The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  It’s a life filled with moments that ring like a bell,

  With elation the thrill of the chase;

  It’s a smile from your dad that says ‘Yes, all is well’

  As he matches the grin on your face.

  This is a hobby that never will pall.

  Tomorrow’s a spotting day. Well, aren’t they all?

  In this spirit I have chosen sixteen icons through which I unashamedly celebrate the lost delights of Britain’s railways. The following chapters are not primarily about old engines, though there are plenty here. Nor do they represent a critique of Richard Beeching, whose 1963 report led to the slashing of the national rail network – although there are many lines here over which his shadow fell. Rather, in the ‘journeys’ of my title I’ve undertaken an odyssey which took me from Preston to Paris and Baker Street to Bangkok to celebrate the best of what has gone from our railways. I’m entirely with the railway historian Bryan Morgan when he writes in his evocative book The End of the Line that ‘the words on an Ordnance Map “Track of Old Railway” have the power deeply to move me, and when I discover the scar itself I have to discover where it is going and what is left of its furniture’.

  And so I walked over the crumbling viaducts of what was once the highest railway in England; I uncovered the furthest outpost of the London Tube buried in the undergrowth of the Buckinghamshire countryside. I rode today’s fastest train from Scotland to London to summon up the great days of the Anglo-Scottish expresses. I trudged through the back streets of provincial towns to stand on the sites of old stations where the hopes and dreams of Victorian visionaries were raised and dashed. I relived the world of Rowland Emmet and William Heath Robinson on the tracks of some of the most eccentric railways ever built. I sat in a car park by the sea where the laughter once echoed from happy excursionists piling off trains from Lancashire and Yorkshire factories and mills. In all these journeys I’ve tried to re-inhabit the essential character of the railways as they once were and to distil the romance that has been irretrievably lost.

  Maybe surprisingly, I didn’t generally find what I sought on Britain’s preserved ‘heritage’ railways – booming though they are, with 108 of them currently flourishing and attracting more than seven million visitors each year. It’s true that without them none of today’s children would ever imbibe the distinctive sounds and scents of the steam age. Yet to me their reality, with a few exceptions, seems not quite genuine. I’m with Muriel Searle, author of Lost Lines, who wrote, ‘The trains puff satisfactorily enough but are dedicated to pleasure instead of running a genuine everyday transport service, for which they were built. They carry tourists, but no farmer to market or housewives to the shops, pet dogs on leads, but not crates of live hens; a modicum of holiday baggage in some instances, but not punnets of Cheddar strawberries to Bristol or crates of Clark’s shoes to John o’ Groats.’

  For me the essential flavour of the railways of the past is often best divined standing on some overgrown embankment, beneath the ruins of an ivy-covered viaduct or amid the last fragments of some grand city terminus such as the old Euston or the demolished Birmingham Snow Hill or Nottingham Victoria, gently reconstructing the humanity and the grandeur that was once there. If you wait long enough between somewhere and nowhere, the past can often return with surprising clarity. Even a high-speed journey to Paris on the Eurostar helped resurrect for me the ghosts of the glamorous days of the old boat trains. Likewise a delicious lunch on one of today’s weekday trains to the West Country was a journey back to the great days of the splendid restaurant cars of the golden age.

  Meanwhile, we must be cautious about over-egging the nostalgia. Compared with the ‘good old days’ there is so much that is better about the modern railway. As I write this, sitting in front of me is the ABC Railway Guide from February 1953, with its well-worn buff cover and adverts for Lemon Hart Rum and Punch magazine – as familiar in the homes of our parents as an old Bible or prayer book. We may regret their passing, yet it paints a dismal picture of the train services of even the recent past. Back then the railway journey from Euston to Manchester, for example, took around four hours with gaps of up to two hours between trains. Today there are three trains every hour taking half the time. Name almost any journey on the main lines of Britain and the story is mostly the same.

