The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Bizarrely, one of the most authentic-looking ‘steam’ locomotives on the line actually had an internal combustion engine concealed inside it. This 4-4-4 ‘tank engine’, called Blacolvesley, still survives and holds the record as the oldest internal combustion railway locomotive in the world. And so we roll on through sometimes-rickety tracks to Moreton Pinkney, where if you listen carefully you might pick up an American drawl from sightseers on their way to nearby Sulgrave Hall, ancient home of George Washington’s family.

  Look out for a big junction coming up, linking in with the Great Central line to Marylebone opened in 1899 and the last main line built in Britain. Thank goodness for the GC, for without the connections here to London the SMJ might have expired even earlier than it did. The spot was famous too for the occasion in March 1916 when a train pulled by SMJ No. 3 was buried overnight in a snowdrift that piled up, according to the locals, as high as the twenty-fifth rung on the signal-box ladder. Without food, passengers stayed warm by drinking coffee made with hot water drained from the locomotive boiler. One passenger claimed it was superior to that served in the station buffet at Stratford.

  Indeed ‘Make Do and Mend’ should have been the inscription on the heraldic arms of the Stratford-upon-Avon & Midland Junction. At the next calling point, Byfield, a donkey was used to pump water for the locomotives, trotting round in a circle harnessed to a pole. Staff keen to speed up the train would commandeer a horse from a field, which would double the donkey’s productivity. But then the railway had a soft spot for horses. The directors removed barbed wire from the trackside so that the steeds of the many local hunts would not get injured. They also issued keys to the trackside farm gates to the hunt masters so they could tally-ho across the neighbouring fields without obstruction

  But pause a minute. We are entering Warwickshire already, running parallel with the Great Western main line to London at Fenny Compton – twenty-two miles along the route from where we started. No great friend to the SMJ, the Great Western offered a connection here, but the SMJ trains had to reverse from their separate station. As it happens there’s no one waiting or alighting on the platform today, so we’re already steaming onwards to the Civil War battle site of Edge Hill, where for a short period the Edge Hill Light Railway, an even more tragic lost cause than the SMJ, had a connection. We don’t need to travel down the Edge Hill Railway now, since we shall meet its eccentric owner and chief engineer, Colonel Holman Stephens – ‘patron saint of lost railways’ – in Chapter 14 of this book.

  Kineton station was legendary for many years for winning first prize in the SMJ station garden competition, but this is small beer compared to tiny Ettington’s lofty place in the SMJ pantheon. At this next station along the line keen-eyed passengers might get a glimpse of the shimmering water of two lakes set in manicured parkland. Remodelled by Robert Adam and set in grounds landscaped by Capability Brown, this is Compton Verney, the palatial seat of Lord Willoughby de Broke, one of the line’s senior directors, famous for his lavish staff parties.

  In the years running up to World War I special trains would convey the workers to Ettington station, from where they were required to walk two miles to milord’s seat. A silver band played, group photographs were taken and a meat tea was served on the lawn. But beforehand the workers were ushered to attend divine service in the family chapel, surrounded by monuments to the Willoughby de Broke family. The singing of ‘Onward Christian Soldiers’ followed by ‘O God Our Help in Ages Past’ was particularly appropriate, given that the railway was even at this stage struggling to stave off its own death. The sermon, preached by the aptly named Reverend Liveing, drew comparisons between steam engines and men. Which, asked the vicar, was the quicker to run out of puff?

  Not that the staff were always ready to doff their caps. One of the more bloody-minded drivers, Dick Paget, who was famous for wearing farmer’s breeches aboard his engine, one day spotted Lord Willoughby handing a tip to the guard. The train was then late as a result of picking up a horsebox and missed its London connection. Lord Willoughby demanded of the driver why the lost time could not have been made up. ‘Ah,’ replied the cheeky Paget, ‘you greased the wrong end of the train for that, my lord!’

