On the Slow Train

by Michael Williams

  In their travelling revue At the Drop of Another Hat Flanders and Swann introduced the song thus: ‘It’s quite a serious song, and it was suggested by all those marvellous old local railway stations with their wonderful evocative names, all due to be axed and done away with one by one, and these are stations that we shall no longer be seeing when we aren’t able to travel any more on the slow train.’ But, fortunately for us, some of their predictions were wrong. Five of the individual stations mentioned in the song ultimately didn’t close. One entire route also escaped the axe. The St Erth to St Ives line, my journey in Chapter 1, stayed open to become one of the most profitable rural branches on the national network. Arram station, between Driffield and Beverley in Yorkshire, survived, as did Ambergate in Derbyshire and Gorton near Manchester (then called Gorton and Openshaw and referred to as Openshaw in the song). How tantalising, then, to take the final journey in this book between the other two survivors, both now busy stations and linked by one of the most beautiful journeys across the Pennines from the western to the eastern sides of northern England. It is difficult to conceive now that either Formby, on the busy Merseyrail suburban network in northern Liverpool, or Chester-le-Street, near Durham, on the East Coast Main Line, which has one of the busiest ticket offices in Britain, could ever have been candidates for closure. And a journey between them is a voyage not just through some of the most diverse landscapes in Britain but across the varied landscape of today’s railway system – city and country, ancient and new, jolty old branch lines and restored and reinvigorated modern railways.

  This is to be a long journey, on eight trains, so I am up early to join the commuters marching to Formby station in the suburbs of north Liverpool, on the electric City line between Southport and Hunt’s Cross. If the station really had closed back in 1963, you might never have noticed its disappearance. It is a modest building partially obscured by a large set of traffic lights on a bridge on the busy road to the shore which thousands of motorists pass each day scarcely giving it a glance, although it’s nicely restored with its 1848 red-brick frontage glowing in the morning sun and the original station name and the logo of the old Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway picked out in green and white terrazzo. Scores of folk with briefcases are pouring through the entrance this morning on their way to their Liverpool offices. The Merseyrail system, which runs underground on a loop beneath Liverpool city centre, is the smallest of the national rail franchises, with a track mileage of just seventy-five miles, but is one of the most heavily used in Britain.

  Not all my fellow passengers are commuters this morning. In the neat little booking hall with its wooden ticket office picked out in the lemon and white Merseyrail house colours, I queue behind a nun with a group of children in neat convent school uniforms. She is going to Liverpool, she tells me, to see the relics of St Therese of Lisieux, a French nun who died a century ago, whose bones have been doing a tour of Europe and are on display in the cathedral. ‘And I’ve baked some cakes to offer to people waiting to get in. It’s good to be neighbourly,’ she tells me. Quite right. Because Formby is the heart of middle-class Merseyside. In fact there can be few places in the nation that are more Middle England than this. No tower blocks or sink estates here, just lines of streets with substantial red-brick ‘bank manager’ semis. Paul Theroux, in his book The Kingdom by the Sea, called it a ‘land of pink and purple lupins’. Cherie Blair, the former prime minister’s wife, claims a proud ancestry in the town, where her great-great grandparents ran a fishing business.

  And as my three-car Class 507 unit heads north to Southport, past sand dunes and pines, it only gets posher. The 507s are among the oldest electric trains on the national mainland network and are unique as the only ones outside south-east England to pick up their power from a third rail on the track. Yet they have been nicely refurbished with comfortable seats and you almost feel as though they should have lace antimacassars and net curtains on the windows. Past Freshfield (‘Alight for red squirrel reserve’) and Ainsdale, nothing could be more suburban than suburban Southport, with the neat greens of the Royal Birkdale Golf Course on both sides of the train. ‘Rough Liverpool’ is far away as the train reaches the buffers at Southport.

