile pass by in procession – though never be surprised to encounter a forest of wind turbines round the next bend. There is hardly a stretch of the route from Silverdale to Maryport where lazily rotating fins are not visible somewhere on the horizon.
Along the beach is a community of shanty dwellers, whose homes bear names such as Sea Breeze and Peacehaven. Legend has it that under the roofing felt and weatherboarding with which most of them are covered are some original Furness Railway carriages. A goods train once rolled off the embankment here, crushing many of them, but fortunately their inhabitants were out at the time. The shacks extend nearly as far as St Bees, where on this sunny morning elegant schoolgirls in whites are playing tennis in the shadow of the medieval priory, where the organ is famous for its 2,000 pipes.
‘It’s not always so peaceful,’ the guard tells me. ‘The boys go into Whitehaven for supplies of alcohol, which they smuggle in their rooms. Sometimes they get back on the train swigging from two-litre bottles of White Ice cider. It’s like industrial fuel, and you could fire up Sellafield with it. The kids are rowdier than the grown-up drunks a lot of the time!’ I ask him for a request stop at Parton, a bleak little former smelting village, but with sensational views along the coast. From here I plan to take the Cumbria Coast Path back to Whitehaven, the most important town on the line. ‘Oh, you mean Dolly’s nipple,’ he says, cheerily referring to the fact that the train rounds a promontory. The line here is known as ‘Avalanche Alley’, owing to the frequent landslides caused by the unstable geology of the cliffs and the colliery workings on the cliff top. Rails can become buckled overnight or even carried away by the sea. Three separate slips sometimes occur within forty-eight hours, placing this stretch of line very much between the devil and the deep blue sea. But for passengers who venture this far, there are fewer more thrilling rides in the whole of Europe.
Whitehaven is cheery and breezy in the sunshine, slowly reinventing itself after years of industrial decline. In the eighteenth century it was the third-biggest port in England, exporting coal in exchange for rum and tobacco. These days the only rum to be seen is in the carrier bags of the yachties, whose boats have replaced the coasters in the harbour. The town’s main claim to fame is that it was the last place in England to be invaded – by the pirate John Paul Jones in 1788 – and is also reckoned to have the third-largest number of Georgian houses in the country. But Whitehaven is clearly struggling with the burden of its heritage. A piece of the lettering has fallen off the sign of the John Paul Jones pub, and the loveliest Georgian building in the town is a pizza takeaway.
Whitehaven’s station is one of only two that are staffed in the eighty-four miles between Barrow and Carlisle, and this afternoon there is a notice in the booking office: SORRY WE ARE CLOSED. Not much to miss here: the Victorian station buildings were demolished in 1980 to be replaced by a Tesco supermarket and a soulless little booking office, although a grand signal box named Whitehaven Bransty remains as a reminder of busier times. The bus station opposite is also closed and derelict, though part of it is occupied by a Wetherspoon’s pub. So I’m off down the line to Workington, where I find the charming Alastair Grey, the booking clerk – labelled ‘Travel Adviser’ in modern railspeak – who is only too happy to show me round. Workington is the only station on the line with most of its original Victorian buildings and canopies intact, although they are now quietly mouldering and in need of several licks of paint. Grass grows high between the flagstones, although the atmosphere is charming – a branch line junction frozen in time. Even the fast lines running through the middle of the station are intact, though it is decades since any fast trains ran here, let alone any trains needing to overtake others. The warren of rooms on the platforms that once served as parcels offices, ladies’ waiting rooms, lamp rooms and places for the dispatch of pigeons are shuttered and empty. Hard to believe you could once board the Lakes Express direct to Euston from here, or that porters would pace the platforms crying ‘All change for Keswick and stations beyond’ as ladies with Rowney sketch pads took the little branch train that pirouetted Swiss-style over viaducts and through tunnels high on the hillsides to reach the heart of the Lake District. The Lakes Express survived until the closure of the branch line in the 1960s, and held the distinction of being the only express train in the country running alongside a lake, skirting Bassenthwaite Lake for three miles. I wonder if the wobbly foxgloves still surviving in Workington’s long-neglected station garden might date from those days.
‘We’re doing really well at the moment,’ Alastair tells me. ‘Thirty per cent up on passenger numbers compared with last year. People are catching on to how beautiful the line is.’ Though it’s a far cry from the days when the steelworks were at full blast and the freight sidings were humming. ‘It was a blow when we lost the Travelling Post Office back in 1991, though we still get one freight a day – of china clay down to the docks. The problem for us was that the Settle and Carlisle got all the publicity when they tried to close it, and we somehow got left out. Look at this!’ He shows me blackened mildew weeping down the plaster in the booking office wall. But he has pledged to get some restoration under way. ‘I used to be on the buses, you know, but there’s no better life than on the railway – even today. It only takes me fifteen minutes to cycle to work in the mornings. I love it here.’
