On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  Ah, the thrill of a lost era, you might say. But you’d be wrong. Even a century later and in the age of the high speed train, sleeping cars still depart on night trains from Euston. After the last of the commuters have scurried back to Herts and Bucks suburbia and the concourse vendors are packing away their stalls, you will find a palpable sense of expectation around Platform 15 where the ‘Deerstalker Express’ departs nightly (Saturdays excepted) for its 520-mile journey to Fort William in the West Highlands. This is not the real name of the 21.15 departure of course, since no train out of Euston these days has a name, and the titles of the great Anglo-Scottish trains of the past – the Night Scotsman, the Royal Scot and the Caledonian – have long vanished into distant memory. But it might as well be, since if any service in Britain oozes the glamour and romance of the great trains of the past, then this is it. Sixteen coaches, and at the front is the powerful 110-mph electric Class 90 locomotive No. 90 021 – the last class of express locomotives built at the famous Crewe works, ending a British engine-building tradition of 150 years. Indeed, you will be very lucky to find any passenger train on the British national network still hauled by a locomotive in the old-fashioned sense, even though this one, despite bearing the branding Caledonian Sleeper, is actually the property of a subsidiary of the German state railway in one of those quirks of rail privatisation that it is best not to enquire into too deeply unless you are a groupie of the Office of Rail Regulation.

  There is no train in Britain that goes farther and offers more pampering to its passengers than this one – splitting off into three separate sections at Edinburgh Waverley, with sleeping coaches peeling away to Aberdeen, Inverness and Fort William, where the last of the passengers will arrive more than twelve hours from now. You can almost feel the train puffed up with importance in the platform. Will you be installed in a berth next to a Scottish laird returning from his London club to the family estate? Or a Scots MSP heading back for a crucial vote at Holyrood? Perhaps an Edinburgh banker or two rushing home to deal with a credit crisis? More mundanely, your fellow passenger could be a hitchhiker on a budget with one of the train’s famously cheap Internet tickets.

  Who knows? But here is Abdul my sleeping car steward, a tall man with an immaculately trimmed beard, to greet me, standing to attention with a clipboard. ‘What would you like for breakfast, sir?’ he asks, scouring his printed list for my name. ‘The Bacon Roll or the Continental?’ One of the advertising slogans for this train is that it is ‘a little bit of Scotland come to London’. Abdul, who lives in Edinburgh, tells me that many Scots enjoy bacon rolls, but he has never eaten one himself, nor would he be likely to. Another cultural twist of the times prescribes that sleeping car attendants such as Abdul should be known as ‘hosts’ (much blander-sounding than ‘stewards’, although Abdul is far too professional to comment). But otherwise very little has changed from when the cultural historian Roger Lloyd wrote about the pleasures of night trains in 1952,

  Practically every sleeping car passenger approaches the train and clutches his special tickets with a real thrill. There is the attendant who quickly identifies and welcomes his guests, addressing them both by name and title. It may no doubt be very childish, and even a trifle snobbish, to be pleased when greeted by name, but it does undoubtedly light a little glow inside not to be treated as just an anonymous member of the travelling public. Down a deeply padded and soft-footed corridor, the attendant takes you to your own tiny cabin and you think – this time with an anti-social satisfaction – that it cannot matter to you how crowded the train is since this kingdom is for that night your very own, and nobody else can get into it.

  There is air-conditioning now, though modern passengers might grumble about having to pad down the corridor in the night for the toilet, and potentially having to share with a stranger if they hold a standard-class ticket. Conversely, the intimate size of the compartments has historically attracted people in search of romantic liaisons – a friend of mine, the editor of a national newspaper, carried on an extramarital affair for years in a railway sleeping car. It was the perfect hideaway and an unsurpassable alibi.

