After the weekend, the weather perked up again and I discovered the trains of East Anglia. In the early days of privatization, they were run by a small operator called Anglia Railways which was a bit quirky and very well-liked. So of course it had to go – dumped in 2004 in favour of the giant National Express. In keeping with the spirit of open government fostered by New Labour, the Strategic Rail Authority, which was then in charge of such decisions, refused to divulge its reasoning. Anglia said it was simply outbid by miles.
Even more than the others, National Express is insanely obsessed by its corporate identity. The night it took over the East Coast service from GNER, another operator that tried to preserve a sense of style, it spent its time childishly putting its own naff stickers over GNER’s rather classy-looking emblems. Still, I thought, give this lot its due: the bosses are not wreckers nor the most wanton cost-cutters, and the East Anglian trains remained do-different, as they say around here, and served very decent food including, if you were lucky, afternoon tea. And the stations were now painted a rather pleasant shade of Cambridge blue, though doubtless another colour would be along in a minute.
The main-line trains had a certain eccentricity too: they creaked like old tea clippers heading out of east-coast ports, bound for the Indies with a brisk wind in the mainsail (even if they were only heading into Colchester for connections to Clacton). And there were these mysterious signs on the platforms: ‘Platform staff are available to despatch trains.’ And all this time I had assumed they were just there to stand around looking useless.
The weather had perked up again now, with Constable clouds sweeping over the trees and the square, solid church towers which peeked from behind them. My friend Simon Barnes had insisted I should take the line from Lowestoft to Norwich, and my gosh, he was right. East Anglia cannot compete with the mountains of Mallaig (though I definitely saw a hillock somewhere). But for sheer English-rose loveliness, this was my favourite journey. It was a springtime evening of limpid clarity, and we crossed the water meadows by the Waveney to reach Somerleyton.
Somerleyton! The very name has a dreamy quality. It also has a place in railway history because Somerleyton Hall was the home of Sir Samuel Peto, one of the great Victorian railway contractors until he went bust in the 1866 crash and had to flee to Budapest. The oaks of Norfolk stood out against a sky that began as sapphire (or at least National Express corporate blue) before slowly turning violet. I love the railways. Did I mention that?
And the next day, something even better happened. I timed my exit from Norwich to catch the National Express afternoon tea. Thin-cut sandwiches. A scone with very rich cream. And there it was on the table: An Individual Pot of Strawberry Jam.
Through Needham Market, with its mysterious chimneys and towers like a miniature Gormenghast, and Stowmarket, which itself does a nifty line in cherry Madeira cake. I added them both to my list of favourites. They joined Glasgow Central, Lancaster, Birmingham Moor Street, rebuilt like a film set, tarty Sheffield, Church Stretton in Shropshire, with its floral displays and its sign indicating latitude and longitude (just in case the driver is lost), classical Huddersfield, which could serve as the capitol of a small but pretentious American state (Britain perhaps?), Kents Bank on the Barrow line with its splendid awning and its heavenly view, and remote Dolau on the Heart of Wales, lovingly maintained by the handful of locals.
Splendour, splendour everywhere, as Betjeman wrote in a completely different context – after birdying the par-four thirteenth at St Enodoc. How he would have loved this journey, and the scones and jam. It all seemed too good to be true . . .
Reality Bites
And it was: far too good to be true. As late as 11 November 2008, the company public relations office was still churning out self-congratulatory press releases: ‘National Express East Anglia has a great reputation for its restaurant service’. On 18 November it announced that the dining cars were being axed. ‘Passengers wanted smaller meals and snacks served at their seats,’ a spokesman told the Guardian.
Oh, sure. Two days after that, the company announced – in common with the other companies – its annual round of way-above-inflation price increases. ‘Passengers wanted higher fares and worse treatment,’ as the press office would put it.
It was said that the restaurant cars were losing £10m per year, which is a totally absurd statistic: it also costs money to provide seats, roofs, walls and other post-1840 fripperies. It is impossible to measure how many people go on trains because they actually still provide the occasional smidgin of civilization not available on motorways.
