Until the closing years of the century, it opted almost invariably for non-intervention except when public pressure became irresistible. Parliamentarians had their own angles too. By the 1860s more than a hundred MPs were directors of railway companies, and the ‘railway interest’ was very adept at steering governments away from interference. Trailing behind the British gave other European governments a chance to learn from the pioneers’ mistakes. And each of them, to a greater or lesser extent, rejected the British model and opted for a system of government control.
The attitude of Victorian passengers was ambivalent too. As the railway ceased to be a novelty, their own lives changed and became increasingly dependent on the railway and the companies that ran it. Public attitude soon assumed a very British hue: tolerance, patience, exasperation, good humour, even affection. This was shown in the way the companies’ names would be unofficially translated:
S&D
Somerset & Dorset
Slow & Dirty
M&GN
Midland & Great Northern
Muddle & Go Nowhere
S&MJ
Stratford & Midland Junction
Slow, Mouldy & Jolting
L&B
Lynton & Barnstaple
Lumpy & Bumpy
LC&D
London Chatham & Dover
Lose ’em, Smash ’em & Turn over
MS&L
Manchester, Sheffield & Lincolnshire
Money Sunk & Lost
(which became the)
GC
Great Central
Gone Completely
All these were very apposite. I suspect the alleged nickname of the Great Western Railway – God’s Wonderful Railway – was the creation of the company’s highly effective public relations machine rather than a popular witticism.2 The GWR’s twenty-first-century successor, First Great Western, became known as Worst Late Western, without any affection whatever. There were other nicknames too, like the Scratter in Northamptonshire (local slang: scratting about, which is self-explanatory really); the Tiddlydike (origin unknown) from Cheltenham to Andover; and the Crab and Winkle (two of them, one in Kent, one in Essex).
These days train travel has a different, greatly reduced, role in the daily life of the nation. And yet the British still maintain their unique, and uniquely perverse, relationship with the industry they invented. We find the railways a kind of exquisite torment.
The idea of trains as an enthusiasm and a hobby began in Victorian Britain, reaching its peak in the years after the Second World War. But at that time the appeal lay with the main lines and the throbbing power of the great locomotives. By the early 1960s, however, railways were going out of fashion, both as a means of transport and as a hobby. Politicians were anxious to annexe the word ‘modernization’. It was a word that meant whatever the speaker wanted it to mean, like ‘revolution’ in the mouths of student activists later in the decade. But in utter contrast to the 1830s when railways were the epitome of modernity, they were seen now to be its very antithesis.
It was against this background that Dr Richard Beeching, the chairman of the British Railways Board, was able to carry through his programme of line closures with no coherent national opposition and often very little at local level either. This period was very brief. The bulk of the closures had been effected by 1967 and steam trains vanished from the British rail network the following year. Very quickly after that, the mood changed.
The 1970s saw a swing back to more traditional British values, i.e. a misty-eyed nostalgia. Country cottages, which previously could hardly be given away, became more desirable than new homes. The modern British Arcadian dream took shape: living in a cottage (always ‘with roses round the door’) close to an oak-beamed pub serving real ale, and cricket on the green. And the vanished branch lines and steam trains became an important part of that make-believe idyll. The railways as such were no more popular than they had ever been, but they now had a fixed place in the landscape of the imagination.
Further closures became politically impossible, and if the railway line no longer existed, people would do everything possible to recreate it. By 2008, the European Federation of Museum and Tourist Railways (Fedecrail) included 102 passenger-carrying preserved railways in Britain and Ireland among its members. In the rest of Europe combined, there were 117. Its meetings were said to be totally dominated by the British.
Britain became dotted with heritage railways, from Keith & Dufftown in the Highlands to the Lappa Valley in Cornwall. On a summer’s day in some parts of the country (e.g. rural Norfolk) it might be easier to catch a steam train than a bus, let alone a train on the former network. This attitude exasperated Edward Heath, prime minister from 1970 to 1974, who was what you might call an old-fashioned modernizer. He referred disparagingly to those who believed there was an alternative to expansion: ‘an England of quiet market towns linked only by steam trains puffing slowly and peacefully through green meadows’. But that was precisely the England which many of those who could afford it did now want, provided their own train was somewhat faster, if still peaceful.
In 2007 the magazine Country Life judged Kingham in Oxfordshire to be ‘England’s Favourite Village’. The concept was of course absurd – if it was England’s favourite, it would be overrun and thus unliveable. Never mind. What distinguished Kingham above hundreds of other contenders (and raised its property prices as well) was that it still had its own railway station, making it a suitable place from which to commute to London.
The Thomas the Tank Engine books were modestly popular in my childhood in the 1950s, rather went out of fashion during the Beeching era in the 1960s before returning with a vengeance to become a publishing and marketing phenomenon. And the media remained fascinated by trains, on the public’s behalf. In the nature of things, this manifested itself most obviously whenever anything went wrong. From the start rail travel proved itself remarkably safe (astonishingly so, given how rudimentary the procedures were in the early days, and how reluctant boards of directors were to invest in improvements). There have been horrible disasters, of course, but Huskisson was emphatically not the harbinger: indeed no one quite as famous has been killed on a British railway in nearly two centuries since then.
