The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Unusual among country railways, the S&D had its own dedicated express train – although the description is something of a misnomer, since the famous Pines Express, carrying holidaymakers from the Midlands and the north, took more than seven hours for the 248½-mile journey from Manchester to Bournemouth. Named in 1927 after the pine trees that are said to lend the resort its health-giving air, the train meandered through Birmingham and Gloucester before joining the S&D at Bath, where the Mendips led to some spectacular displays of fire and steam from locomotives storming Masbury summit with their heavy loads. Who would want to change trains in London when you could go direct by the Pines Express?

  Few engines were powerful enough to tackle this mighty train single-handed, and some astonishing locomotive combinations were turned out – unique on Britain’s railways. Here was a modern Southern Railway West Country Class Pacific bunkered up to an elderly ex-Midland Railway 4F freight engine of Victorian provenance, or perhaps a tiny Edwardian 4-4-0 locomotive of a type which had mostly been consigned to museums. At the end of the 1950s there was a living cavalcade of British engineering history on view in all its glory for anyone who cared to spectate at the lineside on a summer Saturday morning. The locomotive department even threw into the mix the eleven distinctive 2-8-0 freight locomotives specially designed for the line by the Midland in 1914, which for years had trundled humble goods trains over the Mendip banks. Like the anthropomorphic creations of the Reverend W. Awdry’s Thomas books, these suddenly discovered fame on passenger services, outclassing engines half a century younger.

  It was only at the very end that someone discovered an engine that could tackle these weighty summer passenger trains unaided. But the BR 9F 2-10-0 freight locomotives, built in the 1950s, arrived on the scene too late. The times were a-changing, as the motor factories of the Midlands churned out ever more affordable Austins, Morrises and Hillmans, and the final Pines over the S&D ran on 8 September 1962 – appropriately in the charge of 9F 2-10-0 Evening Star, the last steam locomotive built by British Railways and resplendent in green passenger livery. Subsequently rerouted via Oxford, the Pines lingered on for another five years, but its glory was gone.

  By this time the long slow loss of the S&D’s identity had become inexorable. The winding down of the north Somerset coalfield, which at one time had produced 200,000 tons a year, was a major factor in its decline. In 1973 the field would close completely, like the S&D before it. Although the line had retained some autonomy after 1923, when Britain’s railways were grouped into four big companies, the Prussian-blue locomotives were painted over with unlined black and the brilliant coaches covered in a rather drab Southern Railway green. The S&D locomotive works at Highbridge was shut, and new-fangled road vehicles steadily ate into the market for transporting milk and farm goods. Although the long-distance passenger services prospered after nationalisation in 1948, the outlook for local trains was bleak. The service to Burnham and to the cathedral city of Wells was withdrawn on 29 October 1951, the Wells branch latterly carrying a grand total of six passengers a day.

  There was a bittersweet poignancy to the celebration of the railway’s centenary in 1954, since, in their hearts, everyone knew that a way of life that had lasted so long was nearly at an end. More than 100 of the 250 living descendants of founder James Clark, many of them still employed by the family firm, travelled on a special train from Glastonbury bearing 800 people. Some were in period costume, bewhiskered and crinolined. The driver and fireman were bearded and bowler-hatted. The sun shone, the drinks flowed and a jolly time was had by all. But a dozen years later the Somerset & Dorset would be dead and gone.

  Further life was sucked out of the line when British Railways Western Region took over in 1963, rationalising services even more. Many said this was final revenge by functionaries up at Paddington for the deal done with the Midland behind the old Great Western’s back the previous century. Cynics predicted the S&D was condemned to become a withered arm of the Western Region – a moribund and hopelessly uneconomic branch line. They were right. And so the scene was set for the fall of Beeching’s axe.

  As closure loomed, official sabotage became the order of the day. Freight trains were diverted and maintenance was abandoned. Weeds ran riot on the tracks and in the flower beds of once immaculate platforms. Locomotives plodded on with minimum repairs, and when they failed they were scrapped. Timetables were made as inconvenient as possible. As Kenneth Hudson reported in 1965 in the BBC programme How to Kill a Railway, ‘Utterly meaningless connections continued to feed non-existent passengers into a “ghost” Pines Express’ long after the train was discontinued. The inevitable closure was announced for 3 January 1966 – a catastrophe for communities along the line but also for the railwaymen who for generations had given years of loyal service.