  But now the whistle is blowing and we are about to head off into the night. Goodbye to the thunder of traffic on the Euston Road. Tomorrow, breakfast will be served with wheels clacking across as remote a track as it is possible to find within Great Britain, where, if you are lucky, you will be greeted by a curious stag pressing its hot breath against the window to see what’s on the menu. This is one of the world’s great journeys at any time of the year, but for maximum effect it is best taken on midsummer’s night when daylight is longest. Once, in the days when the London and North Western Railway operated the line, you might have found a Precursor Class locomotive named after Shakespeare’s Oberon on this train (the LNWR was fond of classical names), but tonight we must be satisfied with the magic of the views as we race the setting sun on history’s most magnificently engineered railway tracks. Our journey will take us on the metals of Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham and Grand Junction Railways, awakening in the suburbs of Glasgow in the morning to see the full glory of the West Highland line – itself a 164-mile journey along a winding single track through the most desolately beautiful railway in Europe.

  Another special reason to take the Deerstalker Express is that this, and its sister sleeper, the Lowland Express to Glasgow and Edinburgh, are the only trains of the day to progress at a sedate enough pace properly to appreciate the views from the main line north out of Euston. Richard Branson’s 125-mph Pendolinos, which operate the day service to Glasgow, are the sleekest of greyhounds, operating the most intensive inter-city service in the world, with three trains an hour to Manchester and three to Birmingham. Running at speeds of 125 mph has many virtues, but window gazing is not among them. So make the most of it, and settle back in the lounge car, which is one of those comfy seventies carriages you thought had disappeared, with a nightcap at your elbow. (The night services to Scotland can claim the only leather sofas on a British train, and unlike those notorious buffets that always seem to close at Reading or Stevenage will serve until the last passenger has gone to bed.)

  No. 90 021 makes light work of the gradient out of Euston, despite the 21.15 being the heaviest train in regular service in Britain. It is hard to imagine that when Robert Stephenson’s London and Birmingham Railway was opened in 1838 the incline was so daunting that the trains had to be hauled up by cable. They were then taken onwards by little locos housed in the Chalk Farm Roundhouse, now the legendary arts venue, which can be seen clearly from the window on the right. Next door, where a huge Morrison’s supermarket now stands, is the site of the great engine house that operated the cables – as emblematic of the Victorian era as the supermarket chains are of our own. Still, the line is as flat as can be for the next hundred miles, and is one of the greatest engineering achievements of the Victorian era. Built in just five years by 20,000 men, the feat was calculated to have been more labour intensive than even the construction of the Great Pyramid at Giza.

  The London suburbs pass by in a flash, with the spire of Harrow church towering on the hill on the left, burial place of Thomas Port, who had the unfortunate distinction of being the first crewman in the world to be killed. He fell between two carriages and his legs were severed. Scarcely before the drinks have arrived, we are at Watford Junction. Two schoolboys at the end of the platform scribble our numbers in a spotters’ book. Yes, spotters’ guides are still published even in the era of Facebook and the Nintendo Wii, although spotters themselves are as rare as locomotives on passenger trains these days. What a shame our Class 90 doesn’t have a red and silver headboard on the front, as it might have had in the 1950s. But no time for regrets as we gather speed into the Chiltern Hills, through the vast cutting at Tring, running parallel to those other great highways to the north: William Jessop’s Grand Union Canal and Ernest Marples’ M1, now half a century old. (Little boys and grown-up little boys never fail to thrill at the way even slower
trains like ours overtake all those BMWs and Mercs stuck at 70 mph in the fast lane.) But despite all the bustle, there are still lonely spots.

  Near here, at lonely Sears Crossing in Buckinghamshire, the Great Train Robbers halted the Glasgow to Euston ‘postal’. The heist – on 8 August 1963 – couldn’t have been simpler. Buster Edwards, Ronnie Biggs and their chums placed a glove over the green signal and wired up a red light with a battery. The robbers got away with £2.6 million in used banknotes (worth around £50 million in 2009). The money was never found. Couldn’t happen now. There are simply too many trains passing by for a stopped train not to be spotted. What I do spy, as we pass through Wolverton, are the gleaming burgundy Class 67 locomotives of the royal train, manoeuvring Her Majesty’s coaches out of the shed where they are stored. It is a reminder of what good friends the royal family have been to the railways since Queen Victoria became the first reigning monarch to travel by train in 1842, describing the experience as ‘quite charming’. Somewhere in the kingdom tomorrow people will be getting out the bunting for the arrival of the Queen – or most likely the Prince of Wales, who has a sentimental fondness for the train, since it was reputed to have been a much-used location during his ‘courting days’.

