Eleven Minutes Late

by Matthew Engel

  Then the mobile rang again. There were seven people on the train: four were asleep, two were looking out of the window, one was on the phone until she shut it with a bang and it rang a third time.

  At Locheilside Susan Weir got on. She lives in the Station House (tourists aside, the highland lines seem to depend largely on the patronage of the residents of the station houses) and was on her way to the gym in Fort William. She was already unnaturally perky for this hour and was trilling away to the second real passenger of the day: ‘Morning, Eleanor. How are you doing?’

  The mobile rang a fourth time.

  There was a seventeen-minute stop at Fort William’s hideous modern station, time enough to nip outside for a smoke and to take an instant dislike to the place. The station newsagent was particularly grumpy. Since the town was put here to subdue the natives and now exists to service tourists, it may have spent its entire history in a collective state of irritation. But then I met a driver called John Hynd, on his way to start his morning turn, who told me that Fort William-Mallaig was the best stretch he knew: ‘Going in there in the evening light on a sunny September day. You couldn’t get anything better than that.’ I discovered later that John Hynd is a legend, and was chosen as Britain’s train driver of the year in 2007. He has been known to trek miles across this remote country to repair trains on bitter midwinter nights, give people eighty-mile lifts to Oban (in his car, not his train) to spare them paying £60 for a taxi, and give tourists his spare bedroom in Fort William if they have nowhere else to stay. Fort William might not be such a bad place.

  And the journey onwards was still fabulous. At Corrour, 1,338ft above sea level, where there is no public road, the conductor delivered mail and a Tesco package. Nearby was a ruined croft. Otherwise, there was no sign of habitation: the moor was unimaginably lonely, bleak, treeless, unearthly, stunning. It had been like that for several miles, and I realized my mouth had been open the entire time, in gaping admiration.

  At Rannoch we met the Fort William sleeper, the Deerstalker Express, coming the other way. By now the 0603 felt more like a normal train: someone was studying the runners and riders for Redcar and Windsor, and a man wearing a tie was working at his laptop. He turned out to be an American (I had guessed that) who commuted weekly to Glasgow from Spean Bridge (which I had not guessed).

  But the scenery was still not normal at all. The station buildings are described in Biddle’s guide as Swiss chalets, but that doesn’t do them justice. They are more like colonial bungalows. Bwana might emerge from one of the green doors puffing a fat cigar and contemplating the afternoon game-kill. At the Horseshoe Curve past Bridge of Orchy the train executes the most brilliant . . . what would you call it – a pirouette? a glissando? The world’s more mountainous railways often have a piece of engineering trickery known as Horseshoe Curve, but it’s a cliche´ that doesn’t do this one justice.

  At Crianlarich, the Crewe of the West Highlands, there is an arrangement involving complicated timings, permissions and positionings so that our train can sink itself into the rear of the 0811 from Oban. It is a manoeuvre not unlike the pre-sexual behaviour of dogs, which involves rituals so complex that is a wonder the species ever manages to reproduce at all, let alone do it every time one of them finds a way out of the back garden. The scene below was not like Crewe: it was agelessly beautiful and reminiscent of the George Inness painting, which was in the Liverpool exhibition, of an early steam train chugging across the almost pristine Lackawanna Valley in Pennsylvania.2 The Lackawanna is an industrial hellhole now, and has been called the armpit of America. They never found coal in the Trossachs.

  Still there was more: we moved on to Glen Falloch before turning due south to run alongside Loch Lomond. I had been reading the account, by John Thomas, of the first passenger trip along this route, for invited guests only, in 1894:

  Waterfalls large and small cascaded into the glen from the surrounding mountains. The passengers had a wonderful view for many minutes of the great Ben-y-Glas Fall, foaming over a precipice and plunging 120ft to the rocks below with a force that sent a curtain of vapour to the tree tops. The rush and roar of water was the characteristic sound of Glen Falloch. William Wordsworth called it ‘the vale of awful sound’. Even Wordsworth the railway hater would have been impressed by the new sound that invaded Glen Falloch that day – the bark and crackle of Matthew Holmes’s little West Highland bogies as they struggled to lift their ten coaches up the glen.