  Emotions ran high, and angry staff took matters into their own hands. On New Year’s Day a farewell rail tour double-headed by two big Class 8F locomotives was brought to a halt by the signals at Binegar. The crew stepped down into the frosty darkness to encounter local signalman Ernie Cross, standing resolutely between the tracks and brandishing a statement which he flourished in front of the cameras of the assembled press. But his one-man protest against the ‘vicious attitude’ of railway managers was futile. Although the closure was delayed by the failure of a replacement bus to materialise, it was ruthlessly pushed through just weeks later.

  The end couldn’t have been more dispiriting. The last weekend of 5 and 6 March was for the railway’s historian Robin Atthill ‘a traumatic experience for all who had worked on the line or lived near it and loved it’. As the line played out its final hours 111 years after its birth, it was not just the last call for the Somerset & Dorset, but the end of steam in the West Country, and for many it signified something even more profound – the extinguishing for ever of all that was romantic about the railways of Britain.

  In a bid to cling on to the final elusive moments two thousand people travelled over the line aboard chartered specials pursued by streams of cars through the byways of Somerset and Dorset. ‘Every bridge, every cutting,’ Atthill reported, ‘was manned with onlookers who had made the most complicated cross-country journeys and infiltrated into the most impossible lanes to reach a bridge or crossing.’

  The fields were black with figures rushing across country bearing cameras and tripods and tape recorders to get their pictures of the two burnished green Southern Pacifics on perhaps the grandest special ever to run on the railway. The locomotives spouted columns of fire into the darkening sky as they breasted the 1:50 gradient up to Masbury summit. By contrast, the last of the service trains, one carrying a coffin, wheezed with the weight of the hordes bidding their farewells. Some wondered whether, in their run-down state, the filthy and clapped-out locomotives would even make it to the end of the day.

  Many other devotees had already said their private farewells. ‘I had made my own last journey earlier in the week,’ Atthill recorded, ‘on an afternoon of brilliant sunshine and sharp showers. At almost every station there were old friends finishing their last week’s work; dead engines filled the siding at Bath; in the shedmaster’s office, the portrait of Alfred Whitaker [the old locomotive superintendent] still glowered from the wall; soon after four o’clock a porter moved along the platform with a long pole, turning up the gas lights.’ Within days the line would be snuffed out. No longer slow and dirty but sabotaged and defeated.

  Charmed it may have been during its lifetime, but how do we explain the modern magic of the S&D, which remains the most fabled of railways half a century after it closed. This Delphi of railway enthusiasm, this holy grail for gricers, has a lure at least as strong as its grander contemporaries such as the Settle & Carlisle or West Highland Line, which were saved from closure and are still alive today. If anything, its spiritual power grows more alluring as its physical presence crumbles ever more relentlessly into the landscape – whittled away irreversibly by the elements. The Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway dead ca
ptures the imagination as potently as when it was alive, inspiring countless hundreds of articles in railway journals and with at least six preservation societies devoted to its resurrection in some form. At the last reckoning the Somerset & Dorset Heritage website listed fifty-five current titles about the line for sale. Surviving artefacts have found themselves in the auction room stratosphere, with a Bath Green Park ‘totem’ station sign under the hammer for more than £5,000 at the end of 2014.

  Perhaps the key lies in that it outlived many of its rivals and that its demise coincided with the vast swell of nostalgia that came to a climax as the Beeching closures were implemented, symbolising the end of an era for the country railway and the age of timelessness and lost innocence it seemed to represent. Then there were all those lovely station names, just reeking of Olde England: Corfe Mullen, Shillingstone, Blandford Forum, Sturminster Newton, Shepton Mallet, Midsomer Norton, Edington Burtle – and of course Glastonbury with its eternal lure.

  The mood was captured by the comic duo Michael Flanders and Donald Swann with their song ‘Slow Train’ in 1963 – an elegy for the lost world of the country railway – whose opening lyrics ran, ‘No more will I go from Blandford Forum and Mortehoe/ On the slow train from Midsomer Norton to Mumby Road’.

