I’m well stocked up with food and drink, as this is one of the longest journeys in the land without refreshments being provided on the train nor available at stations on the way, although in the summer it is sometimes possible to get a snack as trains wait to pass at Llandrindod Wells. My little Class 153 railcar is generally clean, but like all British Rail-built coaches from the 1980s has high windows that are sometimes hard to see from, and the noise and vibration from the underfloor engines can be wearing. Despite the rain, this is high summer, and the trackside is lined with vegetation, reducing visibility over long stretches.
Luckily John the Guard is in chatty mood. Do passengers know that the towering signal box outside Shrewsbury is the biggest still operated manually by levers in the UK? And so it goes on as we head out on the main line to Newport, along gentle border valleys dominated by Wenlock Edge and the Shropshire Hills. John, it turns out, used to be a train builder at the famous railway works in Crewe. But Britain no longer makes many trains these days, so John, at sixty, has embarked on a new career, selling tickets, chatting up tourists and helping old ladies onto the platform. ‘I spent twenty-nine years building trains like this. Then I was made redundant. But now after all this time I’ve found my true vocation. I’m a people person,’ he says. ‘But I still can’t pronounce half the names of the stations down the line,’ he says in a broad Cheshire accent.
At Craven Arms, the junction with the main line, the driver leans out to pick up the token that gives access to the seventy-nine miles of single track that will ultimately join the South Wales main line near Llanelli. There is water everywhere, with the fields flooded to Noah-like depths as far as the eye can see. A flag flutters on the medieval tower of Stokesay Castle, the finest fortified medieval manor house in England, and looks quite surreal above the waters. Here is the serene countryside of Housman’s A Shropshire Lad, but it’s also famous for its rabbits. I can’t see any of them this morning. ‘But you should be on the first train of the day,’ says John. ‘Hundreds of them, scurrying all over the track.’ Soon we are in the handsome border town of Knighton, where the station is in England but the town centre in Wales. The hotel next to the station, it is said, was deliberately sited in England so that boozers could top up on Sundays in the days when Wales was dry on the sabbath. The driver gets out of his cab and pops into a little grey fibreglass hut on the platform. Not for a quick pee, as some passengers think, but because it’s the housing for the magnificent old cast iron Tyer’s token machine that controls the signalling on the line. The driver takes a large old key from the machine, obtaining permission to enter the next section to Llandrindod Wells. He can only do this after he’s rung the signalman in the old Great Western Railway wooden signal box at Pantyffynnon, seventy miles to the south, which controls the whole line. No fancy radio signalling or computer technology here. This is good old primitive technology, fuelled by Welsh natter between drivers and signalmen, which prevents trains colliding head on in single-track sections. Old-fashioned and reliable, it still works as well as when it was invented more than a century ago.
Next stop is Knucklas, dominated by its grand viaduct, one of the most famous in Britain, taking the line on thirteen stone arches seventy-five feet above the Heyope valley. The castellated turrets reflect the style of the ruined castle on the hill nearby, although they are a bit of a sham – just hollow floor-less constructions and too unrealistic for any railwaymen with Walter Mitty-like tendencies to pretend they were taking part in a medieval siege. It’s possible to see the viaduct from the train on the approach curve, although far better to get off and tramp up through the mud on the neighbouring hill. The local farmers are used to it. It’s worth waiting between trains to take advantage of one of the best vantage points for photographing a country railway in the whole of Britain. Refreshment can be taken in the village’s Castle Inn, whose landlord, a claret-faced former RAF officer, once opened up the pub early for me, just to have a chat. He told me that he had met his wife in a bar. ‘She’s a fantastic cook’ – a view amply justified by the quality of a specially prepared lunch.
