On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  It is beginning to rain, and suddenly I notice there’s no signal on my phone. And there is no sign of the hotel I booked, a building once used to shield the construction workers on the line from the elements. Did I really book this place, or was I imagining it? When I do find the Moor of Rannoch Hotel there is an ominous notice on the door: ‘Liz has broken her ankle and we are closed to non-residents.’ But there is an enormous welcome from Liz Conway and her husband Rob, both Scousers who fell in love with the place on a holiday, restored it, gave up their jobs and are now in their seventh season running the hotel. ‘Look on the map,’ Liz tells me. ‘It’s as remote as can be. The nearest shops and garage are forty miles away. But the railway makes it not remote at all. And we never feel lonely. The train is everything to us. Do you know we get people, come up from Euston on the sleeper on Friday night and go back on the Sunday? It’s a special little bit of solitude. But if the railway was ever threatened again, I don’t know what we’d do.’

  On a bleak winter’s day back in 1889 a party of mostly middle-aged directors and contractors for the line got more solitude than they bargained for when they set out to cross the moor outside the hotel to scout out a possible route. They had clearly not read their Robert Louis Stevenson, who wrote in Kidnapped of Rannoch,

  The mist rose and died away and showed us that country lying as waste as the sea; only the moorfowl and peewits crying over it and far to the east a herd of deer moving like dots. Much of it was red with heather; much of the rest broken up with bogs and hags and peaty pools; some had been burned black in a heath fire and in another place there was quite a forest of dead firs, standing like skeletons. A wearier-looking desert man never saw.

  The sight of this preposterous group of Victorians stumbling around on the moor in their tweeds and umbrellas would have been comic if it hadn’t nearly ended in tragedy after the men got lost in the sleet and darkness. They floundered, utterly disoriented in the desolate stormswept waste until rescued by shepherds many hours later.

  By the time Liz Conway had cooked me a (second) vast breakfast, the moor looked sweet and friendly in the summer sunshine. I have come armed with Dr George Hendry’s Book of Midges, whose wisdom is as essential as any guidebook in this part of the insect-filled Highlands, and head out onto the moor along the banks of Loch Laggan. Curiously it does not feel spongy at all, although there are many patches of water looking like black treacle spilled on the grass. Everywhere there are roots of old Caledonian Scots pine, like ancient bones pickled in the peat, from the forest that once stood here. But danger is never far away. Thomas Telford gave up the idea of building a road here when it appeared the bog would swallow up every piece of foundation you put in it. It nearly defeated the rail builders too. Every last bit of spoil from constructing the line tunnels was poured into the moor and still the bog gulped down everything until the builders had the idea of floating a layer of brushwood – much as Robert Stephenson had done with Chat Moss on the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Even today some passengers swear they notice an extra bounce in the track as it passes across the moor.

  Remote though it is, the main part of the West Highland line was not threatened by Beeching. There have never been more than five passenger trains on a normal day, but its future was safeguarded by an aluminium plant at Lochaber near Fort William, fed by cheap hydroelectricity and generating a steady freight flow, rare for a line built primarily for passengers. Not so for the beautiful extension running for forty-two miles from Fort William to Mallaig, which Beeching settled on with his beady eye until it was ultimately saved in 1995, helped by the unlikely enterprise of a north of England farmer called David Smith. Each year during the summer months Smith and his West Coast Railway Company run an invariably packed steam train daily up the line and back. It would have been especially ironic if the line had shut, since when it was built in the 1890s it was the first in Britain to get a public subsidy, now the lifeblood of almost every secondary railway in Britain. At the time MPs were concerned about the plight of the crofters and fishermen in the remote west of Scotland, which with reports of starvation and worse was the Third World of its day. Money was voted to build a line to get fish down from the coast to the markets in Glasgow and thus to stave off disaster. But where exactly should the line run? Someone stuck their finger on a map, found a speck with a bit of a harbour and so the railway builders created the nation’s biggest herring port at Mallaig.