  Once this huge station with its eleven platforms (now cut back to six) and great overall roof would have been thronged like its sister Lancashire resorts of Blackpool and Morecambe with holidaymakers from Manchester, Preston, Bolton, and Burnley and beyond. During the ‘wakes weeks’, when the mills and factories of Lancashire and Yorkshire closed down for their summer holidays and weary sons and daughters of toil headed for the coast on hundreds of excursion trains, Southport was one of the busiest stations in Europe, second only to Blackpool. The novelist Andrew Martin wrote about the enginemen shuttling high-spirited mill workers to the town in his 2005 thriller The Blackpool Highflyer: ‘The next day, Thursday of Wakes, we were booked for another run to Southport and back. Most of those on the train had already had time away elsewhere earlier in the week and were light-headed with holidayness. There’d been some bottle-throwing from the windows ’ Hard to imagine such behaviour in the genteel Southport of today. Where the booking office and concourse once stood is a giant concrete Marks and Spencer – appropriate for the age profile of its citizens – but it is almost as though the station is longing for busier days again. The extensive sidings built to accommodate the excursion trains are still intact, though weed-grown, as if waiting for wakes weeks to return, the looms to start up in the cotton mills again – and Majorca had not been invented.

  Today, Southport station (Chapel Street, as it was once known) seems melancholy indeed, and entirely too grand for the two-car diesel to Manchester on the next leg of my journey; the little train seems tiny and lost in this big terminus. No point hoping to get anywhere else, since services to Preston, the other regional city, so near and yet so far, were withdrawn in 1964 to be replaced by the A565 and A59 roads. ‘But some of the trains go to Manchester Airport,’ says the man in the orange jacket at the ticket barrier, hopefully, as though I might want to escape Lancashire altogether. In Edwardian times the Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway introduced lavishly appointed ‘Club’ cars on its services to Manchester, where cigar-chomping Mancunian moneymen would breakfast over the Manchester Guardian on their way to the office and slurp gin and play poker on the way home. My Pacer train to Manchester Victoria is a world away, with ancient bus seats of the 1970s kind that have mostly disappeared even from buses. It is smoky and wheezy , and the poor suspension of the trains has lent the railway the nickname the ‘Rollercoaster Line’. As a result, the locals are not happy. Complaining in the House of Commons, Southport MP John Pugh said, ‘I should like a train less than twenty years old to arrive in my own town. But I am not holding my breath.’ Still, the run through the little villages of the south-west Lancashire plain with their stone-built stations is a reminder of the understated charms of many secondary lines in Britain. Not a lot of guidebook writers or railway enthusiasts come this way, yet the atmosphere is charming in a muted, unsensational fashion. This flat, fertile land was once the larder for Lancashire’s great industrial conurbations, and the fields are still there, full of brassicas and potatoes. The tangy whiff of fresh celery drifts through the window as we pass through Burscough Bridge. Here the train pulls alongside the Liverpool–Leeds Canal, and a vista of the south Pennines, which I shall cross on my way to my destination at Chester-le-Street, appears black and misty on the distant horizon.

  To be fair to Northern Rail, which operates the line, their managers have done much to jolly things up on a limited budget. (Northern has the biggest proportion of loss-making lines of any franchise in the land.) Cheery little Wigan Wallgate makes its modern main line brother on the West Coast Main Line look dreary by comparison. The Victorian porte cochère has been painted a jolly green and red and local people have been encouraged to submit poems to be printed on the windows of the station waiting room. One begins, ‘Arrive at the station / Wait for the train /
Thought I heard the word cancellation.’ If you think that’s banal, remember Paul Simon is said to have written the words of ‘Homeward Bound’ on the platform at nearby Widnes: ‘I’m sitting on the railway station / Got a ticket for my destination’.

  Cheer doesn’t come any more easily in this part of Lancashire than it did in George Orwell’s day, and it starts to drizzle as we pass through the drab west Manchester outskirts. Still, it’s always a pleasure to arrive at Manchester Victoria, the city’s second station and now effectively Britain’s capital for slow trains. All the express trains which once ran into its seventeen platforms have long decamped to Manchester Piccadilly and many of the remaining trains that serve the now-downsized Victoria have got even slower. A century ago I could have got here from Southport in forty-five minutes. Today’s journey has taken more than an hour.