  We plunge into the notorious Kilsby Tunnel, one mile and 666 yards long. Robert Stephenson, who had mastered the steam engine and the opposition of English landlords to his projects, was nearly mastered himself by Kilsby Tunnel. The great engineer encountered quicksands 120 feet below ground, which turned the tunnel into an underground lake. Experts told him to abandon it. But, Moses-like, he turned back the waters by designing a pumping engine, which he ran for eight months till it was dry. Just to prove it still is, watch out for the shaft of light from above ground midway through, which is depicted in a famous and much-reprinted engraving made in 1837 by John Cooke Bourne. The light from above used to offer great solace to tunnel-shy ladies, who protected their modesty by carrying candles to augment the dim gas lamps in the carriage roof.

  Not much is left of Stephenson’s original architecture of the line, swept away in the £9 billion upgrade completed by Network Rail in 2009. We race through the rebuilt Rugby station, where Thomas Arnold, the Victorian head of Rugby School, stood on a bridge to watch a train go by and declared, ‘I rejoice to see it and declare that feudality is gone for ever.’ The board of First Group, which runs this train and is arguably the most successful of the privatised rail firms, would obviously agree. Rugby’s old steel and glass overall roof – familiar to Dickens and reinvented by him at ‘Mugby Junction’ – has been sacrificed to the modernisers. Tamworth and Stafford, farther down the line, have been shamelessly and inelegantly modernised too. Much of the new lineside infrastructure, sadly, looks like the architecture of the old East Germany. English Heritage has saved the charming Jacobean-style buildings of Atherstone, the ancient capital of the hatting industry. But the red-brick stationmaster’s house designed by J W Livock is boarded up without a current use – a rather poignant contrast to the vast lorry depot of the logistics firm TNT next door.

  There are many other curiosities to be spied from the window in this rural heart of England. Just before Norton Bridge in Staffordshire is Izaak Walton’s cottage, where the patron saint of fishermen wrote The Compleat Angler. It is so close to the line that a spark from a passing steam train once destroyed the roof, and the Meece Brook, where he drew fish and inspiration, runs for three miles alongside the track. The romantic age of the railway is manifest in spades as we pass through Crewe. The Italianate station buildings of this great junction are delightfully dark and decrepit, evoking a Dickensian age of steam. And part of the old railway works, where the blackberry-liveried giants of the Premier Line were built, were revived by the music entrepreneur Pete Waterman. In between appearances on Pop Idol, the former British Railways fireman recreated a boyhood dream, although the works he established are now owned by the train operating company Arriva.

  Observant passengers may spot north of the station a futuristic but forlorn-looking train parked in the sidings. The paint is peeling, moss is growing round the window frames and its wheels seem rusted to the track. Once this was the most sophisticated train on the planet, a marvel of cutting-edge British technology to inspire the world. British boffins had invented a tilting train that could go round curves at high speed. At least that was the idea. Instead, the Advanced Passenger Train, as it was hubristically known, turned out to be a monument to British failure even greater than Eddie the Eagle. At the press launch in 1981 the invited hacks and dignitaries staggered off reporting horrible motion sickness. Whether this was the fault of the train itself or the effects of a large liquid lunch will never be known. But the British lost faith, let the Italians take over the technology and then spent a lot of money buying it back from them.

  Now the light is fading, though as we pull out of Preston there might just be a chance to get a glimpse of the floodlit ethereal spire of St Walburge’s church designed by Joseph Hansom, of Hansom cab fame, the third highest in Britain, after Norwich and Salisbury cathedrals. It is of just as much interest to railway enthusiasts as architectural historians, since the spire is made from sleepers recovered from the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway. Talk of sleepers inspires thoughts of bed, and it is getting late now. There are few greater pleasures than being rocked to sleep by the gentle motion of a train and slumber should be guaranteed. Unlike the first sleeping cars, introduced by the North British Railway in 1873, passengers are not required to bring their own bed linen. Though they should prepare for the jolt at Edinburgh in the middle of the night as a Class 67 diesel is marshalled onto the front of the train for the rest of the journey to Fort William.

