The Trains Now Departed

by Michael Williams

  Finding various excuses to visit this living but empty museum over the years, I once drove the evening train from Halwill and arrived at Petrockstowe so early that the crew played cards for half an hour in the station and still reached Torrington ahead of schedule. On the twice-daily trains, fireman, guard and signalman were ‘amazed’ if any passenger were ever spotted.

  Once a story did the rounds of a passenger on the line who asked the guard: ‘Do I have the train to myself?’ as the single coach was hauled in leisurely fashion behind a spanking new British Railways 2-6-2T tank locomotive. ‘Yes,’ said the man, whose face looked as though it had been chiselled out of red marble. ‘But you can’t count on it. On Wednesday we took Mrs and Miss Thomson to Halwill. They were going to Bude, you know. They’ll be back some time next week.’

  No wonder that soon the other gnarled fingers of the Withered Arm would be lopped off one by one. Goodbye, Bude, Callington, the main line to Tavistock and Plymouth, and Ilfracombe. Farewell, services to the ancient towns of Bideford, Launceston and Bodmin.

  Amid the wreckage it is astonishing that the fifty straggling miles of the North Cornwall Railway survived until as late as 1966. Economically it was an example of staggering inefficiency, yet for enthusiasts and many of its passengers, it was a beacon of old-world charm. Stopping trains averaged just 27 mph, and there were manually operated signal boxes at each of its ten stations. Just one steam locomotive, operating on the line over a fifteen-hour period, needed servicing and turning several times, involving eight men. In the background were the traffic staff, the signalmen, station staff, permanent-way and telegraph men, let alone the night shed men in the locomotive depots.

  As closure loomed, time had stood still too long for the clock ever to be put back. David Wroe, historian of the North Cornwall Railway, describes the passing of the last down train and the last up train of the day at Tresmeer in the early 1960s. It is a cameo that could equally have dated from 1900.

  Imagine a drizzly wet winter’s evening. Dim oil lamps light the platforms, local people from Launceston market preparing to walk a mile or so to Tresmeer village – some lucky to be fetched in a pony and trap or (later) a motor car. Parcels to be dropped off, Cornish voices in the dark, the single line tablets handed over to the drivers. Then, with a toot of the whistle, one ‘T9’ sets off with a resounding bark up and around to Otterham while the other drifts off to Egloskerry. Signal restored with a clank of levers, final bell codes as the lines clear and Tresmeer shuts down for the night.

  The words could be a requiem for all country railways of the period entering their final days. The pattern was nearly always the same. First the steam services would be withdrawn, followed by a burst of optimism as new diesel trains were delivered. But this was very often the harbinger of closure. The omens for north Cornwall were especially inauspicious. The locomotive on the last steam service – the 1.19 p.m. Exeter St David’s to Padstow on 3 January 1965 – was in such poor condition that it had to stop twice on the journey to raise steam, even though No. 84025, which bore the headboard LAST REGULAR STEAM TRAIN PADSTOW TO EXETER, was itself only a few years old. The freight service had already gone the previous year.

  Efficient though not necessarily clean the new diesels might have been; the timetable nevertheless deteriorated. Connections were missed and the Sunday service reverted to a Southern National bus. The line’s chronicler T. W. E. Roche undertook a pilgrimage in the final days. Under ‘lowering clouds’ he reported a scene of utter melancholy: rusted tracks, deserted goods yards, empty station buildings converted to halts. Arriving in his own vehicle, he heard staff at Wadebridge talking to the guard: ‘Car, ’ave ’ee? Us ought to charge ’n’ car parkin’. ’Tis they cars be killin’ us.’

  Roche responds emotionally: ‘I felt a wave of resentment against Dr Beeching and everyone else who was bringing about the demise of this most delightful station in this most charming West Country town.’ Soon the train onwards to the little platform at Tower Hill arrives.

