The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  The very last train was scheduled to leave Lynton at 7.55 p.m., arriving at Barnstaple Town at 9.22 p.m. The train was joined by Lynton Town Council and thirty members of the public. The town band played ‘Auld Lang Syne’, and to the sound of exploding detonators and prolonged whistling from Yeo and Lew on the front, the train finally set off. More than a thousand turned out in the pouring rain at Barnstaple to pay their last respects – and after the flashlights had popped, the locos finally backed off into the night, much to the relief of the crews, who were anxious that coal and water supplies were running low. For the L&B’s diehard enthusiasts, the eighty years since have been an extended period of mourning.

  Even that great north Devon author Henry Williamson, author of Salar the Salmon and Tarka the Otter, brought along his children for a last farewell. ‘Goodbye, little railway,’ he wrote in his book The Children of Shallowford. ‘The children loved you.’ The North Devon Journal was so moved that it published a poem of its own (to be sung to the tune of ‘Jerusalem the Golden’):

  Oh little train to Lynton

  No more we see you glide.

  Among the hills and valleys

  And by the steep hillside.

  The fairest sights in Devon

  Were from your windows seen,

  The moorland’s purple heather,

  Blue sea and woodland green.

  And onward like a river

  In motion winding slow

  Through fairylands enchanted,

  Thy course was wont to go.

  Where still the hills and valleys

  In sunshine and in rain

  Will seem to wait for ever,

  The coming of the train.

  Alas, it wasn’t long before the scrap men arrived. Eager to avoid protests and ensure there was no possibility of a reopening, the Southern ensured that the track was lifted, the station buildings sold off and any reusable equipment put up for auction. Astonishing now, when even the most modest artefacts from the L&B sell at railwayana auctions for sky-high prices, much of it failed to reach its reserve. Locomotives could be had for as little as fourteen pounds, and much of the rolling stock was cut up on site for its scrap value. Lew, the only survivor among the locomotives, fetched the massive sum of fifty-two pounds, going on to a new home on a plantation in Brazil. Three coaches survived – one of them spending forty-seven years in a vicarage garden until it was acquired by the National Railway Museum for preservation.

  As I arrive back in Barnstaple tonight, the ‘Four-Faced Liar’ is chiming five (the town-square clock is thus famously maligned because of the habit of all four of its faces telling a different time). Despite the discomforts of the bus, I’ve made it in double-quick time, compared with the leisurely ninety-eight minutes and fifty-eight seconds it took the final train to steam down from Exmoor. I stroll along to the old station at Barnstaple Town, where Lyn or Exe or Lew or one of their sisters, simmering in the platform after the evening arrival, would have basked in the rays of the setting sun on this balmy evening. Hark, and you can just summon up the rattle of milk churns on the platform and the metallic clunk of porters’ barrows loaded with suitcases being wheeled along the stone flags still warm from the day’s sunshine. There’s a whirr of wires from the old London & South Western wooden signal box (still there, unchanged from 1935, and now doing service as a school office) as the signalman raises the semaphore for the final arrival at 7.26 p.m. from over the hills and far away.

  The reality tonight is somewhat different. Dodging the HGVs and following the course of the ring road which has subsumed the railway through Barnstaple, I manage to trace the course of the old line through a car park until it peters out appropriately in a scrapyard. But peering up into the hills, past where proud drivers prepared their steeds in the old engine sheds, much of the route of the old trackbed is tantalisingly still there, snaking ever upwards to where the Chelfham Viaduct timelessly stands sentinel – proud guardian of the line’s memories. Will it come back to life again? I think of the words of Driver Pete, a thousand feet back up on Exmoor: ‘Our dream is to rebuild the railway all the way from Lynton to Barnstaple. After all, if we intended anything less, we would have to rethink our name.’