The line curves and climbs through the hills, past the remote halts of Llangynllo and Llanbister Road – the suffix ‘Road’ being one of the rural railway builders’ great white lies, meaning ‘It would have been too expensive to build the line to this obscure village, but intending passengers won’t know they need hiking boots until they get there.’ In the case of Llanbister Road, it’s not even near the road to the village. Dolau’s platform garden, lovingly planted out by local residents, is a blaze of glory. ‘There are some great station gardens along here,’ says John. ‘But don’t think I’ve got a cushy life just pottering up and down this line. I have to work on others too. I’ve already been to Chester and Aberystwyth in the past couple of days. And you try doing the last train out of Birmingham, with all the drunks on a Saturday night. And there are twelve request stops on this line – and sometimes I have to stop the train at nine of them.’ Suddenly, there’s a crunch and a grinding sound, and the emergency brake comes on. John leaps out onto the track and sprints up to talk to the driver. It turns out we have hit a small tree that has fallen across the line in the heavy rain. ‘You think we staged this for your benefit,’ he jokes. ‘But there’s no damage done. Tough trains these, you know. Remember I helped build them. Anyhow, you’re in good hands with Tommo, the driver. He’s a Crewe Alexandra fan, like me.’
At Llandrindod Wells the train changes guards and I say goodbye to John as he swaps platforms to head north on the next train and back home to Crewe. ‘By the way, the toilet’s blocked and there’s no water. Just to let you know,’ he says with a cheery wave. ‘They’ll get it sorted out at Swansea.’ Llandrindod, the county town of Powys, is the only place of any size on the line and has an impressive railway station to match, although it’s not all the real thing. The wrought-iron canopy comes from the demolished Pump House Hotel in the town and the passing loop in the platforms was only re-established after the Beeching cuts left the line bereft of proper places for trains to pass. In the 1960s Beeching also robbed the county of the Mid-Wales Line, which had a junction at Builth Road providing connections to the north and south. This rambling route, run by the old Cambrian Railway, may have seemed like a basket case to Beeching, who regarded most of Wales as a lost cause, doomed to decline. But how handy to have such a line now. The Welsh Assembly pays for a daily service from Cardiff to Holyhead, but it has to travel a circuitous route via the English borders. Llandrindod also sports a splendid restored signal box, which is a museum too. It’s painted in the colours of the old Great Western Railway, causing much tut-tut-ting among railway enthusiast purists, who have long been suspicious of GWR imperialism. Although the Heart of Wales Line was part of the Western Region during British Railways days, it has always been proud Midland Region territory, say the fans, and should rightly be liveried in its maroon and cream colours. But at least there are toilets and a privately run booking office, the only one on the line. Llandrindod’s Victorian villas and mansion blocks from the spa era look rather surreal in the middle of bare hills – a bit like a chunk of Chiswick or Hampstead plonked down in the middle of nowhere. The town has a slightly empty and run-down air these days, a far cry from the time when the railway would disgorge tens of thousands here to take the waters, parade fashionably round the streets and buy fancy provisions from the famous Central Wales Emporium. ‘It’s all the welfare people,’ says the lady behind the counter in Pritchard’s garage. ‘First it was the hippies and now it’s the welfare. They flock to the town. We’ve got all that unused hotel space, you see. You can still get a cup of the waters, you know. But not many do it these days. Might as well go down to Boots and get a bottle of Gaviscon.’
Pritchard’s art deco garage, which resembles one of those idealised structures that small boys had in the golden age of motoring, has pumps on the pavement and a roll call of long-dead marques – Hillman, Humber and Sunbeam – in a sky-blue frieze along the roof. T
he garage is now run partly as a charity shop and partly as a shrine to its former owners. ‘It still belongs to two of the former mechanics in the business who bought it years ago,’ says the charity lady. ‘Both the old boys are in wheelchairs now, and one has lost part of his foot. But they still run the local funeral business, and they fill up the hearse from the pumps on the pavement, which still work.’ I wonder whether the secret of the brothers’ long life is the spa waters, which can still be drunk from the spring in Rock Park and which, according to the Llandrindod Wells Guidebook 1897, can cure eczema, skin disease, bronchial ailments, gastritis, heartburn and diseases of the bladder and kidneys, including ‘diseases of a tubercular nature’. But it warns, ‘From two to six glasses should be taken before breakfast, and another in the forenoon. But not later in the day . . . Better stay at home than subject one’s organisation to careless use of these waters.’ And it’s not much good going to the pub instead, since for a town of its size Llandrindod is notoriously short of them. In any case, with just three trains a day on the line dallying in the pub is not to be recommended and I must hurry back to the station to get the next train south.
