The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  In future ages these lines will tell

  Who built this structure o’er the dell.

  Gilkes Wilson with his eighty men

  Raised Belah’s viaduct o’er the glen …

  And thousands wonder at the glorious sight,

  When trains will run aloft both day and night;

  For ages past, no human tongue could tell

  Of such a structure o’er thy monstrous gill.

  Time will roll on and mortals may increase

  When those who see it now, we hope will rest in peace.

  Chapter Five

  The glamour that ran out of steam

  The Flying Scotsman, the Cornish Riviera, the Coronation Scot – such speed, such luxury! In days gone by almost every main line had its named expresses. These glamorous trains are a fast-receding memory in the corporate world of today’s franchised railways.

  IT’S EITHER OUTRAGEOUSLY late or impossibly early, depending on your point of view. Tiptoeing in the moonlight along the cobbles of Edinburgh’s Old Town to Waverley station, I dodge the last drunks weaving their way home like the cast from one of Ian Rankin’s Rebus novels. As for me, I’m bleary-eyed from a 4.30 a.m. alarm call, dashing to catch the first thing that moves out of Scotland’s capital city each day. Even the newly minted tram service to the airport is not up and about yet as I cross a deserted Princes Street to book my ticket for the 5.40 a.m. train to London King’s Cross.

  With electric motors whirring, the coaches of this IC225 train are already waiting for me at the end of Platform 11. But this is no ordinary service. Though the carriages of the 05.40 may be trying their best to look indistinguishable from the corporate grey East Coast electrics that plough up and down the line to London all day, there’s a treat for passengers with the energy to walk to the front at this unearthly hour. Resplendent in purple is a locomotive with the famous flying thistle symbol on the front, and painted on the side in foot-high letters are some of the most magical words in the lore of the railways: FLYING SCOTSMAN.

  If the train could speak, it might add, ‘Yes, and I’m the oldest named train in the world in continuous service and the fastest train from Scotland to London this morning, taking just four hours from city to city – even faster than those fancy tilting Pendolinos over on the Euston line.’ But it’s a bit early in the day for triumphalism.

  This morning’s Flying Scotsman is the direct descendant of the famous Scotch Express of 1862, which would imperiously leave London’s King’s Cross and Edinburgh’s Waverley stations simultaneously at 10 a.m., taking ten and a half hours for the journey, including a half-hour stop for lunch at York. It acquired its name officially in the 1920s, when the west and east coast routes to Scotland abandoned their agreement not to compete on journey times, and the London & North Eastern Railway launched a non-stop service over the 393 miles between London and Edinburgh. The inaugural non-stopper, on 1 May 1928, was hauled by A3 Class No. 4472 Flying Scotsman and broke the record for the longest non-stop rail journey on the planet, though the journey still took nearly twice as long as the schedule of my train today. (I must heed the niceties for rail buffs here, and point out that the train and the locomotive, though frequently confused, are not the same thing. The Flying Scotsman locomotive is part of the British national collection; the Flying Scotsman train is what I’m on today. Can a locomotive be a train? Well that’s another story, although I’m sure doctrinal theses are already being written on the subject.)

  Over the years the Scotsman was in the vanguard of almost every increment of modernisation on the railway. From the outset, passengers could pay a shilling to listen to the radio over headphones before strolling to the onboard barber’s shop for a trim or to the cocktail bar for a pre-lunch G & T. Corridor tenders were provided for the locomotives, so that the crew could be changed midway to keep up the speed. The train was one of the few namers to keep going during the war, and the Flying Scotsman brand was promoted throughout the British Railways era as the premier named train on the network. Its centenary in 1962 was marked by a special train launched with a ceremonial send-off by the Lord Mayor of London, inaugurating a speeded-up six-hour service between the English and Scottish capitals operated by the new Deltic diesel locomotives, the most powerful things on the tracks.

  On privatisation in 1994, the entire east coast route was named after it by the incumbent franchise holder, the Great North Eastern Railway, which dubbed it the Route of the Flying Scotsman – a legend borne on every carriage. Recently the train was given a makeover by its last operator, East Coast, which decked out the locomotive and driving trailer with purple highlights and gave an extra tweak to the accelerator, with the aim of bringing back a ‘touch of glamour and romance’ while restoring the rivalry with its old foe, the west coast route. (Though a foe no longer, since Virgin, the west coast franchise holder, has taken over running the east coast line, too.)