  This train was of course travelling in the other direction and, even with the addition of Oban’s two carriages to our two, I don’t suppose Wordsworth or anyone else would have been much impressed by it. But the landscape was something else. We hugged the hillside above Loch Lomond, then crossed the birch-clad valley leading to salt-water Loch Long. Here is Thomas again:

  It wound along on a ledge stepped out of the mountain and just wide enough to hold the railway. A wall of freshly cut rock rose up outside the right-hand carriage windows; on the left side a precipice dropped more than 500ft to the water’s edge. The guests were thrilled at one place to find themselves looking down the face of a perpendicular wall. Through the large windows of their saloons they could see the engines nosing cautiously in and out of the crevices as they negotiated a continuous series of reverse curves.

  I was wondering how on earth they could have built this thing. Can you imagine such an enterprise? ‘Oh my God,’ said a young woman, possibly the 7am serial phone-caller. Was this a kink in time? Had she responded the way the first passengers had in 1894? Actually, she was playing knock-out whist with her friend.

  After Helensburgh Upper we were approaching the Glasgow suburbs but still it was beautiful. The final stretch of the line ran along the Firth of Clyde. Dumbarton Central had stained glass and retro globe-lamps that look as though they once they burned oil. The first clear indication that we were back in the real world was when the conductor began arguing with a woman about the precise regulations governing cheap-day returns.

  When we got to Glasgow, I was a little lost. I had the freedom of the railways for fourteen days and, for the first four days, I had a clear plan with set objectives: places to go and people to meet. I had always intended to get straight from Penzance to Thurso and back down to Glasgow via the West Highland. Now there were choices.

  I was standing at Glasgow Central station, my favourite station in Britain. It is full of rich old wood, and rounded corners, and an air of informality: the windows on the bridge over Argyle Street are almost Parisian in their jollity – gaiety, as we used to say. It was still, in 2008, an open station without the nasty automatic barriers that guard the platforms on English stations, those symbols of the distrust with which the privatized train operators regard their customers. Indeed, it could be anywhere in Europe, except England. Even the smell was enchanting: the flower stall is in the midst of the concourse, and the scent of lilies filled the air.

  The whole place hinted at exotic travel, a promise not entirely fulfilled by the 1250 to Mount Florida. I really ought to have learned by now that because a place has a cute name, that is not a sufficient reason to take a train there. The same goes for the 1447 for Jordanhill, changing at Partick. Jordanhill is a reasonably agreeable university suburb that has a railway station with a peculiar global claim to fame. As half the population of Silicon Valley could probably tell you, Jordanhill station became, in 2006, the subject of the millionth article in the English language Wikipedia. As the entire population of Silicon Valley would have guessed, that does not make it worth visiting. I was beginning to lose the plot. The weather was growing colder.

  I couldn’t resist Golf Street, though. This is one of a run of four stations near the golfing town of Carnoustie on the Angus coast that have almost no trains. They don’t even rate a proper mention in the timetable, just a footnote. According to the Office of the Rail Regulator only thirty-eight people a year used Golf Street station in 2006–07. That’s not thirty-eight different people, that’s thirty-eight entrance
s and exits, i.e. it only gets used about once every ten days.

  These figures are clearly absurd, due to inadequacies in the system of data collection. Nonetheless these are stations that would be closed down if anyone could be bothered to go through the process. A similar strategy is employed to keep other stations in a coma, like Buckenham in Norfolk (twenty-eight passengers a year, allegedly) and Teesside Airport (eighty-five a year), which sounds busy and useful but emphatically isn’t. Of course, they could always try a bold experiment and stop more than one bloody train a week there.

  Golf Street is a pretty hopeless case: it couldn’t even come into its own when the Open Championship came to Carnous-tie because the platform is too short for the carriages. These stations are always neatly maintained: never mind the trains, the signage has to be spot-on.