  As well as being faster, today’s trains are infinitely safer and cleaner too – air-conditioning rather than smuts in the eye. Even the remotest branch lines have it better, with regular timetables and no more wondering when the train will come on a windswept platform in the middle of nowhere. Electronic information is ubiquitous, and if you fancy it, all today’s train companies have real-time train information on their websites and apps, as well as Twitter feeds. The world defined by the ABC Railway Guide is already in the trash.

  For all this, though, we may wonder if in fifty years’ time we would ever be able to speak lovingly of today’s railways with the warmth of Hamilton Ellis in the concluding words of The Trains We Loved:

  These were the trains we loved; grand, elegant and full of grace. We knew them and they belonged to the days when we first gazed on the magic of cloud shadows sweeping over the Downs, when we first became fully aware of the smell of a Wiltshire village after rain, or when we first saw a Scottish mountain framed in a double rainbow so vivid that no painter dared to try to record it … They were the days when the steam locomotive, unchallenged, bestrode the world like a friendly giant.

  If this is your world, read on.

  Chapter One

  The Holy Grail of lost railways

  The Slow and Dirty it may have been for some, but the old Somerset & Dorset remains, for its many devotees today, the most romantic and alluring of all the vanished lines of Britain. Did its origins in Glastonbury help weave the spell?

  BLINKING THROUGH THE darkness, I’m half a mile on foot into one of the longest and most notorious railway tunnels in Britain, deep under the hills south of Bath. But the only puffing to be heard is from cyclists exultantly whisking through the gears, Chris Hoy-like, as they swish along the old trackbed. This is a miraculous transformation of an old railway line, in which the Combe Down Tunnel of the old Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway has been turned into Britain’s most unusual cycle way. Who would imagine that this was once such a smoky and ash-filled inferno that train crews would pee on the coal to keep down the dust before entering and lie on the floor with their overalls over their faces to prevent suffocation.

  But then there has always been a magic about the old S&D – still nearly fifty years after its closure the holy grail for enthusiasts of abandoned railways. The most romantic, the most alluring in the tug of its nostalgia, this most magical of lines is associated too with the magical village of Glastonbury. Never mind the Settle & Carlisle, the Liverpool & Manchester, the Stockton & Darlington or any other famous railways with double-barrelled names you care to mention, the Somerset & Dorset rides high permanently in the pantheon of nostalgia.

  All those other ‘joint’ lines with similar names have melded into the mists of time. Who now remembers the old Midland & South Western Junction, lovely though it was, running in rural splendour through the spine of southern England? The venerable Midland & Great Northern, full of Norfolk seaside memories of yore, still has its loyal following. But, ah, the S&D! At the mention of the name, grown men and women go misty-eyed and fumble for their Specsavers wipes. Where were you that early spring day in 1966 when the S&D shut for ever? You can be sure that every rail enthusiast worth their enamel badges has a view.

  So how can it be that a rail byway – chronically loss-making for most of its life and dubbed the Slow and Dirty or Shabby and Doubtful by its passengers – should acquire such mythical status? Never mind that this seventy-one-mile backwater from Bath to Bournemouth was briefly dubbed the Swift and Delightful by one employee. (It was reckoned that he had either received a bung from the management or was declared insane shortly afterwards.) It is a story of high drama and b
ig personalities, whose names still resonate today.

  Here is proud Victorian entrepreneur James Clark, inventor of the sheepskin slipper, who founded the eponymous family shoe firm in 1825, still one of Somerset’s most important industries. It was Clark’s vision in seeking an outlet to transport his products from Glastonbury to the sea that led to a proposal for the establishment of the line in 1851. On the other side is another old Somerset dynasty, the Waugh family. The novelist Evelyn Waugh’s grandfather spoke out against the railway after the army of navvies engaged in its building had terrified the family nanny while out for a walk with the pram. Add too one of the unsung visionaries of the Victorian era. Robert Read, the company secretary of the railway, with his big beard and sparkling eyes, may not be much remembered now, but without him the railway could not have been built, and would not have survived into the twentieth century and thus into today’s mythology.