Alastair sees me off on the next train to Carlisle, promising it will be better next time I come. As we head for Maryport you can spy the cloud-covered hills of Galloway across the Solway Firth – looking in the early evening like a mystical floating island. From here Mary Queen of Scots fled in an open boat to Cumberland, from where she wrote her famous letter to Elizabeth I seeking forgiveness. The Scottish coast here was one of the locations for the shooting of the cult film The Wicker Man, starring Edward Woodward and Christopher Lee. From Maryport the train turns away from the coast into a primarily agricultural landscape, where fat brown cattle lord it over the landscape. Not all is bucolic bliss, however: at Wigton, birthplace of the critic and novelist Lord Bragg, the giant Innovia cellophane plant seethes and fumes next to the railway. But, like Sellafield, it is a very welcome employer.
As we rattle across the junction to join the main line into Carlisle there
is, to the left of the tracks an elegant reminder of the line’s heritage, a large Victorian sandstone warehouse bearing the legend MARYPORT AND CARLISLE GOODS AND COAL DEPOT in black and white capitals along the roof. Sadly it has been partly obliterated by a large ugly polystyrene sign advertising ‘Sleepright, the Bed Store’.
Beauty accompanied by blight. On the Cumbrian Coast line it is mostly inevitable. But as Norman Nicholson might have said, it makes the journey all the more worth taking.
CHAPTER SIX
THE 11.24 FROM VICTORIA – A DAY EXCURSION TO NOSTALGIA CENTRAL
London Victoria to Canterbury and back, via Maidstone, Ashford, Dover, and Folkestone
THIS IS A journey not just into the history of the railways in Britain, but also into the heart of a very British obsession. I’m settled into an armchair in Pullman coach ‘Victoria’ on Platform 2 of London’s Victoria station. Champagne is about to be served, and the smell of a late breakfast is wafting down from the kitchen car. Of all the departure platforms in all the stations in Britain, this one is probably the most hallowed. It was once the famous ‘Gateway to the Continent’, from where glamorous trains to far-off places, such as the Golden Arrow and the Night Ferry, used to depart. Once, when passengers passed through the barrier here there would be connections to thrilling and exotic destinations, such as Riga, Warsaw, Bucharest, Belgrade, Sofia and Stamboul. The Golden Arrow, with its umber-and-cream art deco coaches, was the travel mode of choice to the Continent for a host of politicians, film stars and celebrities. Winston Churchill, Maurice Chevalier, Noël Coward and Marlene Dietrich used to be regular customers. The Night Ferry was a favourite of the Duke of Windsor and Mrs Simpson. Who knew what double agent, film star, diplomat or billionaire might be snuggling up in the sleeping compartment next to yours?
This morning’s 11.24 Cathedrals Express departure is heading for the rather less exotic destination of Canterbury in Kent, and I doubt whether there are any spies, exiled royalty or even D-list celebrities aboard. And, in fairness, it is an exaggeration to describe it as an express, since we are to take a leisurely canter through the back routes and byways of the Garden of England before returning along the main line from Dover at less than half the speed of a Eurostar. But the glitzy heritage of the Cathedrals Express is authentic enough. Simmering on the front, all Brunswick-green and buffed up brass, is Britannia Class Locomotive No. 70013 Oliver Cromwell, whose classmates Iron Duke and William Shakespeare were regulars on the Golden Arrow back in the 1950s. And No. 70013, one of only two surviving representatives of the last class of express passenger engines to be built in Britain, has its own place in the pantheon, as one of the engines that pulled Britain’s final steam passenger train in normal revenue-earning service on 11 August 1968 – the so-called ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’. It was nicknamed thus because of the high price of the tickets, which many felt excluded ordinary railway enthusiasts. Now Oliver Cromwell is one of the ‘people’s locomotives’, part of Britain’s national collection, and the air at Victoria this morning is thick with nostalgia.
A curious thing this, since many of the 450 passengers on board the thirteen-coach train are too young to recall the era of steam on the railways. Most, I suspect, have no interest in rivets, nor have ever owned an Ian Allan ABC spotters’ book, let alone stood at the end of a platform collecting numbers. Yet there is a kind of thrill in the air, a sense of expectancy that vanished from the modern railway almost half a century ago. In 2009 there were more than 270 steam-hauled excursion trains a bit like ours today (although not always so luxurious) running on the main lines of Britain. In fact, there is more steam on British main lines than in any other country in the world, and that doesn’t include the preserved heritage railways, which themselves operate more mileage than the entire London Underground. This may be fitting for the nation that invented the railways but doesn’t quite explain the lasting attraction. You can take your pick from the modest Shakespeare Express, shuttling between Birmingham and Stratford-upon-Avon on a summer weekend, to the ultra-luxurious Orient Express, where the cost of a single day out in 1920s Pullman coaches can buy you half a dozen easyJet tickets to wherever you fancy in Europe.