  Still, it was a nice run on the 1714 from Edinburgh Waverley, Golf Street’s only northbound train a day, once we got into Fife and the commuter-crush eased a bit. It’s a train that connects the city to fairways and fair winds. It ought to have a jolly name, like The Links Express: naturally it doesn’t. I was very taken with the station gardens, especially at Ladybank, and at Aberdour, which not merely had a garden but a greenhouse. I got talking to Ellen, a software engineer whose daily commute to one of the other ghost stations, Balmossie, must constitute about forty per cent of the station’s official annual usage. In fact, a bloke in an anorak got out ahead of me at Golf Street. Thirty-eight all year, then two come along at once. These statistics are phony because they are based on the stations named on the ticket, not where people actually get on and off – there is no one to sell tickets to at Golf Street, never mind count passengers. Massaged figures are everywhere on the railways: since Carnoustie is the last stop, and the possibility of fines for lateness has to be addressed, it allegedly takes a modern Turbostar train five minutes to get there from Golf Street. I walked it in six, pulling a suitcase with broken wheels.

  Next morning, I headed south of the border on the 0700 from Edinburgh to London, a train mainly chosen because of its appeal to my breakfast-fetish. A lot of Scots were heading south too because Rangers had reached the UEFA Cup final, being held in Manchester. All trains heading down the West Coast route had banned alcohol, but it had not been thought necessary to extend that to the East Coast. And certainly not at seven in the morning.

  At Berwick a prim-looking woman sitting alone in the restaurant car, reading a complex document with small print and pie charts, was asked if three gentlemen might join her. ‘Of course,’ she said. She managed to look only slightly startled when the three gentlemen lurched forward: blue replica Rangers shirts, huge forearms, shaven heads, gold bling, tattoos, bottles of Carlsberg. They started their second bottles just before 8am.

  I never did find out how this story developed. At New-castle I caught the train across to Carlisle, an unexpected delight that reminded me of childhood and the individual pots of jam. The rolling stock was old enough for nostalgia, and a fresh westerly breeze came pleasingly through the open window; we maintained a gentle, loping speed through gentle loping country lightly interspersed with contented-looking villages and contented-looking ewes.

  Leaving Newcastle, we passed another Golf Street-style ghost station, Dunston, though here the alleged passenger figures have leapt to six a day. Just past Dunston there was the most extraordinary collection of homing pigeons. At Prudhoe I saw a carving in the hillside which looked like a giant rat. We passed buddleia in bloom at Bardon Mill and the old evocatively named junction of Haltwhistle, which has a coat of arms on what looks like a Victorian water tank. I was entranced by everything now, happy to zip wherever the trains would take me. I made my way to stone-built Lancaster, most amiable and unhurried of the mainline junctions and constructed like a medieval castle, and started to scribble a list of my favourite stations putting Lancaster near the top.

  Then I got on a two-car train festooned with pictures of the Settle to Carlisle, ‘England’s Most Glorious Line’. The train was heading for Barrow but this was pretty glorious too. As we neared Morecambe Bay, where the tide comes in like thunder, a hundred black-and-white waders took wing at our approach. Then we set out over the dinky little viaduct at Arnside, scene of the annual mass trespass, towards mysterious tree-shrouded Holme Island, set amid the sands. Who would live in such a place? The answer used to be John Brogden, the man who built the railway.

  There is another improbable run from Lancaster to Leeds. Northern Rail, the current operator, gave the early morning train a bottom-of-the-barrel Class 142 Pacer, borrowed from Merseyrail who favour a garish yellow livery.3 The colour might have been obnoxious at that time of the day had it not been mitigated by the dirt. Yet it is a beautiful journey on a surprisingly expansive line, which Beeching listed for closure but failed to kill. Perhaps someone in London panicked and thought the lonely station at Clapham was the same as Clapham Junction. We pierced the silence of these gorse-flecked hills and headed through deserted country to Hellifield, still a functioning junction with that middle-of-nowhere grandeur once so common on the railways.