  Yawning Yettington was the nickname for the area around the station before the railway arrived. But no opportunity for snoozing now, since with a roar and a rare burst of speed a banana train flashes by with a couple of panting engines, double-headed on the front, on its way to London from Avonmouth docks with one of the few profitable loads the railway ever carried. No one was ever sure whether the ‘banana line’ nickname was a compliment or an insult (as in banana republic). As for our own train, progress continues snail-like until at last here is a glimpse of the spire of Holy Trinity church and the turrets of the Shakespeare Memorial Theatre, which burned down in 1926. When news of the blaze spread, the Stratford stationmaster fired up the com-pany’s ancient Merryweather fire appliance. Fortunately it wasn’t needed.

  Now, just a short rumble over the six-arch viaduct across the Avon and we’re wheezing into the platform at Stratford. Don’t look too closely at your watch, though. It took 94 minutes to cover the 70 miles on the main line down from London, but another 83 minutes for the 38 miles to Stratford. The best thing might be to retire to the refreshment room – known as the Shant after the places during the construction of the line where the navvies would sing their shanties – and to ponder over a bottle of the local Flowers Ale why the Bard’s name, which generally guaranteed the commercial success of even the most modest Stratford product, failed so dismally when applied to the Shakespeare Route.

  Throughout most of the life of the line the trains plodded on, mostly undisturbed by the outside world, and there were few brushes with fame. The SMJ touched the hem of royalty only briefly, when in 1909 Princess Marie of Schleswig-Holstein paid a visit to Stratford. The arrival of the American ambassador, William Reid, in the same year went off with more of a bang, since the local newspaper reported the discharging of some sixty or seventy detonators along the line, while the locomotive carried British and American flags on the front with a headboard reading HARVARD. The ambassador had come to open Harvard House in the town, with its connection to John Harvard, founder of Harvard College.

  There was probably never a time in the SMJ’s history when rot couldn’t be said to be setting in, but the decline certainly accelerated when in 1927 a canny entrepreneur spotted a way to circumvent Stratford’s moral guardians, who wouldn’t allow films to be screened on the Sabbath. The religious scruples of the SMJ didn’t allow Sunday trains to run either, but the new Stratford Blue bus service was happy to take punters in their droves to neighbouring Evesham to go to the talkies. Bus competition had arrived. Why bother with train travel on other days when you could be picked up near your front door?

  There was a brief renaissance for the railway during World War II, when the line came in handy to transport raw materials and munitions, to divert the occasional troop train and to serve a nearby airfield. There was a minor drama when a Wellington bomber crashed across the tracks, but luckily an approaching goods train was halted in time. But after the war it was back to (little or almost no) business as usual. Passenger services between Stratford-upon-Avon and Broom were withdrawn by the LMS in 1947. And then the axe finally fell on the rest of the line. Its historian J. M. Dunn described how he took a journey in May 1951, when the train ‘consisted of one bogie composite coach only, hauled by a Midland 0-6-0 tender engine, and the passengers could have been accommodated in one compartment’.

  And so, on 5 April 1952, the grim reaper set the scene for the final journey. The Stratford Herald headlined its story MAYOR DRIVES THE BLISWORTH FLYER, and the very last train carried over 200 people – probably as many in total as had travelled in the previous twelve months. As it pulled away from the station, all the engines in Stratford shed blew mournfully on their whistles. A British Railways official blustered that the line would ‘still have a bright future’ – whic
h nobody quite believed. In fact there was an Indian summer for part of the line, that section westwards from Woodford West. From the early 1950s night-time trains (five in each direction, six days a week) conveyed semi-finished steel products, scrap metal and coal between the Great Central main line and the Western Region at Broom Junction.

  After the opening of a new south-facing spur at Stratford in 1960 up to a dozen freights daily in each direction, including fast fitted freights from York to Bristol and South Wales, gave the line some hope for the future. Additionally, since the war regular iron-ore trains had continued to run from Byfield and Blisworth quarries to Woodford yards and Blisworth exchange yard. But like every good thing in the short life of the SMJ, it wasn’t to last. Beeching’s cynical rundown of the Great Central main line, a serious shortage of signalmen and the slump in production in the Northamptonshire iron quarries saw to that.