  But we have to admit this morning that it is not quite the train it was. There is no handsome Stirling Single on the front, or Ivatt Atlantic. Nor a brilliantly polished apple-green Gresley Pacific named after the nimblest racehorses of the day. There is no thundering Deltic diesel bearing the name of a mighty regiment. There’s not even a nameboard on the front. But at least it is still with us. Trains such as this are rare survivors indeed on our modern railway network. Long gone is the Coronation Scot, stirring hearts at Euston with its streamlined crimson and gold Coronation Class locomotives. Memories are fading now of the exotic Golden Arrow train to Paris, with an air-smoothed Merchant Navy at the head of a rake of Pullmans – uniformed stewards in starched jackets ready to fulfil the passenger’s every whim. No more grilled kippers and steaming silver pots of coffee at breakfast on the Brighton Belle. Once upon a time there were more than 130 named trains steaming up and down the land. Now just five of our modern privatised rail companies feature named trains in their timetables. We have lost something indefinably precious about train travel in Britain today.

  But a whiff of that magic can still be discerned in first class aboard this morning’s Scotsman. Can there be an experience more sybaritic than being served a freshly cooked breakfast with a glorious panorama through the carriage window of a silvery morning sun rising over the North Sea as the train speeds across the border at Berwick. Paul, the steward, is at my elbow, uttering the magic words, ‘Would you like the full English, sir?’ But there’s another ingredient, less palpable. Study the mood of all these early-rising executives, suit jackets neatly hooked above seats as they blink into their Acers, Dells and Toshibas. Although no one would dare utter the words – and certainly not in the icy social froideur of a British dawn – they’re almost certainly thinking how much of a cut above the ordinary commuter they are. The trains, the food and the seats may be identikit. There are no white tablecloths, no embossed menus, no deference from epauletted chief stewards. But aren’t we smart to have chosen the Scotsman! No wonder some of the named expresses of the past were known as club trains.

  What is it about named express trains that confers such stardust? An article in The Times in 1938 to mark the centenary of the London Midland & Scottish Railway got to the heart of it: ‘Sentimentality, snobbishness, romanticism, call the weakness by what name you please, will always make the passenger prefer to travel by a train with a name, rather than the 9.15. Though ‘few of us except boys small enough to travel on half a ticket, bother our heads much about the engine which draws us’.

  That master of the art of railway travel Paul Theroux understood this only too well, even aboard a relatively minor service through the backcountry of Mexico. ‘The Jarocho Express,’ he writes, ‘was one of those trains – rarer now than they used to be – which you board feeling exhausted and disembark from feeling like a million dollars.’ Even as far back as 1862 – the Scotsman’s inaugural year – a manual called The Railway Travellers’ Handybook guided discerning passengers to the best trains. Its author heaped praise on the ‘engine selected for the express train, the carriages the
most secure and the employés the most intelligent and trustworthy the management can select … The extraordinary momentum which is attained enables the train to dash through interposing obstacles communicating scarcely any shock to the passengers.’

  But speed was only part of it. In fact, ‘Express’ attached to a title was sometimes the opposite of what it seemed. You were mightily mistaken if you thought that boarding the Cambrian Coast Express at Paddington would get you to anywhere in Wales in a hurry. Slogging up to Talerddig summit in Montgomeryshire on a winter’s day, the speed dropped to 20 mph. Instead, the word was an invitation into a world not necessarily of speed, but of luxury, exclusivity and glamour. At their best, the named expresses imbued their cosseted passengers with a sense of privilege and superiority. Only if you were lucky did you get the bonus of some extra miles per hour.

  There is no better account of the magic of such trains than the 1947 description by the railway historian C. Hamilton Ellis of the Scotch Express leaving St Pancras in the heyday of the Victorian railway. ‘Imagine, then, St Pancras on an early summer night of 1876,’ enthuses Ellis.