  To the modern eye Manchester Victoria may seem rather scuffed and rundown – at the end of 2009 it was named by the transport secretary Lord Adonis as one of the ten worst stations in Britain. But we must thank our lucky stars that it has survived at all where so many cities have lost their second and third stations to the bulldozer or to other more prosaic uses, such as being turned into supermarkets or warehouses. Goodbye, Manchester Exchange, Glasgow St Enoch, Wolverhampton Low Level, Southampton Terminus, Plymouth Friary, Norwich Victoria, Lincoln St Marks, Leicester Central, Bath Green Park. The Great Western’s once-imposing Birmingham Snow Hill lives on only as a concrete platform under an office block, and Liverpool Central, its impressive cast-iron overall roof gone to the scrapyard, is just a subway station. Lucky indeed are the passengers at Manchester Victoria on their way to Moses Gate or Ramsgreave and Wilpshire. Or to Mytholmroyd, Whalley, Oswaldtwistle, Daisy Hill, Hag Fold or all the other stations with quaint Lancashire names in the Mancunian hinterland that didn’t ever close. On their way there, today’s passengers still have the chance to admire Manchester Victoria’s Edwardian iron and glass canopy bearing the names of the stations the mighty Lancashire and Yorkshire Railway once served from here, now restored after being damaged in the 1996 IRA bombing. Or they may pause to study the L & Y’s great tiled mural by the concourse showing the lines that made up its empire while carefully excluding the local routes of all its rivals. The etched glass window bearing the sign ‘Gentleman’s Lavatory’ must be one of the finest surviving in Britain, on or off the railway. Others with time to spare might drop in for a haircut at the Manchester Cutter barber’s shop on the concourse, once a regular feature of mainline city termini everywhere – now a rare find and a snip indeed. SUPERB PRECISION HAIRCUT £8, says the sign outside. For the more thrifty, there are CLIPPER CUTS FROM JUST £7.

  Choke back those wellsprings of nostalgia, though. Don’t shed tears for the halcyon days of the old Lancashire and Yorkshire. There is a far bigger choice for the modern rail traveller than Edwardian Lancastrians might have believed from poring over the company’s great tiled map. For the next leg of the journey to Chester-le-Street, there are several magnificent surviving routes across the Pennines. All are united by dramatic climbs, descents and tunnels through the carboniferous limestone of the northern section, and the millstone grit of the southern part. The features they have in common are dramatic, wild moorland scenery and historic industrial towns that formed the cradle of the Industrial Revolution. All have individual character, architecture and charm. I could take a slow train on any of them to my final destination.

  Lucky for us, only three of the nine principal trans-Pennine routes running at the time of Beeching have gone. Goodbye to the Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith line to Darlington (Flanders and Swann mourned the loss of ‘Cockermouth for Buttermere’) and the Preston to Skipton route via Colne. Beeching wanted to retain the route from Manchester to Sheffield via the great Woodhead Tunnels, newly electrified in 1952, but Margaret Thatcher thought otherwise, and shut it finally in 1981, although passenger services had gone long before. Today though we can still cross the Pennines from Carlisle to Newcastle along the windswept Tyne Valley Line, or take the famous Settle and Carlisle Line, my journey in Chapter 2. The truly adventurous might take the seventy-mile Morecambe to Leeds route, one of the rail network’s great secrets (except to the handful of passengers who use its four through trains a day). I could choose the gritty Calder Valley Line from Manchester to Leeds via Halifax, through hard-nosed Yorkshire mill towns such as Hebden Bridge and Mytholmroyd, birthplace of Ted Hughes. Others might be tempted by the quality of the scenery on the Hope Valley Line from Manchester to Sheffield, through the green heart of the Peak District National Park. But how could I resist the most dramatic line of all – from Manchester to Sheffield through Huddersfield and Penistone. Here is excitement unmatched by any of the other lines; it includes a station rated as ‘splendid’ by John Betjeman as well as a dramatic set of tunnels, the best station buffet on the network and a country railway that has defied closure probably more times than any other.