  Arriving on the early train from Rannoch into the relative civilisation of Fort William after a day walking on Rannoch Moor seems a bit like how it must have felt for an immigrant from the west of Ireland to contemplate Manhattan for the first time. No time to pause in the fleshpots (even if there were any in this dour West Highland capital) because the 10.20 Jacobite train to Mallaig is already in the platform, with K1 Class locomotive No. 62005 Lord of the Isles already blowing off steam, its polished black livery making it look like a blackberry. The lithe K1 2-6-0s owe their pedigree to a design specially drawn up for the West Highland Line by Sir Nigel Gresley, and Lord of the Isles only escaped the scrapyard by hiding away as a stationary boiler in an ICI works in north-east England after being withdrawn from service by British Railways.

  I’m travelling up to Mallaig with the loco’s custodians, Gary, Ian, ‘Malcy’ and Neil, members of the North Eastern Locomotive Preservation Group, who love this piece of machinery so passionately that they have used up their annual holiday to ensure that no one neglects her maintenance. ‘She’s like a woman,’ Malcy explains. ‘She’s beautiful, but she’s quite capable of being temperamental and moody.’ Each man will take a turn in the punishing work of firing over the predominantly 1 in 40 gradients, and they have their own reserved compartment in the train. On the door is a notice which reads: ‘No admittance. Wear ear protection. Snoring in progress.’

  There are fewer better descriptions of travel on the line than that of the humorist Miles Kington, who wrote in his book Steaming through Britain,

  What you have to bear in mind when setting off from Fort William to Mallaig is that you’re going from sea level to sea level. The trip to Mallaig is like going across the back of a glove – you go a long way up and a long way down but every now and then you glimpse a long snake of water snaking down to the sea. It is this coexistence of wild mountain scenery and the invisible nearness of the sea which gives the Mallaig line its special flavour, which you don’t get on the line up from Glasgow or even the Settle and Carlisle.

  Driver Alec McDonald, who has been at the regulator since steam days on British Railways (you don’t have to retire from driving steam trains as long as you are fit, and the oldest steam drivers are invariably the best, it is said), eases the loaded train past Ben Nevis and over the swing bridge across Thomas Telford’s great Caledonian Canal at Banavie. Here is the radio control centre which directs all the trains from Mallaig to Glasgow. Once drivers had to swap a large leather token a bit like a horse’s halter with the signalman every few miles. On the West Highland lines these tokens are now metaphorical, delivered over a radio telephone to the driver, and we stop at Glenfinnan for a virtual interchange with a train going south. Here at the head of Loch Shiel is a poignant memorial to Bonnie Prince Charlie, recalling the 1745 rebellion, which ended in tragedy at Culloden. There is a little museum on the station with a few artefacts from the old days on the line, and John Barnes, the shrine’s curator, a serious, bearded Englishman, who has been one of the line’s best friends over the past two decades, tells me that the figure on the top is not the Bonnie Prince himself, as many think, but an anonymous Highland chieftain sculpted by a friend of Walter Scott. Running across the valley is the mighty Glenfinnan Viaduct, 416 yards long with 21 curving arches set 100 feet above the ground – one of the world’s most stunning engineering achievements and built entirely of concrete, though few would guess, so well does it blend in with its setting. Its builder Sir Robert McAlpine earned the nickname ‘Concrete Bob’ and until recently a diesel locomotive named after him
ran on the line.

  But it’s not the achievements of Concrete Bob nor the heritage of the Mallaig extension that attract people to travel on the Jacobite these days. I notice that many passengers, especially Japanese tourists, are pausing to press their noses against the window of our compartment. Malcy and Co. are smirking. ‘Do you realise,’ Malcy tells me, ‘that you are sitting in Harry Potter’s seat when they filmed the Hogwarts Express going over the viaduct?’ As we pass over the vast structure, which has featured in three Harry Potter films, Neil says, ‘Look on the opposite hillside over there.’ And sure enough there’s a phalanx of photographers with popping flashes, busy turning the viaduct into as much an icon of popular culture as Abbey Road. ‘And there’s probably barely a railway enthusiast among them!’ says Gary. Eat your heart out, Bonny Prince Charlie!

