The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Busying itself at the head of the train might have been one of the Met’s massive K Class tank locomotives resplendent in its brick-red livery, set off with polished brass. The fireman would be stoking hard, ready for the off and the long climb up through the tunnels to Finchley Road. The historian of the Pullman Car Company, Charles Fryer, described the journey evocatively, not only reflecting Pullman’s mission statement as ‘luxury, service and privilege’ but also attitudes of class and sex that are now frozen in the aspic of the past:

  To me it seemed the every acme of luxury travel, utterly beyond my means … only possible to the top brass of the business world, whom I saw boarding their cars and settling into their armchairs. In the cramped six-aside accommodation of a Metropolitan compartment coach, I would daydream about what it might be like to belong to the higher echelons.

  There they sat, the weary tycoons, each in his Louis Quinze chair at his own table, fingering the wine list. Softly across the carpeted floor an attendant approached them. What would Monsieur like to drink? A gin and tonic, perhaps, after the labours of the day? Each having been supplied with his own expensive beverage, their portly frames relaxed as they scanned The Times or the Telegraph. Isolated from the common herd, from the junior clerks and girl typists who thronged the platforms or squeezed into crowded compartments in front or behind, they could just stare out from plate-glass windows like goldfish from bowls and just ignore the lesser bourgeoisie.

  The only hardship suffered by the Met’s pampered customers was the necessity for bladder control, as the toilets were closed while the trains were in the tunnels of the London section. From there onwards there would be no stop for half an hour.

  During that time they would mostly nod off. Then … away into the heart of Metroland, halting at Chorley Wood, Chalfont, Amersham, Great Missenden, Wendover, Stoke Mandeville and Aylesbury. At each of these, a tycoon or two would ease himself from his seat, retrieve his briefcase and umbrella, have the door opened for him by an attendant, step out on to the platform and walk a few yards to the waiting limousine, thence to be chauffeur-driven to his mock Tudor mansion among the beechwoods. To be one of them now, instead of just a scrubby junior clerk.

  Indeed. Many worlds away this afternoon I’m beating a sweaty path through thigh-high weeds along the old track alignment back to the junction at Quainton Road, where it’s not going to be much fun standing in the sweltering heat waiting for one of the rare buses back to civilisation. How foolish you might think for the railways ever to venture this way and expect to thrive. And yet the latest news is that this quiet part of Buckinghamshire is soon to get not only one new railway, but two.

  The former Varsity Line is due to be restored and electrified all the way from Oxford to Bedford as part of a new east–west trunk route. And the path of the new HS2 is planned to pass on its ultra-fast way to the north just a few decibels away from where the Verney Arms now sleeps. But under the new plans there will be no more stopping trains at Verney Junction on either line. Perhaps it’s for the best. While the new trains race by, the quiet old junction and its Metro-land memories will continue to slumber among the brambles.

  After all, despite all the technology and speed, what modern train could trump the reassuring moment when the steward on the 17.42 from Baker Street to Verney Junction nudges your elbow to ask, ‘Would you fancy a touch more angostura in your gin, sir?’

  Rest in peace, old railway.

  Chapter Four

  The railway that touched the sky

  Beeching butchered the bleak Stainmore line over the Pennines, in its day the highest in England. But the old viaducts still stand tall, and the tales of the tough men who worked it live on as the stuff of legend.

  EAT YOUR HEART out, Settle & Carlisle Railway, with all your plaudits as the most scenic line in England, plus all your dramatic viaducts and sensational Pennine moorland scenery. How marvellous that you were saved from the Beeching closures and now stand as a beacon in the revival of historic world railways, never mind being lauded on TV by celebrity broadcasters. But here’s a rival, even grittier, just as daring in its engineering and certainly more defiant in its determination to keep the trains running through hostile northern Pennine scenery. However, unlike its distinguished counterpart, it’s gone. Dead and silent. The Stainmore railway, running for sixty-six miles east to west across northern England through the harsh landscapes of Cumberland, Westmorland and Durham, was, until it closed in 1962, the loftiest and most dramatic main line in England. Here was the highest summit on an English main line and at one time the highest mainline station too. This sensational and beautiful railway also had one of the finest views from a carriage window anywhere in the land, with a panorama over the vast remotenesses of Westmorland unfolding as the trains drifted down the hillsides from its high point at Stainmore summit. In the rankings of the Great Railway Views of Europe, this was one, in the parlance of modern travel, to ‘See Before You Died’.