  But sometimes the modern railway can be evocative too. On the advice of Lord Berkeley, chairman of the Rail Freight Group, I headed next to Doncaster to stand at the northern edge of the platform. This is the hub of the nation for fans of what we used to call goods trains, largely because of the ceaseless appetite of the huge coal-fired power station at Drax, which depends on imports rather than the home-mined coal that saved the nation in wartime. (The weirdness of British energy policy had better be a subject for someone else’s book.) Something came by every few minutes, culminating in the daily Freightliner from Wilton in Cleveland to Felixstowe, apparently full and offering living proof that Britain still does have exports and delivers some of them by rail. Chemicals, steel and maybe even perfume, apparently. All in containers carrying the colours of the shipping companies as distinctive as those of fooball teams, indeed, rather more imaginative: K Line was red, GE Seaco turquoise, CAI orange, Hanjin sky blue, MSC mustard. UCS was russet and Evergreen, inevitably, green. Faraway companies with strange-sounding names. Lorries never look this exotic.

  Back north at Darlington, the duty announcer was a Texan called Ronda Franks, the wife of a local doctor, whose drawl added a hint of mystery to the evening rush. I decided not to get cross about the idea of trains to Peter-borrow and Middles-borrow. Indeed, I added Darlington to my favourite-station list, its case helped by the arches of the trainshed and a subway with entrances that would grace a ducal town house.

  The station has an old map showing the course of the original Stockton & Darlington, including the branch to Yarm, the first of all railway closures – it went before the rest of the network had even opened. But the sense of history does not extend to running trains to Stockton: there are a couple of direct trains on a Sunday, taking sixteen minutes, otherwise it takes the best part of an hour. It’s not the original route anyway. For that, you have to head the other way towards the old rail-dominated town of Shildon, which used to be home of one of the largest wagon works in Europe. Now it is a branch of the National Railway Museum. So it goes.

  It was down the line at Heighington that Stephenson constructed Locomotion No. 1 and along this very route, so the museum director, George Muirhead, told me, that it pulled its very first passenger train. Possibly along these very rails, since they sound as though they date back to the 1820s. Clump, clump, clump, clump.

  The ghosts of the past are everywhere on the railways once you start hunting. And there are ghost stations, and the odd ghost train. The best-known runs at 1128 every Saturday morning from Stockport to Stalybridge via Reddish South and Denton, two stations that have no other purpose in life, like little old ladies left entirely alone in the world except for the weekly visit from social services. This train which makes no return journey has now become a minor celebrity. For the half-hour before departure, there was a buzz on the platform reflecting the fact that most of the dozen passengers were (pause fo
r contempt) enthusiasts. Not all of them, though. There was Lawrence Cody, an ex-signalman from Stockport, who insisted that he used this train regularly to go into the Pennines. ‘It used to be every hour and it should be every hour,’ he said.

  It is not a pretty ride, indeed I can’t recall an uglier one. But the line has an obvious function as an emergency diversion round the south-east corner of Manchester. You would imagine that, on the crowded rails of the north-west, it could perform a day-to-day function too. But in 1991, just before British Rail was dragged to the gallows, a manager decided otherwise, and this line was condemned to join the living dead, keeping the one train to avoid the palaver of the official closure procedure which, aside from the costs, tends to get people excited and sentimental and inclined to start using the trains. Neither of the intermediate stations offers any cover, though Denton rates a bench and, of course, up-to-date signs. The signs, the signs, they always do the signs. Reddish South offered something far more improbable. Passengers.

  On came Alec and Joyce Moores, as they do almost every week. ‘Oh yes,’ said Joyce, ‘Week after week after week.’ It doesn’t cost them anything, with their pensioners’ passes. ‘We have lunch in Stalybridge and then we go back to Piccadilly. Reddish South is right at the centre of Reddish. It’s a good, handy little station. Reddish North, you’re actually going out of Reddish.’

  The buffet in Stalybridge is also quite famous, with eight real ales and a clientele that extends way beyond rail passengers. British Rail also tried to close that in the early 1990s. It is surprising they didn’t agree to let it stay open on condition it only served one pint a week. The Moores sipped a pint and a half of lager; I opted for a hot Bovril. It was a cold, wet Mancunian morning.