  On 30 September 1935, the day after the closure, the stationmaster at Barnstaple Town placed a wreath on the buffer stops with a poignant message in the words of Shakespeare: ‘Perchance it is not dead but sleepeth.’ And why not dream? In the nostalgia-fuelled landscape of railway enthusiasm anything and everything is possible, and sometimes even comes to pass. Talk to the L&B’s most passionate present-day enthusiasts and you will even find those who believe that one day Lew will be brought home triumphantly from the South American jungle, like some long-lost survivor from a forgotten war.

  But we might also sensibly heed the words of one of the modern historians of the line, Chris Leigh: ‘Even if the little engines and their coaches could be created and all the obstacles across the right of way removed, no preservationist can turn the clock back. The Lynton & Barnstaple lived and died in the first half of the twentieth century because that was where it belonged. A large part of its charm and character came from the era in which it lived, and the way of life for which it was created, and that most important, mystical ingredient could not be recreated.’ We should pay heed, he says, to the ‘old adage that distance lends enchantment to the view’.

  It is not known whether the great French writer Marcel Proust ever took the little train to Lynton, although he is known to have been fond of reading railway timetables. But his words may provide an epitaph for the old L&B: ‘Remembrance of things past is not necessarily the remembrance of things as they were.’

  Chapter Ten

  Engineering genius in the scrapyard

  So many of the fiery marvels of the steam age were lost for ever, sent prematurely for scrap. Let us mourn them, including Sir Nigel Gresley’s Cock o’ the North, the Patriot, the mighty Big Bertha and the steam engine that thought it was a diesel.

  IT’S CURIOUS HOW religious imagery has always lent itself so happily to the railways. The Great Western was known as God’s Wonderful Railway, and grand stations such as St Pancras are labelled cathedrals of steam. That most famous of railway clergymen, the Reverend W. Awdry, author of Thomas the Tank Engine, compared the railway system to the Church of England: ‘Both had their heyday in the mid-nineteenth century; both own a great deal of Gothic-style architecture, which is expensive to maintain; both are assailed by critics, and both are firmly convinced that they are the best means of getting man to his ultimate destination.’

  Now we have the Lazarus locomotives. Nearly half a century since the last of steam on the main line in Britain went for scrap, long-disappeared designs are being miraculously raised from the dead by groups of enthusiasts rebuilding old trains for a new era. And if anybody knows how to bring back 166 tons of steel, brass and copper from the grave, it is Mark Allatt. As he stands here in the former works of the Stockton & Darlington Railway, where the skeleton of a mighty new express steam locomotive is already forming, it is no wonder that many regard him as the closest thing to a modern god of steam engines. This expansive marketing consultant propelled a project to build Britain’s first main-line express steam locomotive in modern history, and now he and his team are building another, even grander one, at an estimated cost of £5 million.

  The sound of scoffing reverberated throughout the land back in 1990 when a few enthusiasts floated the idea of building Tornado, a working example of the London & North Eastern Railway’s famous A1 Pacific class, initially by clubbing together nothing more substantial than their beer money. But they reckoned they had a good cause. In the scramble to save the giants of the track as steam came to an end in the 1960s, many emblematic locomotive types were lost, but probably none as distinguished as this class of thoroughbreds, famous for hauling great expresses between London and Scotland. Luckily, their faithful fans never gave up on them, and a coalition of sponsors and train enthusiasts emptied their
piggy banks and raised the cash to get a brand-new engine built and operational inside twenty years. Who said good old-fashioned British engineering skills were dead?

  The new Tornado is a separate breed from some patched-up rust bucket trundling up and down a preserved branch line or a toy train running on some rich man’s garden railway. It is a full-size fire-breathing main-line locomotive, built from scratch at a cost of £3 million by British engineers and capable of giving modern trains a run for their money on the fastest main lines. ‘Just remember,’ says Allatt, ‘Tornado was built as the next locomotive in the class, not as a replica or restoration project.’ Better still, Tornado, with all its modern electronic kit and conformity to such labyrinthine marvels of bureaucracy as the 2006 Inter-operability of the Conventional Rail System Directive, is even better than the originals of the class without losing any of its pedigree – the latest high-tech Porsche 911, perhaps, compared with the original air-cooled version of 1963. At the time of writing Tornado had clocked up 70,000 miles in the seven years since it was built.