Since the end of the Second World War about 9,000 people have been killed on Britain’s railways, less than a third of them passengers. The comparable figure for roads is above 340,000. Roads now account for about twenty times as many passenger miles as the railways, which still makes railways, by my reckoning, about twice as safe. Yet the media attention and fearfulness generated by each of those accidents is entirely out of proportion to the risk involved. At Grayrigg in Cumbria, on the West Coast Main Line, a Virgin train with 111 passengers derailed in February 2007, causing the death of an 84-year-old woman. Contrast the headline news caused by that incident and what would have occurred had she died in a car crash. This is not a new phenomenon, as we shall see. It is one that will require some explanation.
A prurient fascination with train crashes is considered normal; yet it is considered strange to be fascinated by trains themselves. In 1955 the chairman of East London juvenile court, Sir Basil Henriques, told a 15-year-old boy – accused of stealing to fund a trainspotting trip to Harrogate – not merely that it was ‘abominable’ to steal but that he should have grown out of such a ‘babyish’ hobby.
Later, the word ‘trainspotter’ became (along with ‘anorak’) a generic term of abuse for anyone seen as over-interested in any subject, instead of following the more socially acceptable national trait of languid apathy. This has frightened many insecure people – young men, especially – away from pursuing what interests them, for fear of seeming uncool. Particularly if that interest really is trainspotting.
The journalist Jonathan Glancey, in an introduction to a recent volume about John Betjeman on trains, said that a colleague had warned him he should steer clear of writing about railways. It smacked of childhood, he implied. ‘Do your career no
good, old chap.’ (One has to take a deep breath and remember that it worked well for Betjeman.) Nonetheless, the media remain – on behalf of the public – fixated with trains. Above all, railways remain, as they have been from the start, an ever-reliable source of wry, bleak humour. A cartoonist’s delight. A national joke.
But the railways are not a national joke. They are a national disaster.
Creating a viable transport network in the twenty-first century is one of the most complex responsibilities of a modern government. It requires long-term planning and financial commitment. There is political risk because projects go wrong (remarkably often in the case of Britain). And the reward may be so far in the future as to be invisible to politicians concerned with tomorrow’s headlines, next week’s polls and next year’s election.
The British response has always been to let events take care of themselves. Alone in Europe, Victorian governments stayed aloof from planning the railway system. Though Hitler was building Autobahnen in the 1930s, the British failed to begin to accommodate the desire for inter-city travel on fast roads for another twenty-five years. Aviation policy has been a mishmash of confused responses, characterized most spectacularly by the saga of the Third London Airport that, after a search for an acceptable alternative lasting decades, finally ended up on the site (Stansted) where Whitehall intended to plonk it in the first place.
There are reasons for this, some of them good ones. This is an overcrowded property-owning democracy, full of fractious, private people guarding their lives against intrusions of all kinds. No one wants roses round the door and a motorway at the bottom of the garden. (A railway might be slightly different, but only if it was there in the first place.)
Transport minister has always been a job for ambitious politicians to avoid. ‘It’s the most miserable job in government,’ said Sir Malcolm Rifkind, a former incumbent. ‘Anything you do right, no one’s going to know for fifteen years. Anything you do wrong, they know immediately.’ Since the election of the Thatcher government thirty years ago, twenty different politicians have held the job. Even before that, the only politician who actually used the post to enhance her reputation was Barbara Castle (1965–68) although Ernest Marples (1959–64), of whom more anon, certainly enhanced his visibility. One transport minister, Alistair Darling (2002–06) is believed to have been specifically told to keep his department out of the headlines. A grey man to whom dullness came instinctively, Darling followed his instructions admirably.
The problem with this as a strategy is that the consequences do mount up over a couple of centuries. It might be possible to argue that every single major decision or indecision taken by British ministers since the railways began turned out to be wrong. Huskisson’s mistake was merely the first. That would be stretching the truth a little too far, but the general principle holds good. And it has never been more true than now. For the moment, let’s take one incredible example.
In 2007 a transport white paper was very sceptical about the benefits of railway electrification, which currently covers around 40 per cent of the British network, far lower than in comparable countries.3 In 2008, as oil prices shot through the roof, the then transport minister, Ruth Kelly, began to show some tentative enthusiasm for the idea. ‘I can see great potential for a rolling programme of electrification,’ she said. However, she added that this could not start to happen before 2015. That will be 158 years after George Stephenson reportedly predicted that electric power would supersede the steam engine. (‘I tell you, young man, I shall not live to see it, but you may, when electricity will be the great motive power of the world.’) It will be 131 years since the emergence of electric traction as a viable means of powering trains. It will be 84 years since a government-appointed body, the Weir Committee, recommended a comprehensive programme of electrification. And that assumes the projects actually got under way in 2015, which experience suggests is implausible.
Britain continued to build steam locomotives until 1960. Meantime, a third of the British route miles that are electrified use the third-rail system, first described as obsolete in 1904.