One of the nasty surprises of privatization is just how dreadful firms like National Express have been in offering any sense of style or pride or even marketing – all the things that private enterprise is supposedly good at. The original Great Western had locomotives called Pendennis Castle and Lord of the Isles. First Great Western, to take one example, has Environment Agency and Oxfordshire 2007. These are people with no class.
If you think well of Britain’s railway companies for a second, they will turn round and prove you wrong. Standing on Leeds station, I was struck by a big double TV screen showing that all the trains for the next hour or two – about fifty of them – were allegedly on time. I thought this was magnificent enough to be worth a picture and whipped out my camera.
Up strutted a junior jobsworth, full of institutional paranoia and his own importance, to denounce me as a potential terrorist. ‘Show me those pictures!’ ‘Why?’ ‘You could be photographing the pipes!’ The railway magazines regularly report how the handful of 1950s boys who still care enough, as pensioners, to spend their days on station platforms writing down train numbers are forever being tormented by these clodpoles.
After that, I added Leeds to my list of most loathsome stations along with the Sunderland dungeon, which (in contrast to Hudson’s now redundant Athenaeum) makes even Birmingham New Street seem like the gardens of Arcadia. There is also Plymouth, which would be ugly enough in its own right were it not overshadowed by Inter-City House, a 1960s tower block so monstrous and run-down that it would disgrace the streets of Pyongyang. If ever you get into a telephone argument with a First Great Western call-centre employee, bear in mind that any wish that the roof might fall on their heads could come true at any moment.
You can even sense the decay of Britain’s railways in its most hyped, most treasured, most Betjemanesque possession. Yeah, I quite like St Pancras too, though I think the whole rebuilding project was soused in its own self-regard. And it is not obvious who gets the benefit. Passengers for Paris and Brussels are confined to the grim undercroft, deprived of daylight and the architectural delights of W. H. Barlow’s restored roof. And those wishing to travel on the old Midland Railway have to walk beyond the trainshed, about halfway to Luton it feels like, to catch a sluggish diesel to Derby or Sheffield. Low Speed 1.
Instead, I took a Virgin train back to Lancaster, and this time there was long enough to hear the calm wrecked by an endless whine of hortatory recorded announcements. I crossed it off my list of favourites, and with relief caught the train for the four-mile trip to Morecambe, which somehow takes up to thirteen very long minutes. This did not improve my mood.
It is a disgusting journey: Britain’s vilest train, a Class 142 Pacer, travels the country’s vilest line, making a noise like a pile driver as it creeps from one short length of rail to the next: Bang! Bang! Bang! Bang! It arrives at a new station the size of a bus stop, the old station having been transformed into an ‘arts centre’ (Coming up: Alvin Stardust) and a particularly nasty theme pub, from which the staff were largely absent, possibly to avoid complaints about the food.
I had fancied staying the night at the refurbished art deco Midland Hotel but I was a month too early – or possibly not, judging by some reports I have subsequently seen of it. The hotel looked terrific, like the Queen Mary run aground on a savage shore. It is hard to imagine this enterprise being a success because, quite frankly, it’s in Morecambe
, the most horrible town I encountered.
The guest houses that were open were run by jailers who came to the door brandishing bunches of keys and an expression of extreme suspicion. It took me several attempts to find a place that would take me, in a room with no lock or hot water. The general store next door had security measures suitable for a jeweller’s shop in the crack-dealing quarter of Detroit. This shop did not sell jewellery. Or anything much.
I retreated home to wash Morecambe out of my hair, travelling via Holyhead, which was not a convenient route. But I had wanted to pass this way ever since I read George S. Measom’s 1867 publication:
The Official Illustrated Guide to the Midland Great Western, and Dublin and Drogheda Railways, via London and North-Western Railway, WITH A DESCRIPTION OF DUBLIN, AND AN ACCOUNT OF SOME OF THE MOST Important Manufactories in Dublin & in the Towns on the Lines.
Not only does this book have this most magnificently terse title, it also includes the following wonderful sentence: ‘Ten miles from Caernarvon is the small, rude village of Llanberis, remarkable for the vast rocks beneath which it lies embosomed.’ Embosomed! What a word! Surely only two books in railway history have ever managed to get that in.