  In the same year Poet Laureate John Betjeman made a classic BBC film – Branch Line Railway – about a Somerset & Dorset journey, filmed in grainy black and white and tinged with his characteristic note of melancholy. Riding the train to Burnham in his battered homburg and shabby raincoat, he eulogised, ‘Forget motor cars. Get rid of anxiety. And here to the rhythm of the Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway dream again that ambitious Victorian dream which caused this long railway still to be running through deepest, quietest, flattest, remotest, least spoilt Somerset.’

  The image was burnished too by a gloriously eccentric amateur photographer called Ivo Peters, scion of the family soap-making business, who spent the post-war years chasing up and down the line in his beloved 4.25-litre Mark IV Bentley with his elderly medium-format camera. Peters produced one of the finest-ever picture portfolios of railways in the landscape – endowing the iconography of the Somerset & Dorset with an enduring lustre. Fittingly, after he died in 1989 his ashes were scattered on Masbury summit.

  Nor must we overlook that other important ingredient in the S&D mix – the nostalgic power of the childhood seaside holiday, with its capacity to bathe memory in a veneer of sunshine that never quite fades. I recall as a teenager in the 1960s escaping the tedium of a Bournemouth boarding-house holiday with my parents with a trip along the S&D from Bournemouth West to Evercreech Junction. It was an undistinguished journey behind a dirty British Railways Standard tank engine at the end of its functioning life, but I can summon with total recall the shaft of sun through the compartment window in which the dust rising from the ancient seats seemed to do a dance as the brilliant summer light shimmered through the line-side trees.

  Some other essential elements may be stirred into the alchemy. There have been few railways in England where heavy expresses were worked so hard over such difficult terrain. Unlike many comparable railways in their declining years, the line stayed purely steam-operated to the end, unpolluted in the minds of enthusiasts by the new diesels that heralded the coming era of standardisation. And right up to closure, as Betjeman’s charming film showed, the railway was a perfect period piece. There would be a coal fire burning in the waiting room at Evercreech Junction, and in spring a bowl of primroses always graced the beeswaxed Victorian table.

  There was no better way, as one writer put it, to escape into the Victorian era than to spend a winter’s afternoon at Bath Green Park station. So perfect was the atmosphere that on the day closure was announced it was being used as a set for a film of Robert Louis Stevenson’s comedy The Wrong Box, the consummate stand-in for a Victorian London terminus.

  The mood still abounds, as I enjoy the coolness of the old station after my long walk along the trackbed on my way back from Combe Down Tunnel and beyond. The Green Park buildings have been preserved, and the elegant sixty-six-foot arched roof now doubles up as a shelter for the car park of the Sainsbury’s supermarket built in the old goods yard. This was always an airy and elegant station, with its imposing booking hall and grand Victorian lavatories. Aesthetes claim its handsome classical facade of Bath stone makes a far more fitting contribution to the city’s architectural landscape than the Jacobean gables and mullions of Brunel’s Great Western main-line station along the road, although the short platforms were unpopular with trainspotters, who could find their coveted quarry out of sight at the front of long summer trains.

  These days the old booking office is a restaurant, while chic shops reflecting the laid-back image of modern Bath occupy the old platform offices. I’m desperately thirsty after my trek over the track, but instead of a greasy railway buffet cuppa I can choose from a vast range of exotic beverages, including an ‘Indian roadside tea’ or a ‘quenching coconut juice’. I select the latter from the organic juice bar in what was once the station tea room – where once the smell of boiled cabbage might have predominated. But stop! Hark for a moment … Is that hissing coming from the cappuccino machine? Or is that the engine at the head of the afternoon train? All stations to Midford, Masbury and Midsomer Norton. Destination: the mists of time.

  Chapter Two

  Final ticket for the boat train

  The exotic life and death of the Night Ferry from Victoria to the Continent, haunt of spies, diplomats, starlets and sultans. Even in today’s Eurostar era, its memory stands proud as Britain’s only truly international train.