  As the shadow of final closure fell in 1965 – just before the arrival of the track-lifting trains – the line was to have its final fling. The Queen Mother was visiting Stratford – not Brutus-like to bury the remains of the SMJ but to celebrate the restoration of a local canal. The Royal Train was scheduled to carry her home at the end of the day from the old SMJ station, now in such a state of dereliction that British Railways resurfaced the platform especially for this one distinguished visitor much to the fury of the local rail unions. But then logic has never mattered in the history of this beleaguered railway.

  ‘Such, then,’ wrote J. M. Dunn ‘was the SMJ. Through many tribulations and under various names the old “East and West”, which began its career in 1864 and was “in Chancery” five years later before a mile of line was opened, struggled and survived. Its allies were no better off than it was itself; and The Shakespeare Route looked better on the map than it could be in fact. All the same, for part of its life the railway was managed with an enthusiasm that deserved a better fate than it received – long life without prosperity.’

  The early directors would have been delighted with Dunn’s plaudits, but the story doesn’t quite end there. Deep in the heart of Warwickshire, near the tiny village of Fenny Compton, a parish of 797 souls, one small rusty section of the SMJ still exists, over which the occasional train gingerly makes its way. This is the very first section ever built, extending a few miles along to the next village of Kineton, whose moment of fame arrived on that heady day in 1864 when Lady Palmerston wielded her silver spade amid ‘arches of flowers and evergreens’. It was the line’s first and last glorious moment.

  Don’t try to visit it today unless you are prepared for an encounter with a Ministry of Defence security guard attached to a large dog with slavering jaws. Which is why on this grey, louring winter’s afternoon I’m travelling along the old Great Western Railway line that once ran from Birkenhead to Paddington in an attempt to spot the junction with the old tracks to Stratford. With this in mind, I’m glued to the window of the 10.27 Manchester to Bournemouth Voyager service somewhere south of Leamington.

  Today’s overcrowded services on the Cross Country franchise aboard short, noisy trains may be deemed, I suppose, the modern equivalent of the SMJ. Not the Slow and Mouldy but certainly the Crowded and Comfortless. So crowded today, in fact, that the trolley lady wants to park her contraption next to the window where I am waiting for my glimpse of the final stub of the SMJ to appear. ‘Sorry, love,’ she says. ‘You’ll have to move out of the way. It’s hell along there in that carriage.’

  ‘But I can’t,’ I reply. ‘I’m waiting to see the last glimpse of Britain’s most inefficient railway pass by.’

  I think she may have taken this personally. But no time to worry, for here it is – some rusty rails branching off into the distance through some waterlogged fields.

  At the end of this line is a place that no ordinary mortals can enter – a railway graveyard full of old rolling stock unwanted by the train companies, securely guarded within a former Ministry of Defence ammunition depot. The contents of this yard are so secret that they consume megabytes of Internet trainspotter paranoia. Could it even be that there is a hoard of veteran locomotives buried secretly underground here, concealed from the prying of Google Earth satellites? Who knows? But the smell of death always hovered around the old SMJ, and how appropriate that the last bit of the line should live on as a modern Valhalla.

  As always with the Shakespeare Route, there is a ready quote to be plucked from the Bard. What better epitaph for the slowest railway in the land than Falstaff’s: ‘I were better to be eaten to death with a rust than to be scoured to nothing with perpetual motion’?

  Shame the Slow, Mouldy and Jolting’s ever-inventive PR men aren’t around today. They would probably have pasted it up as a motto on every station.

  Chapter Eight

  In the company of ghosts on Britain’s spookiest service

  Could there be anything creepier than a journey aboard a deserted train that runs just once a day through forgotten Yorkshire? Yet this zombie of the tracks opens a door into the mists of early railway history.

  IT WAS SPOOKY enough trying to buy a ticket in the first place. ‘A day return to Goole on the direct line, please,’ I ask the booking clerk at Leeds station, which is buzzing on this busy summer’s day. ‘It’s the one that stops at Hensall, Snaith and Rawcliffe,’ I explain, trying to be helpful when his gaze goes blank.