  At 5.50 next morning the sun is already up and Abdul is knocking on my door with my breakfast tray in his hand to whet an appetite for the start of what was voted in 2009 ‘the world’s most scenic railway journey’. We are trundling through Westerton in the northern suburbs of Glasgow and the Clyde, to the left, is a far cry from the busy waterway depicted in the 1936 film Night Mail, where the grainy smoky river was packed with shipping as far as the eye could see. There are no ‘steam tugs yelping down the glade of cranes’ nor ‘furnaces set on dark plains’ as W H Auden put it in his famous film script. In fact, the riverbank is so bucolic this June morning that one could almost imagine you could cast a spinner for a trout without a single boat’s wash getting in the way. But maybe it is a little early to get carried away by such innocent thoughts, since security fencing and barbed wire is coming into view along Gare Loch, a sign that we are approaching the huge Faslane naval base, home of the Trident submarine and Britain’s nuclear deterrent.

  Garelochhead station, at the beginning of Loch Long, is the start of the West Highland adventure proper, with its Swiss-chalet-style architecture and island platform the hallmarks of the line (so precise were the original engineers that some of the building materials were imported directly from Switzerland). One moment we are in the Lowlands and the next in the Highlands, as the train climbs steeply along the side of the loch. It’s easy to imagine how the passengers marvelled in the brand new claret-coloured carriages on the first official train from Glasgow on Saturday 11 August 1894. As John Thomas puts it in his book The West Highland Railway, ‘The visitors were gathering to celebrate an event unique in British railway history. That day there was to be opened ceremonially a main line through one hundred miles of mountain and moorland, with not a branch line nor scarcely a village worthy of the name in all its length.’ ‘It throws open to the public,’ said the Railway Gazette at the time, ‘wide and interesting tracts of country which have been almost as much unknown to the ordinary tourist as Central Africa was ten years ago.’

  Even in the twenty-first century, awakening in a sleeper bed fresh up from London somehow makes the scenery seem oddly exotic as we head along Loch Long, past Loch Lomond, squeezing through Glen Falloch, past Crianlarich, junction for the Oban line, with its famous refreshment rooms, once so celebrate
d for their luncheon baskets that twenty miles on either side of the line used to be littered with champagne corks and the discarded shells of plovers’ eggs. Then on through Strathfillan to Tyndrum and the lonely little station of Bridge of Orchy. Now we’re on the long climb to the bleak 400 square miles of the Moor of Rannoch, the bleakest place in the British Isles. Here are stags in profusion, with towering antlers, staring curiously at the train on the treeless moors. The lifespan of most of them is destined to be short, since on 1 August the shooting season will open. Whatever your view on such a sensitive subject, it was the stags and the influence of the powerful owners of the estates along the lineside that probably saved the train when it was threatened with withdrawal shortly after privatisation, and provided the Deerstalker Express with its nickname. On to the highest point of the line at Corrour, 1,350 feet above sea level, then a swift descent down Loch Treigside and through the gorges of the Spean to Fort William at sea level on the banks of Loch Linnhe, in the shadow of Ben Nevis. As John Thomas writes, ‘Never before in Britain had such a spectacular length of line been opened in one day. Never before had opening day guests been taken on so spectacular and exciting a trip. Here was a railway fascinating beyond words, every foot of it with a place in the past, a story in every mile.’

  It is for the sake of one of these stories that I am not – unlike almost all my fellow passengers – continuing to the terminus at Fort William this morning. Instead, I am alighting at Rannoch, officially the loneliest station in Britain. Crunching on the gravel of the platform with my suitcase, I feel like Spencer Tracey in Bad Day at Black Rock, the only passenger to alight and seemingly the only living being on an uninhabited planet apart from a few hungry-looking peewits pecking at puddles in the gravel. For a moment there’s a tightness at the back of the throat as I see nothing but a vast expanse of treeless boggy moorland and read a notice outside the station that proclaims, ‘At 1,000 feet, Rannoch Moor provides one of the wildest and most forbidding landscapes in Britain – treacherous mires, boulder-strewn moorland, complete lack of shelter and exposure to wind and rain make this an inhospitable environment. Walkers are warned this is not an area to trifle with.’