  Meanwhile Driver McDonald is making smart work of the 1 in 40 gradients, the bark from the exhaust ricocheting against the rocky sides of the cuttings – past Arisaig, Britain’s most westerly station, and Morar with its white sands and grandstanding view across to the islands of Rhum, Muck and Eigg. Here is Scotland’s deepest loch – 1,017 feet to the bottom – though maybe not the loneliest since like Loch Ness it is reputed to have its own monster.

  In no time we’re at the buffers in Mallaig. In the days when the town was one of the busiest herring ports in Europe you could hardly move for fish. Miles Kington writes,

  It fell out of every boat, every nook and cranny. If you wanted to cook a fish on your shovel on the way home, you just picked one up off the quay. There’s the legendary story of the man at the station who asked the driver if there were any spare fish on board. Aye, third car down, he said. The man opened the door to the third car down and ten ton of fish fell on top of him.

  Now there’s hardly a herring to be seen, and if you are offered Mallaig kippers, they have probably been imported from Canada. These days it is the prawn fleet that rakes in the cash, though you will get the finest, flakiest and freshest haddock and chips anywhere in the British Isles by going where the locals go – to the back doors of the cafes by the harbourside. I eat mine out of a brown paper bag on the quay, watching two fat seals creep up to a fishing boat, intent on larceny. I don’t tell on them, partly because the hooter of 62005 is already blowing and passengers are scurrying back to the station for the train back to Fort William. I’m travelling back with Florence McLean, the ‘Queen of the Jacobite’, who is the guard, the master of ceremonies, the issuer of tickets and the mother figure for the 300 passengers who travel on the train every day between May and October.

  ‘People in Fort William say, how did you get such a great job? It’s the best job in the world. It’s in my blood,’ she tells me in the sweet local accent that is fast disappearing from the West Highlands these days. ’I was born and bred in the place, but I never tire of it – it’s so green and so lush.’ Florence has always been a pioneer. Back in the 1980s she was a freight guard on the line, quite an achievement in the macho west Scottish culture of the time. Nowadays, she tells me, life on the trains is just as tough, but there are many highlights: ‘I love it when people get engaged on the train. I usually don’t know in advance, but I announce it over the loudspeaker and deliver the champagne. I can’t even relax on my day off because I worry about the train so much.’

  But there is nothing to fret about tonight as Lord of the Isles eases the train gently into Fort William, the evening sun reflecting gold off Ben Nevis. In the next platform, freshly spruced up for tonight’s journey home to Euston, is the Fort William portion of the Deerstalker Express. Once upon a time, before Beeching and the modern corporate railway, in backwaters and branch lines up and down the land, there were what might be termed the ‘trains that Time Forgot’: a couple of elderly main line carriages pensioned off from crack services, in the charge of a former express locomotive whose reason for existence had disappeared in the mists of time. The four coaches of tonight’s train are a bit like this – two sleeping cars from the 1970s and a coach with seats of even earlier vintage which potters only as far as Edinburgh. But, hurrah, the fourth carriage is a restaurant car. It may be kitted out in the dated style of a mobile Angus Steak House, but where else on the entire railway would a full meal service be provided on such a diminutive train?

  By the end of 2009, even on the crack expresses, proper dining on trains was all but extinct. The best you could hope for, even travelling from Penzance to Aberdeen, might be a cheeseburger or a microwaved curry. But tonight, on a train which probably carries at most forty passengers on a good day, here is Scotland’s finest. Shhh, don’t spill the secret. Fancy some haggis, neeps and tatties? Or Cumbrian lamb hotpot? Alison, who runs the place, has already put fresh flowers on the tables and started pouring from the widest selection of malt whiskies to be found on any train anywhere. ‘If you want another wee dram,’ she tells me, ‘I’ll be serving till we get to Edinburgh, past midnight.’ And so I settle back with a Bruichladdich for one of the best views in the world, rolling gently through the Highlands, following the setting sun. And so we climb through the valley of the River Spean, black water shooting into white rapids, alongside the hauntingly lonely Loch Treig, with a final glimpse of Ben Nevis over our shoulders, climbing up to the bogland of Corrour, once a private station for the grand estate nearby, though now owned more democratically by two Harvard academics. It’s starting to get dark now, I catch sight of the welcoming lights of the Moor of Rannoch Hotel before the train runs downhill all the way, past the crossing at Gorton, where once the local children went to school in a railway carriage because there was no road out, and round the famous Horseshoe Curve, where the train double backs on itself to squeeze round the twin peaks of Beinn Dorain and Beinn Odhar – a cost-saving exercise by the engineers which served to create one of Britain’s most thrilling bits of railway.