  Along came the driver with a pot of tea, new-made in the signal box; the guard’s whistle shrilled and we were off … Up through the lovely country we ran and so to Tower Hill, where, wonder of wonders, one of the other passengers alighted; the guard ran up to take my ticket and waved to me as the train ran by; I stood on the platform listening to its sound growing fainter, then echoing louder again, then dying up the valley of the hanging woods, while the wet Western evening wept for the North Cornwall line.

  No one was surprised when the inevitable took place on 3 October 1966. The line’s last day was filled with sadness. As one observer describes it, ‘The younger enthusiasts gave what cheer they could to the final day’s services. The older generation bought last tickets and thronged the trains.’ As always on these occasions, the last extinguishing of lamps, the locking of gates and doors and the final replacement of single-line tokens in their machines underlined the awful melancholy of those railway closures of the Beeching years.

  All that was left of the Withered Arm were three truncated stumps. In the near half-century since then one of those stumps – the Tarka Line from Exeter to Barnstaple – has prospered, doubling passenger numbers. The western end of the old main line along the Tamar Valley to Bere Alston and Gunnislake has also done well, reinventing itself as a commuter route into Plymouth. At the other end of the line, Okehampton has scraped by, albeit with a limited summer Sunday service. Meanwhile, Padstow, Wadebridge, Launceston and Bodmin have worse connections than at any time since modern public transport was invented.

  For five decades since the last trains ran, the closed sections of the Withered Arm settled on a future of infinite decay, the worms eating away at the last bits of infrastructure, and the embankments and viaducts appearing to modern generations as mysterious as prehistoric tumuli. Then, out of the blue at 10 p.m. on 4 February 2014, the railway gods intervened in the form of the worst storm to batter the Devon coast in living memory. With an unprecedented ‘black warning’ in force, a furious sea washed away Isambard Kingdom Brunel’s historic 1846 railway to the west along the sea wall at Dawlish. Cornwall was entirely cut off from the rest of the United Kingdom, with 109 miles of track isolated and twenty-five trains trapped. The cost of the closure, until the line was reopened two months later, was reckoned to be £20 million a day.

  Back in the 1960s this would have been little more than an inconvenience. There was still a commodious service of expresses from Waterloo to Plymouth on the Withered Arm main line along the Dartmoor route via Okehampton, the fastest of which took only ten minutes longer than Brunel’s route. And weren’t the Waterloo trains much nicer, with their spacious Bulleid corridor carriages, through coaches from London to the tiniest of wayside stations, restaurant cars with generous menus, all pulled by Britain’s most modern and sophisticated express steam locomotives in the form of the Merchant Navy and West Country Classes?

  No wonder all the chatter now is about reopening a railway that the powers that be happily put in the bin half a century previously. Not so long ago anyone raising the question of resurrecting the Withered Arm would have been regarded as a deluded fantasist. Now metrics are being studied and cost-benefit analyses drawn up, part of a pattern since Beeching in which political will can suddenly become potent in raising ‘trains now departed’ from the dead. A Network Rail study in the summer of 2014 found that the entire Exeter to Plymouth line via Okehampton could be rebuilt for £875 million, a drop in the ocean compared with the tens of billions reserved by the Treasury for HS2.

  The tracks already run to Bere Alston from the Plymouth end of the line – and to Meldon Junction just past Okehampton at the Exeter end. Preparations are already well under way to reopen the line from Plymouth as far as Tavistock. Optimists say that only eleven miles of the old main line would need to be totally rebuilt. Maybe it could be done, people say, for £500 million, peanuts compared with the cost of another great storm at Dawlish. Who knows where it might end? Perhaps one day London’s well-he
eled will leave their Chelsea tractors at home to head along the north Cornwall line aboard a revamped Atlantic Coast Express to dine chez Rick Stein. Or enjoy some delicious grilled Padstow sole in the restaurant car on the way home. Well, you can but dream.

