The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  The locals saw an opportunity for international fame and applied to Parliament to build what would be the world’s first steam passenger monorail. Costing £30,000, the nine-mile line opened on 1 March 1888. Unfortunately what seemed a brilliant idea in the North African desert, where conventional tracks were a problem because of drifting sand, wasn’t quite so practical in the bogs of the west of Ireland. One of the main problems was that everything had to be duplicated to prevent the trains from toppling over. For example, the locomotives, sitting astride the tracks, had to have two boilers, with the consequent doubling of maintenance. If Farmer O’Reilly wanted to take a cow to market, he had to balance it with another one – or find two pigs of the same weight. With tracks at waist height, level crossings were impossible. And workable points were a logistical nightmare. Even so, Britain’s most eccentrically engineered trains continued to run for another thirty-six years, and such was their fame that a short replica runs as a tourist attraction today.

  Many other pioneering designs went to the great scrapyard in the sky, leaving subsequent generations to pine over their loss. ‘The problem is that people have always had different criteria about what to save,’ says Anthony Coulls, senior curator at the National Railway Museum in York – the man who watches over the national collection. ‘Should it be engineering history? Or social history? People have sometimes opted for novelty or big names. Sometimes it’s a matter of who shouts the loudest. Yet it seems incredible now that the Great Western binned two of its most historic locomotives, the broad-gauge North Star and Lord of the Isles, just because there wasn’t enough space at Swindon Works to keep them.’

  Even in the modern British Railways era – after saving historic locomotives for the nation became more systematic – some decisions were made that would never be taken now. ‘Looking back it’s unthinkable that Flying Scotsman should not have been saved for the nation when it was withdrawn in the 1960s,’ says Coulls. For him, with his curator’s hat on, perhaps the most important loss of all was a representative of the Salamanca Class – the world’s first commercially successful steam locomotives, built by Matthew Murray for the Middleton Railway in 1812, predating even Puffing Billy and Rocket. The last survivor was sent for scrap in the 1850s.

  Coulls’ personal list of regrets includes The Bug, a tiny locomotive that drew the personal saloon of Dugald Drummond, the London & South Western Railway’s locomotive superintendent, along with the modern-era express engines of the London & North Western Railway. Some of its finest products – a Precursor, a Claughton and a George V Class – were all scrapped in the 1940s. Others might nominate The Great Bear, the only Pacific ever built for the Great Western Railway, and Gresley’s Hush-Hush experimental locomotive, the unique 4-6-4 10000, which was scrapped in 1959.

  ‘The benefit of hindsight is all very well,’ says Coulls. ‘Now people are asking why more first-generation diesel locomotives weren’t saved in the 1950s and 1960s. But at the time they were dismissed as smelly boxes on wheels.’ Meanwhile, more Lazarus locomotives are in the pipeline in projects around the country to resurrect the lost souls of steam. Here is an eclectic band of projects with various degrees of appeal, including resurrecting an LMS express Patriot Class, to be called The Unknown Warrior, and a handsome London, Brighton & South Coast Atlantic named Beachy Head. It’s easy to understand the fund-raising appeal of a Great Western Railway Saint to be called Lady of Legend, but do we really need another British Railways Standard tank engine from the 1950s?

  Surely it is madness to embark on all these rebuildings when there are scores of unrestored or ailing locomotives shunted into sidings at the back of preserved railways all around the country, mouldering away for lack of care. Writing about Tornado, the design critic Jonathan Glancey has perhaps the best explanation of the appeal of building afresh: ‘It is not simply that [Tornado] is a particularly fine example of an express passenger locomotive, but that she is brand new. This is not in itself a virtue, yet Tornado’s very existence is a kind of modern miracle and one, perhaps, that could only happen in Britain.’

  It is the emotional appeal that captivates Glancey.

  Not so very deep down, many people in an ostensibly digital age have a hankering for beautiful machinery, for things well crafted and honestly made; for machines not made far away by cheap and even child labour in distant lands, but by ordinary decent people in the very towns that, famous for their engineering and productive prowess until recent decades, have lost what had seemed their right to craft magnificent machines that everyone involved in their making could rightly be proud of.