Although the Heart of Wales ranks high in the league of the world’s great rail journeys, some find it disappointing because the vegetation by the lineside often obscures the view. There may be a very good reason for this given the many hundreds of sheep in the fields by the lineside. But no matter that much of the journey is filtered through blurred hedging, there are so many little stations with their comings and goings that it is never possible to get bored. There’s quite a bustle when we arrive at Builth Road, even though it is two miles from Builth Wells, the famous spa town and home of the Royal Welsh Show. But don’t get off there expecting to take a quick swig of the waters or even get a sight of another famous curiosity of the town – one of the few post boxes in Britain with the insignia of King Edward VIII – unless you’re prepared for a stiff hike.
Fortunately, the station here, which used to be called High Level, had a Low Level counterpart on the Mid-Wales Line, just downstairs. Even though Beeching did his best to wipe it from the map in 1962, the old station buildings survive as a pub called the Cambrian Arms, which is an excellent place to stop for passengers wanting a sup of something stronger than spa water. But stay on board because soon we will be rolling along the valley of the Irfon, where the waters sometimes appear to almost lap against the track, and into Cilmeri, where the monument to Lywelyn ap Gruffud, the last native Prince of Wales, killed in 1252, can be seen on the right. (Cilmeri was once known as Cilmery Halt, one of the last stations to carry the suffix before British Rail purged the word from the timetable in 1969.)
At Llangammarch, not only is the name slightly more pronounceable than some on the line, but for the thousands of visitors that were once brought here by train from all over Britain to take cures in the spa, the waters were said to be more drinkable. Once a busy freight siding here exported gallons of it by bottle, although by the time it was shunted and bashed through sundry marshalling yards to its final destination, it was said not to have tasted particularly nice. As we approach Llanwrtyd Wells we are in the heart of primrose country, rich in wildlife. I count a whole menagerie of peregrine falcons, curlews, ravens and buzzards in the sky overhead. It’s a reminder that the Heart of Wales Line is best enjoyed slow, and I have chosen to take a break in the town overnight, for no other reason than it looks on the map to be roughly halfway down the line, and who could resist somewhere with an unpronounceable name in the middle of nowhere, claiming to be ‘the smallest town in Britain’?
So small in fact that there appears to be nothing there, although I quickly realise that, like Llanbister and Builth, the town proper is a hike along the road. Here is a bank, a church and an old-fashioned chemist out of Happy Families, where I buy a toothbrush made of bristle that appears to have been in stock since the 1950s. The grocery has so little on the shelves it looks like something out of Iron Curtain Europe, and the bookshop has no staff, just an honesty box. The Neuadd Arms, where I am to stay, is a battered old boozer overlooking the main square, and by the door is a replica leopardskin hat and a plaque commemorating Screaming Lord Sutch, founder of the Official Monster Raving Loony Party, who was a fixture at dozens of by-elections, once scoring so many votes against Margaret Thatcher in her Finchley constituency that the national candidate deposit was raised to deter him. Sutch played his last gig at the Neuadd Arms before his suicide in 1999. The plaque reads, ‘David Sutch (Screaming Lord) 1940–1999’.
Inside the dark bar over a pint of home-brewed Heart of Wales bitter, Dai the Barman says, ‘He was a great guy. He used to be the official starter for the Man v. Horse Race. Look, we’ve got his autograph on the wall up there. Came up every year for it, he did. Can you imagine – a bloke has to race a horse over twenty-two miles? And do you know, the year after Sutch died a man won it. Amazing really. Mind you, he was a marine and a marathon runner.’ Dai used to teach at the local school, but he tells me he’s happy pulling pints these days. The pub brews 1,728 pints of ale a week in an outhouse round the back, he tells me. ‘We’re quite famous for our sports here, you know. We started the World Bog Snorkelling Championships right here in this bar.’ He gives me an elaborate rundown of the rules, which involve completing two consecutive lengths of a sixty-yard water-filled trench cut out of a peat bog. Competitors must wear snorkel and flippers and complete the course using only conventional swimming strokes relying on flipper power alone. The race takes place every August Bank Holiday in the Waen Rhydd bog down the road from the pub. ‘We have a lady champion now,’ someone pipes up from the back of the bar. ‘From Heckmondwike she is. Lots of good bogs in Yorkshire, I reckon.’