  Chapter Thirteen

  Final whistle for the grand stations

  Victims of a barbarous age, mighty cathedrals of steam such as Birmingham’s Snow Hill, London’s Broad Street and Euston, with its heroic Doric arch, fell cruelly to the wrecker’s ball. There were others, too, less famous but no less glorious. A journey among the ruins …

  HOW IRONIC. I’M on my way to visit what must be Britain’s meanest and most wretched apology for a once-grand city railway station, aboard one of the last truly comfortable trains in Britain. My newly refurbished Chiltern Railways carriage, built in the days before coaches were designed for emaciated stick insects, is commodious indeed, with generous armchairs and wide windows to absorb the view. Never mind that it is an old British Rail Mark III coach dating from the 1970s; it has been reinvented with a slick black and grey interior and Wi-Fi at every seat. Best of all, in the increasingly cramped world of modern rail travel, the seats line up with the windows. All the better to enjoy the vista of the Warwickshire countryside rolling by on this early spring day.

  Once we thought we would lose it all – hard to believe that this grand former Great Western main line over the Chiltern Hills, through the tranquil fields of Buckinghamshire and Warwickshire to Birmingham, was once regarded as redundant. This had been the hallowed fiefdom of the famous Castle and King locomotives – all burnished brass and Brunswick green – along with mighty expresses with names such as the Inter-City and the Birmingham Pullman, dashing up and down the line to London in two hours. It survived by the skin of its teeth through the closure blitz of the 1960s, though relegated to a route primarily for commuters, and terminating no longer at Brunel’s Paddington but at Marylebone, a station likened by Sir John Betjeman to a suburban public library.

  In its heyday, the vast Birmingham Snow Hill station bustled day and night with trains to and from all corners of the land. Yet inside little over a decade, between the 1950s and 1960s, it had turned ignominiously into the ‘biggest unstaffed halt in Britain’. These days the crack trains, like the Chiltern Mainline Silver service that I’m on today, don’t even bother to travel the full distance to what was once one of the most important city-centre stations outside London. Short of total closure, no grand station fell more egregiously and precipitately than this.

  Which is why I’m dodging the traffic of Birmingham’s ring roads, wending my way from Moor Street – my ‘final station stop’, in the language of today’s train conductors – to find what survives of the ashes of the old Snow Hill. Past the brutalism of New Street and Colmore Circus, here’s a pretty little Victorian arcade built by the railway as the station approach above the tunnel containing the railway. Now twee shops sell artisan bread, vintage fountain pens and brightly coloured sweets from the olden days. But don’t get lost in a reverie; prepare for a very modern shock when you emerge.

  Where the palatial Great Western Hotel once dominated is a characterless solar-glass office block above a fume-filled subterranean platform. Where the old station once stood, buzzing with the ferment of Brummie commercial life, is a depressing multi-storey car park with a large sign reading, WELCOME TO THE SNOW HILL CAR PARK – BIRMINGHAM CITY COUNCIL. Goodness, those councillors must be proud of themselves!

  The fate of the old Snow Hill is a case history of what happens when railways fall out of fashion. The 1963 Beeching Report, which promoted blinkered short-term economic demand above community need, ripped, as one commentator put it, the steel backbone out of the nation. More than two thousand stations were lost as a result. Bad enough, but in their misguided quest for modernity architects and planners inflicted equal damage on many of the stations that survived. Magnificent buildings were felled by the wrecker’s ball and deleted from our heritage with callous disregard for tradition or merit. Some were blitzed from the landscape entirely, with every trace obliterated. Even more were replaced by hideous concrete bunkers. Others were incorporated into shopping malls or car parks, dumbly commemorated by some meaningless name from the past or a redundant piece of stonework that the developer couldn’t be bothered to put in a skip.

  Although the loss of countless smaller stations was devastating enough (and not just for social reasons; many of them were minor architectural gems), there is something even more poignant, more tragic about the loss of the great city stations. These mighty termini and junctions were as emblematic in the cityscape as palaces or castles or cathedrals. But in the heart of British life they stood for something profounder still. As Jeffrey Richards and John MacKenzie point out in their book The Railway Station: A Social History, ‘The railway station, in its latter-day incarnation as cathedral, castle and caravanserai, was yet one more gigantic stage on which drama could daily unfold, casts of thousands could cavort and modern technology could convey its marvels and miracles.’