  But sadly this is a tale that must be related mostly in the past tense, since the superlatives of the Stainmore railway are no more. Shut even before Beeching in 1962, it is the biggest single loss in the history of the railways of northern England. I’m reflecting on this with a blizzard whistling round my ears on the windswept Podgill Viaduct near Kirkby Stephen in Cumbria – dramatic in every sense. If you ever want a tribute to the audacity of Victorian civil engineering, then this is it: a magnificent structure 155 yards long and 84 feet high across Rigg Beck in the Howgill Fells, with its eleven slender limestone arches providing an elegant silver-grey contrast to the dazzling green of the surrounding hillsides. Although the rails have long been ripped up, the old trackbed is still there, and the mighty stones of the viaduct remain, staunch in their defiance of more than a century of lashing by the cruellest elements the Pennines can provide.

  Today there are fewer and fewer people who remember the days when the trains came this way. But it’s not too long ago that I could have been toasting my feet on the heater in a warm train compartment as I sped eastwards to Stainmore, a heady 1,370 feet above sea level, where the hilltops blend with the sky. Tragic today then that there are no longer any services – not even a ghost of a rumble of a carriage or a peep of a whistle. All we have left in these high Pennine fells are the memories. Shhh! Is that the sound of one of the Durham miners’ trains bearing the north-east’s sons of toil on hard-earned holidays in Blackpool or Morecambe? Or just a little J21 locomotive, doughty workhorse of the North Eastern Railway, struggling up the gradient with a heavy coke train? Sadly it is nothing but the wind whooping on the fells, as if to mock the grandeur that once was here.

  And the weather is ever present. No English main line railway faced such extremes as this, the harshest route south of Scotland, with snowdrifts closing the line regularly each winter. But still the goods had to get through, as this was a vital artery connecting the coal and coke fields of County Durham with the great ironworks on the west coast at Barrow, Whitehaven and Workington. In winter it was reckoned that when it was raining on the coast, then there would likely be snow somewhere on the line up in the Pennines. And when there was snow on the line anywhere, there would almost certainly be a raging blizzard on Stainmore.

  No wonder it bred a hardy strain of railwaymen willing to work in such grim and dangerous conditions, frequently having to be rescued from snowdrifts and forced to deal with the slippery wheels of long, unbraked freight trains. There was an extra frisson to the potential for danger in that the engineer of the line was Thomas Bouch, responsible for the ill-fated Tay Bridge, which collapsed on a dreadful winter’s night in 1879 just as a train was passing over it. Bouch had got the job on this most challenging of railways because his brother William was the locomotive superintendent of the pioneering Stockton & Darlington Railway, but this in no way diminishes his achievements here in this most barren of places, and his structures across the Pennines proved safe and durable to the end. The great Podgill, Merrygill, Redgategill and Smardale Gill viadu
cts still stand defiant in the landscape like monuments from the Neolithic age. The grandest of Bouch’s structures – and the one that would rehabilitate his reputation today if it had not been demolished in the barbaric anti-railway age of the 1960s – was the Belah Viaduct. Nearly 200 feet high and 1,040 feet long, it was built on 15 piers – a 16-arch gossamer structure of impossibly slim girders. There was nothing like it in Britain, and possibly nothing like it anywhere outside the fecund imaginations of the animators of Disney or Dreamworks movies.

  To understand the origins of the grandly named South Durham & Lancashire Union Railway – sweeping through the remotest of landscapes over the roof of England from Darlington on the east coast main line to Tebay and Penrith, south of Carlisle on the West Coast Main Line – I’ve hiked ankle-deep in mud across sleet-swept sheep pastures to reach Kirkby Stephen, one of the last surviving outposts of the line. OK, I’m freezing and soaked through, but what right have I to complain? These are the terrible conditions that generations of men put up with every day of their working lives to keep the trains running.