Two of the main lines from London, those out of St Pancras and Paddington (God’s Wonderful Railway), are by some distance the most important non-electrified railways in Western Europe. It will be difficult and expensive to upgrade these routes as they stand because other countries abandoned diesel high-speed trains long ago, and Britain would have to bear all the costs of developing a new version.
We don’t yet know how Britain will be able to generate electricity, if at all, by the second half of the twenty-first century, though it seems safe to rule out diesel fuel as an option. We don’t even know how we might be able to get around. It is, however, very likely that in a densely packed area like Europe, the most effective and sustainable method of inter-city travel will be something that looks very like a train.
In a country as small and crowded as Britain that is doubly true. By 2050 the automobile industry may well have refined the technology to produce a motor car that neither depletes the planet’s resources nor pollutes its atmosphere. Non-polluting cars cannot, however, solve the problem of congestion. Despite the plodding progress of the railways and the artificially low fares offered by budget airlines, internal air travel within England has become an absurdity. And that is increasingly becoming true of travel between London and Lowland Scotland.
It would be hard to design a nation better suited to modern rail travel than Britain: it is a natural hub-and-spoke country. London is an overwhelmingly dominant power in the land. The trunk lines radiate out from there; so do the major suburban lines; the need for complicated crosscountry journeys is much less urgent than in, say, Germany, where as in the US, there are plenty of cities contending for influence.
Yet a high-speed railway map of Europe is already taking shape. Britain is represented by one remote spur, the line optimistically known as High Speed 1, connecting London to the Channel Tunnel. This was finally completed in 2007, a mere 205 years after the idea of a tunnel was first mooted. By early 2009, the government had experts researching the idea of High Speed 2 from London to the North. There was no prospect of it happening in anything other than an unimaginably distant future: 2027, according to the Conservative Party even from the comfort of opposition.
One must allow for three factors: the difficulties of building through the British countryside; the weary fearfulness that afflicts a governing class with a long record of disastrous management of major public projects; and the temptations of short-termism that inevitably afflict here-today gone-tomorrow politicians whose main aim is not to be gone until the day after tomorrow at least.
Britain has never been able to reconcile the past and the future. That’s the disaster.
CHAPTER TWO
PENZANCE
And so, to explore the subject, I started wandering, and a strange thing happened.
I arrived at Abergavenny, the nearest station to my home and a place I try to avoid. Going from there to the junction at Newport and then from Newport to London increases the possibility of being late exponentially. Both the half-hearted little two-to-three coachers that arrive here and the high-speed train to London then have to be on time. And of course, one of the wonders of the privatized railway is that the one no longer waits for the other.
But here was the strange thing: I didn’t care any more. I wasn’t going anywhere – the idea was simply to move. I had the freedom of the railways – a two-week Rover ticket – valid everywhere on National Rail services except the Heathrow Express, and the Heathrow Connect service between Hayes and Harlington and Heathrow. (I loved that Hayes and Harlington bit; it made the place sound so enticing.) First-class, second-class, whatever. Eight hundred and sixty quid, a bargain. All I had to do was to make two rush-hour return journeys from London to Glasgow, making sure I had the free first-class Virgin breakfast, and I was practically in profit.
As it was, I made seventy-seven separate journeys. Long ones, short ones, lovely ones,
vile ones, packed in sardine cans, sprawled out in luxury. And was I late? Not once, not within the railway industry’s definition that doesn’t count delays of less than ten minutes (five on short trips). And certainly never eleven minutes late. Not in seventy-seven train journeys. The perversity was unspeakable.
Because I was free: free from schedules and deadlines and meetings and pressure. If I couldn’t catch one train, I’d get another somewhere else. The very notion of punctuality became an ethereal kind of concept. So I was always punctual.
This new self looked at Abergavenny station through new eyes. In the days when the town had three stations, this one – the old Great Western Railway station at Monmouth Road – was ‘much the most handsome’, according to Biddle. Another Italian villa, he says, though in this case there was no sign of Ms Binoche even in my imagination. But that didn’t matter. It was a perfect spring morning. The sun was poking through the young ash leaves; the potentilla and periwinkle were in bloom on Platform Two; and the Blorenge, the mountain to the south-west, was standing sentinel over us as the mist slowly cleared. It was lovely.
And the Arriva Trains Wales service to Cardiff Central was on time, or to put it another way – as they are obliged to do on Welsh stations – the train to Caerdydd Canalog was officially Ar Amser. In reality, it was three minutes late, but who was counting? This was a four-carriage train, different types of carriages – leased under the bizarre system that was another creation of privatization – hastily spatchcocked together, presumably in anticipation of a large turnout. For once, it was almost empty.
A recorded message enjoined us to ‘familiarize yourself with the safety notices in the passenger saloons’. In my lightheaded mood, with few people around, I was unperturbed by the funny looks I was getting by wandering around. Also, I loved the idea that we were in a saloon. So I obeyed the instruction. My saloon had fifteen different safety notices, some bilingual, some not.
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