  But there is yet something else even less tangible. ‘By saving these locomotives, we’re pulling railway enthusiasm back from the precipice,’ says Mark Allatt. ‘What we’re doing with these brand-new engines is to kill off the idea of railway fan as anorak stone dead. A new generation of enthusiasts is coming forward. And now,’ he enthuses, ‘we’ve got Steampunk.’ This is a subgenre of science fiction or fantasy based on the steam age with its devotees sometimes even dressing the part too. ‘It’s a renaissance,’ enthuses Allatt. ‘Even girls have got interested.’

  Chapter Eleven

  Last call for the dining car

  Crisp tablecloths, silver service and six-course gourmet meals. The railway restaurant car was once the acme of civilised travel. Now, in a world ruled by the soggy bacon roll it is all but vanished. But not quite …

  I’M ABOUT TO enjoy the ‘Golden Age of Travel’. I know this because it says so on my ticket for this morning’s day trip out of London’s Victoria station. I am settled in an armchair aboard a 1930s art deco Pullman car called Audrey, contemplating a table setting for luncheon which is at least as swank as you could find in any of London’s finest dining establishments. We’re not talking the Victoria station hotel here – decent enough maybe for a second-division plc boss to wine and dine (and perhaps have a cuddle with) his PA on the way home to East Grinstead. Think instead of true class – the Grill Room at the Dorchester, maybe, or the Ritz. On the starched white tablecloth in front of me is a dazzling array of silver cutlery, crystal glassware and fresh flowers. And, ah … here is the first glass of champagne bubbling silkily into my glass from a steward so discreet that he has gone before I notice.

  I’d arrived in London aboard an early-morning train from Sheffield experiencing what we may call without being too unkind ‘the utility age of travel’. East Midlands Trains is one of the last British train franchises (apart from Virgin, East Coast and First Great Western) to have staff routinely serve a hot breakfast (or any kind of food) to its passengers. But today, according to the train manager, the ‘kitchen is down’ so we are entitled to a ‘breakfast bacon baguette’, which is included in the price of my Business Anytime Plus first-class ticket. I didn’t see any rabbis or imams (or even bosses cuddling their secretaries), but even I – hungry as I was – found it hard to stuff what seemed like a wodge of warm cotton wool wrapped around a small piece of pork fat down my throat.

  Thank goodness for Audrey. ‘You’ll love Audrey, says the lady on Victoria’s Platform 2 who takes my ticket for the British Pullman – a four-hour canter around the Surrey Hills aboard the historic carriages of the Venice-Simplon Orient Express, which earn useful revenue pottering around the Home Counties on their days off from normal duties on the luxury trains to Paris, Venice and Istanbul.

  And indeed I do love her – every umber and cream and polished brass inch of her frame – and I’m besotted with the perfection of her jazz-age marquetry. Audrey is infused with the spirit of dining on trains. She made her debut in 1933, spending forty years with the Brighton Belle, the world’s first all-electric Pullman train, and is the direct descendant of the world’s first dining car, pioneered by George Mortimer Pullman in the United States in 1868, which was so classy that it was named Delmonico after the famous New York restaurant. Audrey has another, more British, claim to fame, having reputedly been the Queen Mother’s favourite dining carriage. The Duke of Edin
burgh is apparently partial to her too – at least it says so in the booklet on my table.

  What Prince Philip’s flirtation with Audrey has to do with the Golden Age of Travel, none of the eighty-two passengers on board, celebrating birthdays, engagements, lottery wins and ruby weddings, probably knows. But by the time we stagger back onto the platform at Victoria four hours later – after a grande bouffe of ‘Grilled line-caught tuna Niçoise’ followed by ‘Cauliflower and leek soup with chive crème fraiche’, ‘Woodland mushroom and basil-stuffed breast of corn-fed chicken’, a plate-load of British cheeses and ‘Blackcurrant and white chocolate mousse with honeycomb and almond crumble’ – we are certain that this really was The Way to Go.