  There’s a pause, and there seems to be a bit of a chill in the air. ‘Are you sure, son? I can sell you a ticket to get there, but don’t make any plans to come back in a hurry.’ What’s wrong? I can feel the hairs bristling on the back of my neck. ‘There’s only one train a day down the line, and sometimes it doesn’t come back.’

  There are other worrying omens. Scanning for my 17.16 train on the departure board, I note it’s at Platform 17a, the furthest, pokiest platform in the remotest, emptiest corner of this bustling station. And there don’t seem to be many other passengers on this ancient Pacer train with its primitive four-wheel carriages, one of the oldest in the network. Everything about the train seems distinctly unwelcoming despite the warmth of this July afternoon. Even the guard, a small wizened man staring into his ticket machine, seems oddly preoccupied.

  Perhaps this is because the train is running late. Or maybe there is another more sinister cause, since the 17.16 to Goole has a special status in railway iconography as one of Britain’s ghost trains. These ethereal services wend their eerie way around the rail network almost entirely unknown to the travelling public and running mostly empty, since they operate at deliberately inconvenient times, often giving passengers no prospect of getting home again. They are truly ‘the trains now departed’.

  The Pontefract Line, as it’s known – from Leeds to Goole – has a single train in one direction in the morning with a solitary service the other way in the afternoon, returning to Leeds if it’s in the mood. Not a schedule for anyone wanting to get anywhere in a hurry – more, perhaps, an itinerary for the living dead. Progress tonight into the East Riding of Yorkshire may be the equivalent of crossing the Lethe into rail purgatory. ‘Skeleton service’ suddenly has a new meaning.

  Yet, zombie of the tracks though it may be, my Goole train and others like it around the country have a very real existence in the minds of the bureaucrats who control Britain’s rail system, since they help maintain the fiction that a railway line is still open for business when in reality it has been abandoned. For the price of an occasional train service with some clapped-out carriages or in some cases even a bus, the train operators are able to duck the long and costly consultation, accompanied by inevitable howls of public protest, that the law stipulates when a railway line is to be closed. This is why ghost trains are sometimes known as parliamentary or parly trains – because they supply the bare minimum of service required by statute without having to bother with a closure process.

  In this Alice-in-Wonderland world it is especially desirable if the train staff are as obstructive as possible. As we clatter over the points east out of
Leeds, I ask the guard whether the return train from Goole will be running tonight, since I don’t want to be stranded. ‘Dunno,’ he says helpfully. ‘But what about this one – surely these coaches will form the return service? ‘Not necessarily. This one might go back to Wakefield. And sometimes they’re cancelled.’ A long pause. ‘And sometimes they’re not …’

  But frustrating though it might sometimes be, a journey aboard a ghost train can offer special pleasures, especially when it prowls along a line that is seldom used today. Even the name is a window into a lost world of railway history. Parly services originated in the Railway Act of 1844, which brought in regulated services and higher safety standards after a group of stonemasons were catapulted to their deaths from an overturned third-class carriage.

  Travelling conditions for the working classes in the early days of the railways were terrible, and the companies did very little to encourage the poorer classes to take advantage of the new benefits of railway travel. The Stockton & Darlington Railway did not provide third-class facilities until 1835, and then only because it hoped to dissuade people from the dangerous practice of walking along the railway tracks. The Midland Counties Railway was typical of many early companies. Although the railway carried third-class passengers, the carriages were no more than open boxes without seats carrying sixty passengers each. It was assumed that ‘no one will go in it who can afford to go in others. The passengers will stand, they are taken as the pigs are.’ The Great Western, meanwhile, provided carriages of ‘an inferior description’ travelling at very low speeds for its third-class patrons, very often without windows in a style foreshadowing that which would be used a century later to transport victims to the Nazi death camps. Both the London & Birmingham and London & South Western Railways thought nothing of mixing their third-class passengers with ‘cattle, horses and empty wagons’. The Illustrated London News described such carriages as a ‘species of shower bath’.