  And it wasn’t just that.

  The great termini represented the last great age of travel before the joys and mysteries and individualism of travel were taken over by the bland, prepackaged age of tourism, when long-distance flights with their second-rate movies, plastic food and attendant jet lag replaced for ever the slow boat to China and the stopping train to Samarkand. It was the last age when the railway station was an essential ingredient of every traveller’s itinerary: point of departure, point of arrival, point of contact en route with everyday life as it teemed and flowed outside the protective cocoon of the train.

  No wonder the great stations inspired the finest poets and writers. Théophile Gautier said of them, ‘These cathedrals of the new humanity are the meeting points of nations, the centre where all converges, the nucleus of the huge stars whose iron rays stretch out to the ends of the earth.’ E. M. Forster was similarly moved. ‘They are our gates to the glorious and the unknown,’ the author of A Room With a View wrote. ‘Through them we pass out into adventure and sunshine, to them alas! we return. In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter west; down the inclines of Liverpool Street lie Fenland and the illimitable Broads; Scotland is through the pylons of Euston; Wessex behind the poised chaos of Waterloo.’

  These great termini were intensely romantic places, says John Minnis, a senior architectural adviser with English Heritage who has made a study of lost stations.

  There was a sense of otherness to them, as though they were somehow detached from the outside world. True, there were kiosks of W.H. Smith’s or Wyman’s or John Menzies, selling little but newspapers, books and magazines, the stalls of the Empire Fruit Co. and the sweet shops of Maynards. But these were merely a prelude to travel – one did not go to stations for a ‘retail experience’ … No, they were a point of departure for far-off places, a process accompanied by arcane ritual – even into the 1960s, the stationmasters of the great London stations wore silk hats.

  The sense of romance, as Minnis points out, was heightened by the names of the trains that served them – ‘the Royal Scot, the Queen of Scots, the Cornish Riviera Limited, the Cathedrals Express, the Red Dragon, the Golden Arrow, as did the names as well of the locomotives themselves – Wolf of Badenoch, Quicksilver, Lord of the Isles. The architecture added to that sense of anticipation.’

  The milestones of my own early life, as for many of us, were counted out in rail journeys from these great termini, which always seemed to offer an aching and infinite sense of possibility. The terrifying hiss of steam for a small child heading off on holiday from Waterloo; the thrill of standing as an eleven-year-old at the end of the platform at Euston or Paddington, jotting down the numbers of mighty machines whose glamour was celebrated far and wide. Here was my first long-distance journey away without my parents – tingling with anticipation and fear as the Scottish train from St Pancras prepared to depart.

  When I left home for the final time, for a new
life at university, I recalled the words of T. S. Eliot in Four Quartets. Here was a journey that would turn out to be much more than a physical departure:

  When the train starts and the passengers are settled,

  To fruit, periodicals and business letters

  (And those who saw them off have left the platform)

  Their faces relax from grief into relief,

  To the sleeping rhythm of a hundred hours.

  Fare forward, travellers! Not escaping from the past

  Into different lives, or into any future;

  You are not the same people who left that station

  Or who will arrive at any terminus,

  While the narrowing rails slide together behind you.

  None of this helped to save Birmingham Snow Hill, of course. Prowling around the perimeter of the car park as afternoon twilight falls, I can find very little evidence of what was once a focus of Birmingham life, with its packed platforms a third of a mile long, elegant canopies and salt-glazed wall bricks. The booking hall was famously elegant – dressed up a treat with buff terracotta and white Carrara marble. The refreshment rooms were the finest in the country – walls lined in fumed Austrian oak and the countertops finished in red marble.

  All smashed up, all vanished now. The best I can find today is a bricked-up gateway halfway along a side street, whose provenance is recognisable only by a Great Western Railway coat of arms. A commuter who sees me peering at it comes up to say, ‘Shame what we did to our city! Now we’re trying to get it back. But they’ll never manage to do that here. Too much gone …’