  Who would have thought that when Class 9F locomotive No. 92220 Evening Star rolled off the production line at Swindon in March 1960 – until the Tornado the last main-line steam locomotive to be built in the nation that invented the railway – that any more of these antiquated machines with their direct lineage to Stephenson’s Rocket would be built again? It would not be long before Harold Wilson with his ‘white heat of technology’ mission statement took over from old-school Sir Alec Douglas-Home as prime minister, and the railways were busy dumping the dirty remnants of the Victorian era and ushering in such futuristic innovations as the double arrow logo and MaxPax coffee, as well as covering almost all their assets with fashionable-at-the-time corporate blue paint.

  In eight years time steam on the national network would be as extinct as crank-handled telephones and black and white televisions. Industrial quantities of steam locomotives, some as little as five years old, went for scrap in an undignified orgy of destruction. The romance had gone out of our lives. There could hardly have been a sadder day than 11 August 1968, when thousands of weepy middle-aged men lined the tracks in the north of England as a couple of dilapidated engines (one, Britannia Class Oliver Cromwell humiliatingly stripped of its original nameplates) were spruced up to run British Railways’ last ever main-line steam train from Liverpool and Manchester to Carlisle and back. The following day the BR politburo issued an edict banning steam on the national tracks for ever, and only the most ardent trainspotter fantasist would have believed that we should see the likes of a shiny new express steam locomotive on the main line again.

  But never underestimate the power of British nostalgia and the devotion to the steam engine of the nation that invented it. Historian Roger Lloyd, writing in the 1950s, distils the attraction beautifully:

  The slow humming in the distance, swelling fast to a grand fortissimo, and the shriek of the whistle adding to the din as the great engine rushes her train through the station, and the fading into silence until only the tapping of the last pair of wheels over the rail joints is heard – these common sounds and sights owe the thrall in which they hold us all to the fact that a steam engine does something that no other piece of mechanism succeeds in doing. It makes energy visibly and audibly impressive, and it seems to have an endless hold over the human imagination as it does so.

  And so, as the last steam locomotives in revenue service ran in 1968, all over the nation railway fans, their enthusiasm undiminished by years of struggling to preserve the branch lines slashed by Beeching in the early 1960s, were regrouping to save the last of steam for the main line. And no matter how perforated by rust, never mind how many parts missing (wheels, cab fittings, rivets, buffers gone – not a problem), many locomotives survived. The scramble to preserve every last steam one was helped by a canny scrap dealer in South Wales called Dai Woodham, St Dai as he became in the iconography of steam preservation. He stayed the execution of the 215 crippled wrecks he had assembled in his weed-infested graveyard, while cutters’ torches were busy preparing their less-fortunate sisters in other scrapyards for the smelter.

  His actions may not have been entirely motivated by philanthropy, however. The canny Dai stopped cutting up steam locos, as it was quicker, easier and more lucrative to scrap wagons instead, while the steamers were stockpiled against the day when the price of scrap warranted their dismantling. During the 1970s and up to the 1980s, every so often a steam locomotive or two would be broken up when the wagon trade was slack.

  One small boy at the time – these days elevated to the official in charge of Britain’s locomotive collection at the National Railway Museum in York – told me, ‘My parents will confirm that a little boy cried every time he read about that in a magazine.’ Anthony Coulls’ traumatic boyhood experience is probably not dissimilar to that of many grown men today. As it turned out, the venerable Dai in the end also became nostalgic about the inmates of his scrapyard. Most railway enthusiasts today would agree that the South Wales scrap man deserved his Rolls-Royce in the end.