  I’m clearly made of less hardy stock, since I’ve already turned back once as a blizzard swept along the footpath into this austere little agricultural town, where the Stainmore line was once the main carrier of people and goods. Such was the blind ambition to get there first as the Victorian railways rolled out across the land, that stations are often distant from the communities they purported to serve. Kirkby Stephen suffered especially badly, as its Stainmore line station, near the town centre, was shut in the 1960s, leaving passengers to trek from the alternative on the Settle & Carlisle line up the hill, from where I’ve just arrived puffing and out of breath.

  Still, even though the trains don’t run to the centre of town any more, there are signs of rail-borne life as I make my way off the fells through squidgy fields and into a soulless industrial estate. The sound of hammering and the sight of a few rusty diesels in some sidings lead me into the former Kirkby Stephen East station of the Stainmore line. Inside, it’s a cosy shrine to the history of what once was and, if the present custodian has his way, what might again be. Here is former Newcastle University lecturer Mike Thompson, expertly wielding a spanner in the old booking hall and dreaming of the days when the trains will return. He shows me the paintwork in the station offices, newly restored in authentic railway colours with Farrow & Ball fastidiousness. How painstaking can you get?

  So devoted is Thompson that, although his home is on the other side of the Pennines at Sedgefield in County Durham, he lives in a caravan on the site. He’s joined as often as possible by his equally train-mad wife, a hospital consultant in Hartlepool, and supported by the station cats, Quaker and Oates. ‘Look at this,’ he says, proudly showing off a teak LNER carriage he is restoring from the heyday of the railway. ‘So far, it’s cost me £180,000. And these lovely luggage rack brackets. Beautiful. Four thousand pounds! See this engine,’ he says, pointing to a little Peckett industrial saddle tank, ‘that’s mine;’ gesturing to a diesel shunter next to it, ‘and that’s my wife’s’.

  As the sleet hammers on the old station roof, Thompson explains how, after the railway’s closure in 1962, the station became a bobbin factory and a woodworking shop, until he bought it (‘rather like something in the Amazon jungle’) with some chums, hoping to get the trains back running again. The railway here only lasted a hundred years, he tells me – it arrived late and left early. Contrary to popular belief, the north of England was not a crucible for the early development of railways everywhere. Sure, the pioneering Stockton & Darlington, and Liverpool & Manchester led the way, concentrating on getting goods to and from the sea as quickly and cheaply as possible. But here it was a different tale. Who would want to promote a railway in these wild Pennine moorlands – 2,800 square miles with little industry and containing infinitely more sheep than potential passengers?

  But by the mid-nineteenth century, with the first flush of the railway boom over, hungry entrepreneurs were seeking out less obvious markets, and it was in November 1856 that a group of hard-headed industrialists got together and passed a resolution declaring that it ‘was expedient that a Railway be formed to connect the extensive Coal and Ironstone fields in the East part of the Island with the important Shipping Ports and Manufacturies on the West side of the Island’. By 1857 Bouch had accepted the job of engineer for the line, agreeing to supervise its entire construction. The Tay Bridge fiasco was in the future, and optimism was all around.

  The proposition was simple. Durham produced large quantities of coal and coke, with thousands of beehive ovens that had spare capacity for coke making. The western side of Cumberland and Westmorland was rich in iron ore, with blast furnaces on the doorstep. Here was the perfect opportunity to sell coal and coke for use in the ironworks, and the Stainmore line would be perfect for moving the fuel in one direction and the ore the opposite way. Even better, the iron ore in Cleveland to the east was much improved by mixing it with the purer ores on the west coast.