  It really is an admirable thing, this new Midland ‘Scotch Express’. There stands the superb line of carriages; a twelve-wheel composite, some six wheelers – even these very superior of their kind – and a Pullman sleeping car for Edinburgh. What a Pullman at that. The name Castalia glistens in an oval-framed scroll on each side, amid a welter of panels gorgeous in gold-leaf on a dark brown base … terribly new and unblemished, she furnishes sleeping accommodation for the best people.

  He continues in an almost orgasmic tone:

  She scintillates with silverplate and gilding, her handsome bronze kerosene lamps in a coloured clerestory, shedding a warm radiance over rich panels and sleek plush. There in a little while, stately gentlemen will be cautiously extracting themselves from broadcloth and starch, fine ladies and lovely girls will be shedding stiff linen and whalebone as delicately as possible within the uneasy privacy of their green-curtained berths – save for the plutocrats who have booked the single private compartment at the end. Here, under the vast dim parabola of the roof, we see only the dignity, the elegance, the last word in travelling comfort. At the head, superbly in tandem, are two of Matthew Kirtley’s latest and finest express engines, deep emerald green and so clean that they reflect the station and signal lamps as if theirs were a vitreous rather than a ferrous quality.

  Nearly a century later the journey seemed just as glamorous when I took one of that train’s successors, the Thames–Clyde Express, on my first long-distance journey away from home as a teenage boy without my parents. In those days this was one of only two named expresses to run over the rugged Settle & Carlisle line, one of the most scenic railways in the world. Never mind that the word express could not have been more inaccurate, with the journey from St Pancras to Glasgow St Enoch taking a tardy nine hours and forty minutes. There, simmering on the front, complete with THAMES–CLYDE EXPRESS headboard, was one of the most impossibly exciting locomotives any young trainspotter could encounter. I still have its details inscribed in boyish scrawl in my notebook: ‘Royal Scot’ class No. 46110 Scots Guardsman from Kentish Town shed. V. clean! Shed code 14B.’

  Such first journeys, filled as they are with a heady mix of anticipation and trepidation, are heightened experiences for most of us, let alone a child on the verge of adolescence. For me on that day in 1962 the sight from the carriage window of the high Pennine fells bathed in evening gold and stretching as far as the eye could see was an epiphany. But it was, necessarily, a moment frozen in time. At the end of the 1975 timetable the Thames–Clyde Express would be obliterated, along with so many named trains of that era, as the commissars at British Railways headquarters in London’s Marylebone Road deemed that they no longer fitted in with the image of the modern railway.

  As my Scotsman today sighs to a halt at the buffers in King’s Cross after 153 years of service, we must mourn all the other named expresses that have departed for the final time. What a tragedy to have dispensed with the Irish Mail from Euston to Holyhead, which was honoured with its title in 1848 – the first named train in the world, even before the Flying Scotsman. This was the year the Chester & Holyhead Railway opened, and fast trains took over from the elderly horse-drawn stagecoaches that had long ferried the mail up and down the road to Telford, now the A5. More than a century of tradition was put in the bin when the train was killed off by the bean counters of British Railways’ London Midland Region in 1985. Still, we must be grateful that the original had set a trend for naming trains that became all the rage as the twentieth century dawned. Here was a new age, and the burgeoning publicity departments of the railway companies were keen to present a new image of trains as the fastest and most luxurious form of travel on earth.

  The Great Western was a pioneer in naming its own Cornish Riviera Express in 1904. Then, the Paddington to Plymouth leg of the trip to Penzance was the fastest non-stop railway journey in the world, and the company offered three guineas as a prize for the best name chosen by a reader of the Railway Magazine. As the 1930s got under way, railways around the world vied to brand their fastest trains. In the lead was the Cheltenham Flyer (the unofficial name of the Cheltenham Spa Express), which in 1932 was claimed by the Great Western to be the fastest train in the world. Not to be outdone, the LNER introduced its streamlined Silver Jubilee from London to Edinburgh in 1935, followed by its sister the Coronation in 1937. Meanwhile LMS struck back with its own streamliner, the Coronation Scot of 1938. Such beauty, such power, such speed! And all were celebrated in a host of associated promotional paraphernalia – advertisements, publicity leaflets and ‘window-gazer’ guides. The Irish Mail even had special luggage labels, proclaiming it ‘The oldest named train in the world’.