  Even the old-school train staff appear to have been delivered in a time capsule from central casting. But Alan, my steward – all white gloves and starched jacket – is the real thing, his inscrutable ruddy face the hallmark of the railway stewards of old – something perhaps to do with years of proximity to hot stoves and scalding plates. ‘I’ve been serving on trains for thirty-six years,’ he tells me. ‘I started in 1988 on the restaurant cars out of King’s Cross, but sadly they’re now gone for ever.’

  Here is a chap who knows effortlessly how to avoid a ripple while conveying a bowl of steaming soup along the carriage of a moving train, but he is also a living link with one of the vanishing experiences of modern travel: the soothing clink of cutlery on china, the starched tablecloths, a smartly uniformed steward at your elbow serving dinner in the restaurant car as the scenery of our green and pleasant land flashes by through the window. For more than a century the time-honoured words ‘Last call for the dining car’ have summoned hungry passengers for sittings at lunch or dinner on trains across the land.

  Now cuisine on trains – where it exists at all – is rarely more exalted than a microwaved burger or a ‘cheese toastie’, and the announcement you are most likely to hear is ‘The onboard shop is closing at Watford.’ For many of us this is a tragedy. As the railway historian Bryan Morgan wrote, ‘Diners are much-loved things, for we never quite outgrow our childhood amazement at the idea of refreshment on wheels. The moving sunlit countryside; the strange cries from the hell-hole of the galley; the stewards trying to steer a steady course – all these impart a glow …’

  Given that Britain pioneered the railways, it took us a long time to get round to putting dining cars on trains. This was partly because early trains had no corridors, but also because of the technical sophistication in the age of coal needed to produce a hot meal on the move. Instead passengers were encouraged to order luncheon baskets at stations, which went by names such as The Democrat or The Aristocrat, depending on the quality of the contents and how much you could afford. The Midland Railway produced ‘hot baskets’, typically containing a steak or a chop with vegetables, cheese, bread and half a bottle of claret or stout. Orders could be telegraphed ahead, and small boys called nippers called out the passengers’ names as the trains came in and delivered the food directly to their carriages.

  British railway dining proper began on 1 November 1879, when a Pullman car called Prince of Wales with a fully equipped kitchen was attached to the Leeds expresses of the Great Northern Railway. Passengers reclined in velvet armchairs and rang electric bells, summoning waiters bearing trays of roast meats, fish, puddings and fruit, with crystal decanters of wine. The food was cooked over an open fire at the end of the coach, and despite teething problems, such as soot blowing onto the food whenever the train went through a tunnel, the idea quickly caught on.

  Many commentators enthused about the experience. Describing a return journey from Euston to Manchester in 1903, the Manchester Evening Chronicle reported, ‘The waiter who appears with soup says we are doing sixty miles an hour, although it is difficult to realise it. In the best West End restaurant style, fish, joint, poultry, sweets, cheese, coffee and liqueurs are produced in a magic kind of way from an absurdly small room at the end of the carriage …’ Value for money was a key ingredient. A review of British dining cars in Transport magazine around the same time commented, ‘In every respect – the selection of food, its quality and cooking and the charge made for it – the Midland Railway have left nothing to be desired. The Midland wine list is very extensive and the prices asked are very reasonable indeed.’ A chop or steak with fried potatoes, bread, butter, tea or coffee could be had for half a crown – around ten pounds in today’s money.

  Queen Victoria was not so enthused, however. Though an early fan of rail travel, she insisted that her train ran at no more than 40 mph and that it stopped at selected stations whenever she wanted to eat. Even so, Her Majesty enjoyed a cup of tea on the move, and her personal carriage had tea-making equipment installed as early as 1869. Surprisingly the mighty Great Western Railway was late on the scene, not launching dining cars until 1890. This was because Brunel had rashly signed a lease giving exclusive catering rights to the owners of the station buffet at Swindon. But he regretted this decision later, complaining that the coffee tasted like roasted corn, and wrote to the manager in 1842, ‘I have long ceased making complaints at Swindon. I avoid taking anything there when I can help it.’

  By 1914 there wasn’t a single main-line railway except the Highland Railway in the north of Scotland that didn’t have scheduled dining car services. Lunch aboard would often have been a five-course affair, with staples such as grilled turbot, roast sirloin, salmon with sauce hollandaise, bread-and-butter pudding, apple tart and crème caramel. The early waiters were aristocrats of their trade, doing apprenticeships in special sealed-off dining cars where they were trained to walk, Monty-Python-style, along a white line wearing a blindfold while the train moved at speed.