  Since there were no rival railways in this desolate territory, the building of the Stainmore line raced ahead, with the Duke of Cleveland, the local estate owner, cutting the first sod at Kirkby Stephen on 25 August 1857. ‘On the day of the sod-cutting ceremony,’ reported the Westmorland Gazette joyously,

  all the shops in Kirkby Stephen were closed and the town enjoyed a general holiday. Triumphal arches and flags were everywhere and the bells of the parish church rang forth a peal. The Duke arrived at the King’s Arms Hotel at 11.30 a.m. and a procession led by a navvy with a wheelbarrow and spade was formed. The barrow was of ‘polished mahogany with handsome mouldings, polished brass nobs and felloe’. Whether the navvy who bore the barrow on his shoulders was a real son of the soil or embankment and the cutting, we are not prepared to say, but he looked stalwart and sturdy and sunburned enough.

  There were more ceremonies later in the year when the foundation stones of the three main viaducts at Tees, Deepdale and Belah were embedded. The line was opened for freight traffic on 4 July 1861 and for passengers on 8 August that year.

  Meanwhile an Act of Parliament was pushed through for the connecting Eden Valley Railway, which branched off from Kirkby Stephen, connecting with the West Coast Main Line to Scotland at Penrith. The first sod here was cut by Lord Brougham on 28 July 1857, and was followed by a procession containing sixteen banners, including those urging ‘May Westmorland Flourish’, ‘Peaceful & Plenty’ and ‘Religious and Civil Liberty’. At 2.30 p.m. a large company sat down to a lavish dinner in a tent behind the King’s Head Hotel and a ball was held in the hotel later in the day. The line opened for minerals on 10 April 1862 and for passengers two months later, with both lines becoming part of the expanded Stockton & Darlington Railway.

  Despite the tricky landscape, there were relatively few of the landslips or other tribulations experienced by engineers on other difficult lines, although there was the usual drunkenness, rowdyism and pilfering among the navvies, who earned just three shillings a day for their dirty and dangerous work – leading to the appointment of a constable (first class) to watch over the works. The policeman was to be appointed by the Westmorland and Cumberland force and paid monthly, the amount to be claimed quarterly from the railway company. The chief constable had suggested there should be four officers altogether, but the stingy railway company would only pay for one, even though his wages were a mere £1. 1s. 0d. a week plus 1s. 5d. boot allowance and 1s. a month for oil. He was also allowed a greatcoat, cape and badge, plus two pairs of ‘trowsers’ [sic], and his duties did not include the ‘preservation of game’ – which meant he might enjoy the occasional pheasant with his family!

  But not all was conflict. There was a delicious note of harmony too between the ‘invaders’ and the local population. The Eden Valley contractor Joseph Lawton, from Newcastle, married a local girl, Arabella Fairer from Warcop, and after the wedding at the local church threw a grand party, where the workers on the line caroused with the locals and a
good time was had by all.

  The promoters of the railway, despite (or perhaps because of) their Quaker background, were especially cheese-paring when it came to its civil engineering structures, spending as little as possible. Although Bouch slightly overran his budget, his economy was exemplary, with the main line over Stainmore costing a quarter of the price per mile of the average cost of a British railway at the time. The risk was considerable, since Bouch had no experience of building iron bridges, but as it turned out his two Pennine iron viaducts at Belah and Deepdale proved to be marvels of their age. The reasons for using iron trestles were the need for speed and the height. Material excavated from the east side of each of these two deep valleys was urgently needed for embankments on the west side, and the best way to get it across was to build an iron viaduct.

  The prosaic language of civil engineering fails to convey the poetry and mystique that always surrounded Belah. The inauguration ceremony in this bleak depopulated landscape at the start of construction on 25 November 1857 verged on the lyrical, as Henry Pease, deputy chairman of the railway company and a local MP, laid the foundation stone. The proceedings, as described by the Durham Chronicle, were poetic indeed.

  The morning was clear and frosty, the hills of Stainmore were covered with snow and the scenery around the steep valley of the River Belah was exceeding wild and imposing. Mr J. Whitewell of Kendal addressed the audience. He said they had met amidst sublime scenery which surrounded them to see the immense gap over which Mr Bouch, the engineer proposed to leap, an effort, the magnitude of which had astonished everyone in the district. These engineers must be bold fellows to undertake this monster leap, but bold and vast as the project was, he believed … it would be accomplished.