On the menu tonight, predictably, is lamb shank and chips, and there’s a notice on the wall of the lounge bar declaring the local climate to be similar to Majorca or Tenerife. Hard to believe on this windy evening, but the atmosphere in the saloon is warm enough. I ask around about how to get to the famous Cynghordy Viaduct on the other side of Sugar Loaf Mountain. The 283-yard viaduct carries the line on eighteen arches over the valley of the Afon Bran. It ranks high in the pantheon of British railway wonders – up there with Ribblehead and Glenfinnan but less accessible than either. So remote is it that a brickworks was established near the site, and for decades its products were regarded as the finest engineering bricks in Britain. Like many of the great civil engineering features of the Heart of Wales Line it is difficult to appreciate from the train and is especially spectacular when seen from the hillside as the sun rises. ‘I’ll take you there myself in the morning, boy,’ a voice pipes up from the other side of the bar. ‘So long as you buy one of my raffle tickets.’ It is an elderly gap-toothed farmer who turns up at six o’ clock the next morning to take me there. Pure, undiluted Welsh generosity.
Back at Llanwrtyd Wells station later that morning, after a jolting ride in an ancient Land Rover over hilly tracks only to find the viaduct swathed in mist, there is a problem. Dozens of passengers are pacing the platform. There are only two passing places on the entire railway, and the southbound train is stuck somewhere up the line because of the weather. The northbound service is sitting with diesels thrumming impatiently and people are grumbling about the wait. ‘Why so many on the train?’ I ask the conductor. ‘Oh, it’s like this every day, you know. The Welsh Assembly give all the over-sixties free travel on the trains wherever they like, and sometimes it’s like a Darby and Joan outing here.’ Curiously it turns out that the conductor is called Joan herself, and confesses she is sixty-two. ‘ I used to run my own mail order business with my husband, but the stress got to me and I decided to downshift. The old man’s now a postman, and he’s much happier too.’ Unlike some of the stations on the line, which are shuttered and desolate, Llanwrtyd, although unstaffed, is a pretty place, with immaculate gardens and plenty of evidence of the railway as it once was. The wooden board from the old LMS signal box has been repainted and has prime position above the f
lower bed. In the days of steam, engines used to take water here, and you can still see the grating for the surplus water at the end of the platform. Steam locomotives still occasionally pass this way on special trains, but now they are filled up by the local fire brigade.
After nearly an hour we are off. The driver picks up the token for Llandovery and sets off for the three-mile climb on a 1 in 60 gradient for Sugar Loaf summit at 820 feet. The single-car diesel makes light work of it, but in steam days, with an LMS Class 8F freight locomotive in charge of a long train of coal wagons, it was a stiff test of a fireman’s endurance, particularly as it was followed straight away by the plunge into the 1,001-yard Sugar Loaf Tunnel, a dark melancholy place plagued by swirling steam and roof falls. The tunnel marks the boundary, not just between the counties of Powys and Carmarthenshire, but also between two distinct weather zones. Although it was drizzling as we entered the tunnel, perversely, the sun is shining as we run gingerly onto the Cynghordy Viaduct. It is just possible to see Sugar Loaf itself on the left behind the train, and keen-eyed passengers will spot red kites wheeling overhead, making a change from the ubiquitous sheep – for this is forestry country. Through the little Cynghordy station (‘Not many requests for this one,’ Joan tells me) and the next twenty miles are downhill, although ‘gently does it’ because much of it is undertaken squealing round curves. Past Llandovery, a boozers’ paradise for more than half a millennium, where drovers slaked their thirst in the town’s many pubs thanks to a special licence granted by the lord of the manor (the tradition is still continued by the supporters of the local rugby club known as the Drovers). Then on to Llandeilo with its colour-washed houses in the lee of the big Victorian church on the hillside.
On the Slow Train Page 15