  Each route around the country had its own culinary specialities. The Lancashire & Yorkshire Railway introduced special ‘tea cars’ for shorter journeys. On the Metropolitan Railway (now the Metropolitan Line of the Tube) commuting stockbrokers could have both kippers and champagne aboard a special Pullman car to and from the London suburbs. The old Great Eastern Railway, which was the first to provide restaurant cars for third-class passengers, ran evening dining cars to almost every minor town in East Anglia, including midnight ‘supper trains’ to Essex seaside resorts

  On the Cornish Riviera Express in its pre-war heyday a steward from the luncheon car might walk the length of the train, slide open compartment doors and, perhaps tinkling a bell, announce that lunch in the restaurant car was imminent. The price was three shillings. George Behrend in his famous book on the GWR Gone With Regret rhapsodises about the white napery and ‘silverine cutlery, all emblazoned with the company crest’.

  Immaculate service aboard was taken for granted. In the Cornish Riviera Mystery, a 1939 thriller about a murder in the dining car, two of the characters are asked by the waiter, ‘Usual lunch, Gentlemen?’ The conversation goes:

  ‘What is the usual lunch?’

  ‘Tomato soup, sole and fried potatoes, apple tart and cream.’

  ‘I think that will do, don’t you?’

  But the finest-ever combination of fine dining, comfort and speed came with the great London to Scotland streamliners of the 1930s. Aboard the Silver Jubilee from King’s Cross to Edinburgh in 1938 the luncheon menu offered four courses including soup, grilled lemon sole tartare, roast mutton with redcurrant jelly, braised steak and cold pickled pork, followed by date pudding or charlotte russe. The first-class restaurant cars on the Flying Scotsman were advertised as being ‘in Louis XIV style with low-backed loose armchairs blending with painted wall panels in stone picked out with blue mouldings’. In his book Belles and Whistles, Andrew Martin describes the special Flying Scotsman cocktail served on board – incorporating whisky, vermouth, bitters and sugar – which could apparently have ‘felled a horse’.

  In the 1940s the Southern Railway designed unique ‘tavern cars’ complete with fake brickwork and mock-Tudor beams to create an olde-worlde atmosphere, although they were unpopular with passengers because they had no w
indows. Many a commuter missed their station after a noggin or two on the way home from the office. Most famous of all was the Brighton line, renowned for its grilled kippers – much loved by the actor Lord Olivier, who campaigned to save them when British Rail tried to drop them from the menu. In the train’s final days at the end of the 1960s a kipper for breakfast cost the equivalent of just eleven pence, and grilled steak, chips and peas for lunch a mere ninety-five pence. All served amid the magnificent art deco marquetry of jazz-age carriages with lovely names such as Doris and Vera. My new girlfriend Audrey ran on this train too.

  Romantic – and sexy. Many of us were lured by Alfred Hitchcock into the idea of dinner in the diner after watching Cary Grant and Eva Marie Saint in the dining-car seduction scene of North by Northwest (1959), surely one of the most erotic encounters in cinema history. No sooner has the lady ordered the trout from the menu of America’s most luxurious train, the 20th Century Limited, than Hollywood’s most famous schmoozer is lining her up for activities that might be more appropriate in the sleeping car.

  This didn’t mean one couldn’t encounter some horrid culinary experiences. At the start of the twentieth century a reviewer of the food on the London & North Western Railway complained that the boiled haddock in parsley sauce ‘was full of bones, small and watery’, while the vegetables were an ‘insult to the gastric juices’. And, from more modern times, we may remember Michael Caine, playing gangster Jack Carter, who guzzles a bowl of British Rail soup without relish in the opening scenes of the film Get Carter aboard a 1970s service to Newcastle. And while the ubiquity of the curling British Railways sandwich may have been overstated, it was not unknown for restaurant staff to stir gravy browning into the coffee. During World War II unsuspecting American servicemen were routinely tricked with watered-down beer.