  It’s getting towards lunchtime as I leave Manchester Victoria on the hourly train to Huddersfield. With few passengers aboard, the two-coach Pacer is surging like a ship at sea and banging on the track joints like a Bofors gun. Fortunately my journey to Stalybridge is short. Although it is technically in Greater Manchester, the green shoulders of the Pennines poke prominently into this historic cotton town. Stalybridge is famous for many things. It was the first place where steam power was used in the cotton mills. ‘It’s a long way to Tipperary’ was written here, and the Stalybridge Brass Band is the oldest civilian brass band in the world. Beatrix Potter came from hereabouts and the artist L S Lowry spent his last lonely years in Stalybridge Road, Mottram. But for the hungry (and thirsty) railway traveller there is one claim to fame that eclipses all of these: Stalybridge is widely judged to have the best station buffet in Britain.

  Travellers in search of refreshment can’t mistake the entrance to Stalybridge station buffet under the huge clock on Platform 1, bearing the legend ‘Joyce of Whitchurch’. Next to the door is a blue plaque celebrating its status as the most famous refreshment room on the railway. ‘This Victorian Buffet Bar is unique,’ it says, ‘and is authentic in detail since being rebuilt in 1885.’ Lowry did not care for pubs, preferring Kardomah coffee bars, but push open the door and his working-class matchstick men would recognise this place instantly. It’s as far away as you can get from the modern station buffet, where bored travellers gulp down flavourless coffee out of styrene cups. Nor could you imagine the cut-glass accents from that other famous station refreshment room at Carnforth in here. Stalybridge station buffet is more the snug at the Rover’s Return than Brief Encounter.

  Queen Victoria stares down from an etched-glass mirror over the marble bar, which glistens with rows of beer pumps. On sale in a glass cabinet on the counter are Werther’s Originals and Tunnock’s teacakes. This, David the barman tells me, is a favourite place for ‘tickers and bottlers’ – apparently much the same thing, since tickers collect train numbers and the bottlers keep a tally of the different brands of beer they have drunk. ‘Try some of the Nangreaves Crimea,’ he urges me. ‘It’s brewed locally in Bury.’ But if feeling abstemious I could have chosen a ‘Hot Bovril’ or a ‘Hot Vimto, 95p’ – or a glass of Wincarnis, which according to a notice on the wall, can cure ‘brain fag, sleeplessness and mental and physical prostration’. I settle for the beer, along with the ‘lunch of the day’ – black pudding and black peas. This is quite the largest black pudding I have ever seen, the size of a Greater Manchester police officer’s truncheon, and it is fortunate that I have only a few feet to stagger to climb aboard the next train towards Huddersfield.

  Once out of Stalybridge, we are climbing hard, the antiquated underfloor bus engine of the train feeling the strain as we ascend through Mossley and Greenfield, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, into the Colne Valley and alongside the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. (‘Narrow’ equalled cheaper to build, since this is the highest canal in England.) Without notice we plunge into the murk of th
e Standedge Tunnel, three miles and sixty yards long. Standedge (pronounced Stannige) may be only the third-longest rail tunnel in Britain (after the Severn Tunnel and Totley Tunnel on the Hope Valley Line), but it is certainly the most dramatic, with four parallel tunnels of railway and canal running beneath the high fells. As you might expect, it is drizzling as we enter from Lancashire, but emerging in the West Riding, the sun is skidding across a fluffy sky. Two of the rail tunnels are disused now, but the canal tunnel is an astonishing feat of eighteenth-century engineering – the longest, highest and deepest canal tunnel ever built in Britain. And it’s still possible to drive a boat from one end of Benjamin Outram’s masterpiece to the other.

  I have a hunch that I might be able to climb up to its entrance, and so I get off the train at the next station, Marsden. Everything here is deserted. There are no buildings on the station, no passengers on the train and I pass nobody on the steep road up to the tunnel entrance. There is a pub along the way, but it is shuttered and closed. The empty moors up above, the thin Pennine air, the watery sunshine and some rooks cawing overhead make the scene somehow even more surreal. Around here is some of the emptiest moorland in Britain, including Saddleworth Moor, location of the Moors Murders, where the body of at least one of the child victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley has yet to be recovered.