Unfortunately, the old London & North Western main line to Holyhead goes nowhere near either Caernavon or Llanberis. And the 1635 back to Cardiff, now operated by Arriva Trains Wales, did its best to go nowhere near Holyhead either, starting out 300 yards away from the buffers and the ticket halls, as though holding its nose. Holyhead is almost as dingy as Morecambe, but not as snarly.
The service from Holyhead to Cardiff could be described as the national train of Wales, linking the towns of the north with the nation’s capital. Every nation needs a crack express and this one took a mere four and three-quarter hours to cover the journey, not much longer than Edinburgh to London. That journey just happens to be 393 miles and Holyhead to Cardiff is 253, or 190 for a self-respecting crow. No one had yet given this a name to match the Flying Scotsman, so we had better try. Welcome aboard the Limping Welshman.
Lots of nations would be proud of such a train: Liberia, Somalia, Equatorial Guinea, the list goes on. However, the politicians of these countries would jib at the fact that the three major junctions on the service, Chester, Crewe and Shrewsbury, are all in another country. There was no dining car; I never even glimpsed a trolley which is always a regret on Arriva Trains Wales because there is a slim chance of meeting their star employee Paul, who flogs his limited range of sandwiches with a surreal spiel worthy of a grander setting: ‘Anaconda! Thomson’s gazelle! And . . . um . . . egg.’
Oddly, the dining problem was being addressed at that very moment. Against the trend and against their own normal approach to investment (pardon?) and customer service (was-sat?), Arriva Trains Wales had decided to institute one daily train that’s a fraction faster, with a first-class-cum-dining car. Since the members of the Welsh Assembly are the group most likely to use this service regularly, one can only interpret this as an attempt to keep them onside pending the renewal of the franchise.
I could hardly complain about the pace myself since one of my main objectives was to clock the station sign as we passed through Llanfairpwllgwyngyllgogerychwyrndrobwllllantysiliogogogoch. I got distracted and missed it, which didn’t offer me much chance of ever reading the signs at Ayr, Ash, Ely, Lee, Lye, Ore, Par, Rye, Wem or Wye.
There was not much else to see on this run in Wales. From Anglesey you can look across towards embosoming Llanberis. You can catch one of the Britannia Bridge lions if you’re very quick. But the sea is largely invisible because the wall is just at view-blocking height.
South of Shrewsbury, a young man, evidently on his way to what he believed would be a pleasing weekend, was on his mobile to the object of his ardour. ‘I’m sweating like a pig here,’ he said, not very romantically. ‘Are you happy I’m on the way down?’ The answer to that must have been equivocal. ‘I’m on the train now, aren’t I?’ he snapped. ‘Wait for me when I get down. I don’t want none of your boyfriends there.’ He relapsed into an understandable silence. Next to him there was a group of teenagers, less angst-ridden. ‘Did you fuck Matt Savage?’ one said. ‘No!’ the girl cried indignantly. ‘Oh,’ came the knowing reply. ‘It was Nick Daniels then.’
The Shropshire part of the run is quite attractive, and this part of the country is full of pretty, bad railways rather than just pretty bad ones. I love the slouching Severnside run from Newport to Gloucester, but it is best not to be in a hurry. Oxford to Worcester and Hereford has its charms, though the journey is frequently interminable, sometimes literally so: much of the route was single-tracked to save money and the slightest mishap leads to exponential delays to which First Great Western sometimes respond by dumping passengers at some wayside station.
Personally, I boycott the line; my friend Matthew Hancock and his brother Chris relieve their frustrations by keeping a special misery diary. ‘2 November 2007,’ reads one Perrinesque entry. ‘Four hours late: hit a pheasant, Charlbury. Compensation not given. They did offer two custard creams.’