  As the last remnants of dusk float gently down over the West Highlands on this June night, the Deerstalker Express halts at Crianlarich, crossing a freight train of alumina tanks heading north. My sleeper is a carriage like those of old, with that rare luxury a pull-down window. I lean out for a final swig of the sweet Highland air before bed – a draught of champagne before the fug of the Euston Road in the morning. There is just a single passenger waiting on the platform – a portly red-faced Englishman, who for all I know has a brace of grouse in the trunk he is carrying. There’s no other sound on the evening breeze except the soft Scottish chatter of the driver and his mate, who have stepped onto the platform awaiting their signal. It’s reckoned that it costs £2 million a year in public subsidy to keep this train running. It is money well spent.

  CHAPTER NINE

  THE 14.05 FROM SHREWSBURY – SLOW TRAIN INTO THE ‘UNPRONOUNCEABLE’ HEART OF WALES

  Shrewsbury to Swansea, via Craven Arms, Llandrindod Wells, Llangammarch Wells, Llanwrtyd Wells and Llanelli

  A SINGLE RAILCAR meanders through some of the richest and remotest countryside in Britain on its slow journey through the old counties of Shropshire, Radnorshire and Brecknock. No one is in much of a hurry here on the Heart of Wales Line. Somehow it seems to be permanently Sunday afternoon on this, the closest we have to the traditional rural railway of the Edwardian era. True, the thirty-four tiny stations with names that defy pronunciation by the English are now unstaffed and the sidings that once echoed to the clatter of milk churns and the cacophony of sheep on their way to market have long been lifted. But you are just as likely to run into Mrs Jenkins on the way to Llandrindod Wells to change her library books, or neighbour Dai alighting at Llanwrtyd for some of the local butcher’s finest Welsh lamb chops and a couple of pints in the Neuadd Arms while waiting for the train home.

  With only four services a day on the line, these are trains you don’t want to miss – literally. My heart sinks like the axles on my main line connection from Birmingham as we run into floodwater outside Telford. Will I make it? I ring through to the station manager’s office at Shrewsbury, hoping I can still catch the connectio
n, but prepare for a long wet wait. As we limp in twenty minutes behind schedule, the little Heart of Wales train is still there, engines grinding in the bay platform. ‘Hop along,’ says John, the conductor-guard. ‘We knew there were passengers on their way so we waited for you.’ He adds, ‘Don’t worry, we’ve got hours to make up the time!’ How refreshing to find an antidote to the anonymous world of the privatised railway, especially as the train I’m boarding is run under franchise by Arriva, one of the world’s mightiest transport conglomerates, which carries two billion passengers a year in Europe alone.

  In its day, the Heart of Wales too was an audaciously commercial enterprise. Built in 1868 as a long tentacle from Crewe to give the mighty London and North Western Railway access to industrial South Wales, it was a cheeky infiltrator onto turf which the Great Western believed to be its own. For much of its life it was dominated by heavy coal and mineral trains, but now you are more likely to spot the rare red kite that sometimes swoops overhead and rabbits scurrying over the tracks than a freight wagon. Once upon a time, laden passenger trains carried hundreds of thousands of city dwellers to take the waters at Builth Wells or Llandrindod Wells, genteel spa towns that owe their entire existence to the railway. It is hard to imagine now, as the line quietly settles back into its slumbers. It was slated for closure in 1963 but saved after a vigorous local campaign. It’s said now that the line is unshuttable since it runs through six marginal constituencies, and it has a healthy and assured future, supported by the pro-rail policies of the Welsh Assembly and a vocal passenger group, the Heart of Wales Line Travellers’ Association.