  Most of the ‘namers’ were stopped in their tracks in the dark days of World War II, as austerity put an end to such fripperies. With bombs and blackouts all around, there were in any case no trains on the network that could be remotely described as expresses. Only the Flying Scotsman, the Night Scotsman and the Aberdonian limped on through wartime – all with drastic speed restrictions. But the glory days of Britain’s great named express trains were yet to unfold as the nationalised British Railways set out to rekindle the excitement of rail travel when the nation emerged from austerity and headed into the never-had-it-so-good days of the 1950s and 1960s.

  In this brief period – before the arrival of the Ford Popular and cheap air charters to Torremolinos – a galaxy of great trains flourished: from the Brighton Belle, the Bristolian and the Caledonian to the Ulster Express and the White Rose. Special headboards were cast from aluminium and steel and adorned with brightly painted badges, shields, crests, flags and symbols. The carriages often bore roof boards proclaiming their route, and some, such as the Caledonian from Euston to Glasgow, even carried their name on an elaborately painted tailboard on the gangway of the final coach. How exciting to watch it vanishing into the distance trailing a plume of steam. There were boat trains such as the Cunarder, fine dining trains such as the Tees-Tyne Pullman and the Harrogate Sunday Pullman, trains with regal names such as the Elizabethan from King’s Cross to Edinburgh, and trains with the most workaday of names, such as the Trans-Pennine and the Hull Executive. (Whoever named this one must have been blissfully unaware of John Betjeman’s famous lampooning poem ‘Executive’ – ‘No cuffs than mine are cleaner … I use the firm’s Cortina.’)

  Even some freight trains pulled by the early diesels were elevated with titles, such as the King’s Cross Freighter and the Lea Valley Enterprise, though it’s hard to see how such labels bestowed the least bit of glamour. The most famous of these was the Condor – a fast freight between London and Glasgow – although its name did not derive from anything so exciting as the giant South American vulture. Rather, it was a prosaic abbreviation of ‘containers door-to-door’.

  But by the late 1960s the times were a-changing. The age of main-line steam was coming to an
end. The very last named train hauled by steam on British Railways was, appropriately enough, another Irish boat train – the 06.15 Belfast Boat Express from Heysham Harbour to Manchester Victoria on 4 May 1968. And with its departure much of the romance that adhered to the railways vanished, literally, in a puff of smoke. The old headboards, often greasy and battered from the steam age, were still sometimes stuck on to the front of the shiny new diesels and electrics. But they looked increasingly incongruous, since there often wasn’t a proper place to put them, shaped as they were for the cylindrical smokeboxes of steam locomotives. There seemed even less point when a new generation of multiple-unit trains came along. The front and the back of the train looked identical – as were most of the services on the timetable throughout the day. And why interrupt the sleek lines of these multi-million-pound pieces of technology with a clunky piece of greasy metal, so redolent, it seemed, of the bad old days?

  The most famous chronicler of named expresses, the late Cecil J. Allen, whose bible of named trains, The Titled Trains of Great Britain, ran into several editions from 1946 onwards, remarked in the fifth edition of 1967 that ‘with the gradual disappearance of steam power, much of the romance that attached to the famous named trains of the past disappeared also’. In the space of thirty years the number of titled trains he recorded had grown from 70 to more than 120, but by the mid-1960s 69 of these services were no longer running. Allen commented,

  It is remarkable that at the present time, when all principal trains in countries like France and Germany bear titles, British railway authorities are setting their face against the practice, and steadily removing train names rather than adding to them. The excuse offered is that the higher speeds of today make it possible for the same sets of coaches to be used on three or four long-distance runs on the one day, so that the continued use of names would involve fitting or removing carriage nameboards to a troublesome extent; moreover the tendency is towards standard schedules of equipment rather than to the running of expresses of exceptional speed or luxury. But one cannot help feeling that public attraction as well as romance are being lost in this way.