  WHO-OO-OSH! OUR EUROSTAR train – all 800 high-tech tons of it and three quarters of a mile long – accelerates like a rocket out of London’s St Pancras. Motors whirring, it shoots out from underneath Sir William Barlow’s great arched roof, and before long we’re flashing through the outer fringes of east London. We’re over the Dartford Crossing in a trice and soon the orchards of Kent pass by at 186 mph in a blur of apple blossom. A delicious meal is in prospect, provisioned by Waitrose, the official caterer to the English middle classes. Could there be a more desirable way to get to Paris than aboard this marvel of high-speed rail technology – fast, efficient, super-smooth, connecting the capitals of England and France in just over two hours? And with all the comforts of Middle England.

  But for all the slickness, there’s something indefinable missing. Aboard these silky Class 373 Eurostar trains it’s easy to nod off – no more perfect opportunity than in the blackness of the Channel Tunnel. Suddenly I’m dreaming, but not about tackling a modern, sustainably produced meal in the minimalist Philippe Starck decor of the 20.06 to Paris; instead I’m far away, having polished off a splendid silver-service supper on a starched white tablecloth in an elegant dining car heading for an exotic foreign city.

  In this journey of dreams, we had sauntered down Platform 2 at Victoria to take the 10 p.m. Paris train. We’d perhaps already enjoyed a Tom Collins in the American Bar at the Savoy before indulging in a snifter at the station’s Grosvenor Hotel. The supper prepared by a French chef in the restaurant car, washed down with champagne and claret, was exquisite. As for the company, it seemed both mysterious and glamorous – surely that chap with the distinctive dark-haired lady at the next table in the dining car can’t be the Duke of Windsor? That swarthy fellow whispering conspiratorially to his companion – he looks uncannily like a cre-ation of Ian Fleming.

  Never mind – it’s time for bed and the short walk along the corridor to a cosy berth, where the black-gloved conductor asks if sir or madam needs anything else, before we slip between crisp white cotton sheets. Faintly, amid our dreams, in the middle of the night there are some clanks and clangs and what sounds like the moan of a steamship’s hooter and the soothing slap of waves on a shore. Though the train appears curiously to have stopped, we feel ourselves being rocked ever so gently back to sleep.

  We awake to a timpani of thuds, rattles and clangs, along
with a hiss of steam. There’s a plaintive sigh of escaping air from the rattling brake system and we emerge, with a slight thump, over a wobbly bridge-like contraption, past an unmistakably French gendarme in his distinctive uniform. In the grey dawn there’s the rumble of a mighty French Pacific, product of the world’s greatest modern steam-engine designer, André Chapelon. It backs onto the front with the alien owl-like shriek of its whistle. The driver – with his beret and goggles, looking for all he’s worth like Jean Gabin in La Bête Humaine – helps set the scene.

  With a whiff of Disque Bleu floating on the air, there’s the hum of commuter voices on the platform, since this is the fastest service of the day up to Paris. Racing through the flat country of the Nord, we are sped on our way by the many crossing keepers, often exquisitely manicured black-clad ladies of indeterminate age. And there is no mistaking where we are. On the sides of houses are louche-sounding advertisements for Dubonnet or Byrrh (‘the best liqueur’) or maybe for Dubonnet’s great rival St Raphael Quinquina.

  Paris is in sight now, and with a discreet ‘Pardon, Messieurs et Mesdames’ the conductor glances at our passports. Luxuriously, unobtrusively unheralded by the bureaucracy of immigration and unsung by any public-address system, we arrive under the great roof of Paris’s Gare du Nord. The conductor unfolds a chamois to clean the soot off the door handles before we alight. Joy of joys, this is the first time we have had to leave our carriage since we tucked ourselves in somewhere in the Garden of England.

  But this is no fantasy of a jaded modern rail traveller. This seeming idyll is how it once was aboard what remains, at the time of writing, the only truly international train in history ever to operate between England and the Continent. The Night Ferry, which ran between London’s Victoria and Paris, Brussels and Basle, was not some throwback to a vanished Victorian era; this was a grand train offering the ultimate in modern comfort: travel between London and the heart of Europe without ever having to leave your bed. Its last service ran as recently as 30 October 1980.