  At the risk of heresy, we may even include the good Lord himself. According to Somerset legend, after the Crucifixion, Joseph of Arimathea, uncle of Jesus Christ, sailed up the Bristol Channel into an inland sea that extended to Glastonbury – the mythical Avalon – where he planted his staff, which became the Holy Thorn. There are those who reckon that he may even have brought his nephew along in person during the lost years between Jesus’ boyhood and ministry. Could ‘those feet in ancient time’ that walked in Blake’s words ‘on England’s mountains green’ have trodden what would one day become the tracks of the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway? There are some diehard S&D fans so unswerving in their faith they would probably swear it to be true!

  Even so, there was wasn’t much glory or holiness about the S&D’s progenitor, the little Somerset Central Railway, built across a bleak turf bog the fourteen miles from Highbridge to Glastonbury. The sneerers derided it as going ‘from nowhere to nowhere’, although this didn’t deter a vast procession on its opening day – 17 August 1854 – carrying banners proclaiming ‘Railways and Civilisation’ and ‘Where ther’s a will ther’s a way’ [sic] winding around the ruins of Glastonbury Abbey to a spacious tent where a ‘cold collation’ was served to 500 people, followed by three hours of speeches, along with 800 ‘working class dinners’ served in yet another tent.

  But these were optimistic times, and before long the line was heading from somewhere to somewhere. The tracks were extended to the tiny port of Burnham-on-Sea, with a steamer link across the Bristol Channel to Cardiff. Robert Read, driven by his family motto ‘Res non verba’, was dreaming of even bigger things, with an eye on the neighbouring Dorset Central, whose tracks were working their way north from near Poole. But could the two ever meet up to create a major route running from the Bristol Channel to the English Channel – particularly when built in the opposing gauges of Britain’s two greatest railway engineering geniuses: Brunel’s 7 feet ¼ inch and Stephenson’s 4 feet 8½ inches?

  An ingenious solution was found in laying one set of tracks within the other – a bit like one of the madcap schemes from Heath Robinson’s surreal 1935 cartoon book Railway Ribaldry – although it didn’t need to last for long, as Brunel’s dream of a broad-gauge Britain was dead by the 1870s. Meanwhile, the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway, as it had become, was not just running coast to coast, but even advertising a service from the Bristol Channel to France, leaving Burnham at 8 a.m. and docking in Cherbourg at 6 p.m., just ten hours later. It was an astonishing achievement for a little undertaking with just one main line, and a journey time that could not be achieved even by the most ambitious of high-speed trains today.

  But there were even grander plans still. Work began in 1872 on an extension to Bath, creating a money-spinning link from a tiny junction bearing the quaint name of Evercreech with the Highbridge branch, linking in at Bristol with the Midland Railway main line to Birmingham to the north. In the middle of nowhere it might have been, but little Evercreech Junction – in the minds of the dreamers – was to become the Clapham Junction of the west. And there would be a tantalising harvest of black gold to be reaped in the rich coalfields around Radstock along the way. At least that was the idea.

  But it was one thing building a railway across a former seabed on the Somerset levels, and another blasting a route over the formidable Mendip Hills, where 3,000 men smashed their way through rock, twisting and turning to find negotiable gradients to Masbury summit, 811 feet above sea level. It was a fearsome and audacious enterprise that terrified the locals. Arthur Waugh, Evelyn’s father, whose own father was a country doctor at Midsomer Norton, painted a vivid picture of the construction in his autobiography, One Man’s Road, recalling how the peace of his favourite walk, which he took regularly with his nanny, was shattered, with the countryside scored by ‘a long and scarlet wound and loud explosions … Several of our favourite trees were lying on the ground; the earth was turned up; boards, wheelbarrows and the boots of loud, rough-voiced men had beaten down the primroses into a pulp of red soil.’ A swarm of navvies apparently shouted profanities in the wake of the perambulator, forcing the horrified and red-faced nanny to flee in embarrassment.