We must not mistake the Cathedrals Express for an excursion for railway enthusiasts – we are as far away from the world of anoraks, Thermos flasks and pork pies as we can get. So what is the attraction for the passengers? ‘The connection between the sight of a railway engine’ and a ‘quite deep feeling of satisfaction is very real for multitudes of people, but it excludes rational analysis,’ wrote the railway historian Roger Lloyd. But does it? I prefer the more straightforward explanation by the engineer and writer L T C Rolt:
Of all man’s mechanical inventions, the steam locomotive remains the most evocative of power and speed; it differs from more recent inventions whose design and function are of a different order, intelligible only to the technician; complicated machines which can fascinate the engineer as technical tours de force, but which lack that quality which appeals to our aesthetic sense and stirs the imagination of the layman. It is because the railways possess this quality to a unique degree that all the seven ages of man may sometimes be seen at the head of the platform to witness the departure of the express train.
Most of the ages of man seem to be at Victoria station this morning, as we pull out on time with a great cloud of steam from the cylinders immersing curious office workers, railway staff in high-visibility jackets and slightly astonished tourists at the platform end. A Rastafarian hoists his son onto his shoulders for a better view, while a young Muslim girl in a hijab takes a snap with her mobile phone. If anything can make Victoria station seem grand then it is the Cathedrals Express as it eclipses a host of unremarkable electric trains arriving and departing for the suburbs and the south coast. John Betjeman described Victoria as ‘a happy sort of muddle’. It is certainly among the most confusing of London termini – the two separate stations built by the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway and the South Eastern and Chatham Railway have never quite melded into one, and for most of the day commuters from Kent bluster into trippers from Brighton, and suitcase-weary travellers from the Gatwick Express tangle with journalists from the Daily Telegraph, whose state-of-the-art newsroom is on a concrete platform above the station.
But all is calm now in Pullman car ‘Victoria’ as we accelerate across the Thames, over Grosvenor Bridge and through the cat’s cradle of lines that weaves into and out of Clapham Junction. Here’s the shell of Battersea Power Station, which had its heart ripped out by property developers who failed to turn it into a theme park after its closure in the 1970s and still stands abandoned and spooky – an occasional setting for the odd Grand Guignol movie. And look, there’s Battersea Dogs’ Home, recently expanded into feline territory with a new refuge called Cattersea. ‘Just watch Oliver Cromwell climbing up there round the curve. Get your camera out – it’ll make a great picture.’ This is Marcus Robertson, boss of Steam Dreams, the company that runs the Cathedrals Express, arguably the most successful of the main line steam operators, which for a decade has run dozens of excursions each year from London. The mid-morning departure to Canterbury operates regularly during the summer. Although Robertson himself would resist being described as one, a small group of rich and slightly eccentric men have kept steam going on the main line since Oliver Cromwell made its valedictory 1968 trip. Unlike private heritage railways, which may be seen as the equivalent of a Hornby toy train set, running steam on the main line is more akin to collecting Bugattis or owning thoroughbred racehorses – you need nerves of steel and a bottomless pocket.
Those who know Robertson describe him as a true English eccentric who never quite outgrew his childhood – his mother is the writer Elisabeth Beresford, who created The Wombles, and his father Max Robertson, the veteran BBC tennis commentator. But he is also a shrewd businessman – one of a rare breed who make money doing what they love. He sold his stake in the sports sponsorship company he created with the legendary cric
ket commentator John Arlott to form Steam Dreams, and instead of sitting in an office can generally be found chatting to the passengers on the variety of trains he runs each week. ‘My bedroom when I was a little boy,’ he tells me, ‘overlooked the main line from Waterloo to the West Country and all I wanted to do up to the age of eleven was to watch the steam trains go by. The big green Pacifics on trains like the Bournemouth Belle and Atlantic Coast Express were the most exciting thing ever to me. I suppose it was a seed planted then that came to fruition forty years later. But I’m not a railwayman and I’m not a trainspotter – I’m a marketing man and I spotted a gap in the market.’ (He breaks off to ask the steward why one of the passengers has got black pudding but no sausages with her breakfast.) ‘I suppose when my children came along and I took them on some steam trips, I realised this could have been done a lot better. Even forty years after the end of steam, the general public, who are not gricers [number collectors], love the idea of going on a trip behind a steam loco. But nobody was running anything much that appealed to ordinary people, it was all for hard-core enthusiasts.’
The train clanks to a halt at Bromley South in the heart of suburbia to pick up some more passengers – mostly silver-haired and well-heeled, I note. Robertson squints at his watch. ‘Marvellous, we’re on time.’ He goes on: ‘I wish I could claim the name Steam Dreams for myself, but I got half a dozen people from my PR firm around a table and had a brainstorm of names, and a young guy there came up with it. Do you know we were just about the first operator since BR to run timetabled steam on the main line? Can you imagine it – running steam spliced in with commuter trains in the rush hour? Back in the early 1990s this was totally unheard of.’
On the Slow Train Page 9