As I Was Going to St Ives
Back in Cornwall I took the little line from Liskeard to Looe, which had the narrowest of all escapes from closure, being reprieved by Barbara Castle in 1966 with just a fortnight to go. Platform 3 at Liskeard is effectively a separate station from the one on the Cornish main line and seemingly a world away, restored to Great Western chocolate-and-cream yet still with the same stream of announcements: ‘Luggage left unattended may be destroyed by the security services,’ boomed a voice, as though the Bomb Squad was on hand for just such an eventuality, although the only people around were both outside the station confines having a smoke.
It’s a delicious journey. Rabbits scurried away from us, through bluebells and great willowherb. Then suddenly – at Coombe Junction – the train stops, and the driver walks the length of the train to take us in the other direction while the conductor gets out and changes the points so we can negotiate a hairpin bend of Alpine proportions. Between 1879, the line’s opening, and 1901 passengers had to walk up this hill. Now the train does the nearest thing to a three-point turn. The conductor said he enjoyed the chance to take the air. Springtime filled the carriage, and Cornwall was alive with birdsong.
‘I’m not going to fucking sit next to you,’ said a boy loudly.
‘Fuck off, then.’ It was his big sister, I guessed, the dead spit of Vicki Pollard: pallid breasts pouring out of a pink T-shirt, fat arms, dangly earrings, sour face.
We went past a limpid stream – the East Looe River – past campion and wild garlic. The stream became a river and the river became an estuary. Then I spotted an egret, the west country’s most visible symbol of global warming. But in most respects, this was how rural branch lines used to be: quiet, eccentric, gorgeous, marginal. We travelled over old short rails without the ghastly pounding of the Morecambe line: duddle-duh-duh, clackety-clack, duh-duh, clack-clack. Vicki and the boy were snogging now, to the rhythm of the rails. This did not, I thought, necessarily rule out the brother-sister theory.
That night I took Cornwall’s other improbable branch, St Erth to St Ives. Beeching tried to close this too; indeed Flanders and Swann sang of it as though he had. Yet there is hardly a more environmentally essential line in the country, since St Ives is almost unreachable by road: in summer these trains can be jammed solid. The route from the exotic, almost tropical-looking station at St Erth to the coast was the last broad-gauge route to be opened, in 1877, more than thirty years after Brunel had lost the argument. Yet it travels over a rocky promontory where there hardly seems enough width for a standard-gauge track, never mind one of the Great Western’s seven-footers; it is impossible to see how it was done.
The road, such as it is, lies to landward; the line hugs the coast, high above miles of sandy beaches. In our fragile single-carriage, smaller than a bendy bus, we seemed so insubstantial, as though we could be blown away by a single puff. The light was declini
ng gently, and the sea was slowly fading to black; I reflected that this might actually be the loveliest line of all. ‘It is lovely,’ said the conductor, wistfully. ‘Mind you, on one of the diagrams we have to do this trip, there and back, thirteen times in a day. You get a bit fed up with it then.’
It was in St Ives that I suddenly started to understand all those phone conversations I had overheard and all those I normally suffer when trying to read in what are supposed to be no-mobile compartments (a restriction the otherwise cowed and bossed-around British habitually ignore). Away from the station, walking by the harbourside, I passed a man who was bawling into a mobile phone at a volume others reserve for the quiet carriage. He was about seventy, from Birmingham or thereabouts, and was talking, I surmised, to his son. ‘Look, Broyan,’ he yelled, ‘Joost appreesee-ite it. She’s doing well. She’s feeling better.’ It sounded as though his daughter-in-law had been ill, mentally rather than physically perhaps, and the relationship was under terrible strain.
It was a conversation of delicacy and family intimacy, which – I guessed – he had felt obliged to have away from the guest house and prying ears. Yet he had no concern at all about the presence of passers-by. On French trains one is never bothered by fellow-passengers’ phone calls, because they conduct them in a discreet hush. And I realized that the use of mobile phones is just an extension of the old silence and hostility of British railway carriages. The British are oblivious to the people around them, as they always have been. They’re just noisier now.
Umerji
Twelve years after Virgin brought their reputation for customer care and service to the railways, I took the 0646 from Euston to Glasgow, which is self-evidently one of Britain’s most important trains. What used to be called a crack express.
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