  The new line was judged by others an engineering triumph, but the builders of the original dead-flat railway may not have appreciated the degree to which Somerset is one of Britain’s counties of greatest geological contrast. This is a rare place where mushy sea-level bogs jostle shoulders with bleak and unforgiving rocky hills. The cost of two years’ blasting, the construction of seven viaducts and four tunnels, along with many cuttings and embankments, as well as buying new engines, exhausted the company’s finances. Crushed by the sheer weight of their overambition, the directors were forced to sell out, doing a deal with the mighty Midland Railway to partner with the London & South Western Railway. This was a marvellous chance for the brass-nosed money men of Derby to extend their empire deep into the south-west, much to the fury of the Great Western, whose turf was being invaded.

  Ironically, this shotgun marriage spawned a moderately successful railway, with beer, coal, bricks and other hardware carried from north to south as well as a burgeoning holiday trade taking advantage of growing leisure time for the toiling masses. For the workers in the mills of Lancashire and metal-bashing factories of the Black Country, the S&D was the conduit to a precious week’s holiday on a sandy beach in the sunny south. A journal kept in 1910 by J. Thornton Burge, the stationmaster at Templecombe, published in the Railway and Travel Monthly, records no fewer than 200 trains and engines passing his signal box in twenty-four hours on a peak summer’s day.

  Even so, the charms of the S&D remained those of a predominantly rural backwater. Because of the line’s isolation the staff were a close-knit bunch. ‘Family spirit’ were words constantly used in personal recollections by employees along the line. It was a quality that defined the ethos of the railway, since fathers, sons, uncles and cousins staffed the engines, the signal boxes and the booking offices and handed their jobs down through the generations. Drivers were even allowed to have their own personal engines and would take them to the railway’s works at Highbridge for repair and collect them afterwards.

  As well as keeping morale high, the closeness of the community allowed much flexing of the rule book. A favourite jape among crews was to grease the rails of the opposite track while in a cutting and then to discharge a vast cloud of steam. When the next train in the opposite direction hit the cloud, its wheels would spin helplessly. When the steam cleared their colleagues were also helpless – but this time with laughter. Crews were especially fond of their jimmies, home-made hooks that held down the blast pipes of the engines to improve their performance – highly illegal, of course. Alan Hammond records in his book The Splendour of the Somerset & Dorset Railway how a locomotive was driven through an engine-shed wall one day when the chairman of British Railways Western Region was doing an inspection. The damaged bricks were swiftly put back in place and nothing was ever said.

  This is not to downplay two very serious accidents on the line. On 7 August 1876 fifteen people died in
a head-on collision between Radstock and Wellow, and on 20 November 1929 the crew of a goods train was overcome by fumes in Combe Down Tunnel, killing the driver and two other staff. The train ran out of control, crashing into the entrance of Bath goods yard. But mostly the safety record was good, with one locomotive superintendent, Alfred Whitaker, inventing a much admired system in which a token could be passed on automatically from the locomotive to the signalman, thus avoiding two trains being on the same section of single track at the same time.

  For most of its existence life along the line generally bumbled along in its usual slow and dirty way. A train would sometimes come to a halt in the middle of nowhere, much to the bemusement of passengers, while its crew picked mushrooms in a line-side field before frying them with bacon and eggs on a hot shovel in the firebox. Another perk for staff was the clutches of eggs retrieved from bird crates after their live cargoes had been released from pigeon trains. There were other oddities. If you listened carefully outside the waiting room at remote Masbury station you might discern the strains of ‘Praise my Soul, the King of Heaven’ as the porter played the harmonium at Sunday evening services there. The community surrounding little Shoscombe and Single Hill Halt was still inaccessible to buses until 1966, and for thirty-six years you would have found the Misses Tapper, later Mrs Beeho and Mrs Chivers, ready for a chinwag in the booking office, which they ran like a community centre.

  But somehow there was more to the S&D than another secondary railway marooned in yokel world. There was always that dash of quinine, that twist of lime that gave the railway its distinctive flavour. The liveries, for instance, were among the smartest of any railway in Britain, with engines and carriages alike painted in smart Prussian blue lined out in gold, contrasting with polished brass set off with a smart crest and scarlet buffer blocks. The staff meanwhile turned out in snazzy green corduroy.