  Whatever the facts, the Baron of the Barry scrapyard now has an assured place in the annals of rail preservation, but the result of his endeavours turned out to be mixed, with a vast oversupply of the types of locomotives that happened to be around at the end of steam, and a dearth of others. Many of the later types were former Southern Railway engines still operating on the main line at the end. On a more pragmatic note, these later Southern types were less appealing to the scrap men, since there was less money to be had from their steel fireboxes, as opposed to the copper linings so beloved of the Great Western. (Some of these wrecks are still waiting to be restored to steam half a century later. And it doesn’t seem likely that they will ever be, as rust consumes their innards and the now-elderly men who raised the funds to save them pass on to the great scrapyard in the sky.)

  At the same time, only a single locomotive from the London & North Eastern Railway had passed into Woodham’s hands. And although the British Transport Commission, charged with retaining for the nation the best of Britain’s locomotive types, had done its best to build up a representative collection, some suspected a bias towards certain railways. Sure, the LNER’s finest, such as the record-breaking Mallard and the fast freight locomotive Green Arrow, were saved. But it was left to a private individual, the industrialist Alan Pegler, to preserve that railway’s iconic Flying Scotsman – even more sacred in the pantheon, some would argue, than Mallard. And how come an engine from Richard Maunsell’s modest King Arthur class of the Southern Railway – hardly a locomotive to set the pulse racing – was chosen for the national collection over the Eastern Region’s mighty A1 Class Pacifics?

  The reasons will long be argued, but you only needed to have stood at the end of the platform at King’s Cross in the post-war years to appreciate the poetry of the sleek modern A1 engines, designed by Arthur Peppercorn for the cream of the expresses between London and Scotland. Those unconvinced might read off the liturgy of the names. Hal o’ the Wynd or Redgauntlet at the head of the Aberdonian, or Madge Wildfire storming north on the Tees-Tyne Pullman. Ah! Bliss it was to be alive, brandishing your Ian Allan ABC for locospotters in the late 1940s and early 1950s, when they reigned.

  Enter the A1 Locomotive Trust, the group that built Tornado and cleverly tapped into the romantic psyche of a cohort of middle-aged men. All those Just William kids, once happy with their duffel bags, spotters’ books, enamel badges and Marmite sandwiches – as Nicholas Whitaker, a former trainspotter, describes them in his book Platform Souls – have morphed into comfortable baby-boomers. With mortgages paid off, there is time and money to revisit their youth before it’s too late.

  No wonder Allatt and the group are now confident about performing another Lazarus-like miracle with a project to spirit up a new locomotive from the shades of Sir Nigel Gresley’s hallowed and long-lost P2 Class. Born in 1965, Allatt was too young to see the end of steam, although he is proud of a photograph of himself
as a babe in arms in front of the Flying Scotsman. But his ambitions are messianic: ‘What we’re doing here is finishing off the last major project of this great designer, who had already done so many wonderful things during the 1930s.’ The frames for the locomotive were rolled in the good old-fashioned Scunthorpe steelworks on St George’s Day 2014, overseen by Gresley’s grandsons – and, with a further dose of patriotism, it has been decided to call the locomotive Prince of Wales. Hubris? Standing here in the greasy hall of the old Darlington works, where the lathes once turned to build the trains of the world’s first passenger railway, it is clear Allatt’s vision is something more.

  Though Sir Nigel Gresley’s mighty P2s were the most powerful steam passenger locomotives ever built to run on British tracks, their lives were tragically short. Even though there is scarcely anybody alive today who ever saw one, they have acquired cult status among railway enthusiasts, who have always prized rarity above quality. Fortunately the Cock o’ the North Class has both in copious quantities. Devastatingly handsome, with smoke deflectors melded into the body of the locomotive, they were built not for speed, despite their sleek looks, but for the heavy sleeping-car expresses on the twisting and heavy gradients of the hundred-mile route between Edinburgh and Aberdeen. Gresley, with a sense of thrift befitting the son of a clergyman, hated the wasteful practice of locomotives having to double-head these 600-ton trains, so he designed a behemoth that could tackle the job on its own.