On the Slow Train (22 page)

The quality of the job is borne out by the high speed trains racing past us on their way to Exeter and Penzance. When the Great Western wanted to speed up its services to the west at the end of the nineteenth century, constructing a shorter way to bypass Bristol, it chose to co-opt part of the route of the Heart of Wessex line. We continue to jostle with the expresses through Bruton, a stone's throw from the old Somerset and Dorset station at Cole, where neat children play in front of the ancient chapel at King's Bruton school, and on to the junction at Castle Cary, a
sleepy
wool town, where a red kite hovers lazily over the track. It is possible to change onto the fast train to Paddington here, although progress is slower on foot to the village, which is a mile away.

Glastonbury Tor, floating like an island, with its roofless tower perched on the top, can be seen to the right. Was this peculiar-looking hill really the home of the king of the fairies and the entrance to the underworld? Or the place to which the Holy Grail was borne? There is little time to speculate as we rattle off the main line to take the single track down in the direction of Weymouth. This is rich pastureland, with fat cattle basking in the fields all the way to Yeovil, the only town of any size on the line. Here is the perfect country junction in a time warp. Once there were three stations in this small town, famous for its glove making, and there are still two: Yeovil Junction, on the Waterloo to Exeter main line, which crosses here, and Yeovil Pen Mill, where we pull up at a perfect set of Great Western lower quadrant semaphore signals. Once a little train linked the two stations; now passengers wanting to change have to get the bus or walk, even though the connecting railway tracks still exist. Not an enticing prospect after dark. But we must not complain, since Pen Mill has an exquisite flavour of the past – a working signal box surrounded by boxes of flowers, along with old-fashioned levers for raising and lowering the signals. There are rows of neat sidings, wrought-iron and glass canopies on the platforms and a charming little overbridge.

Too good to simply pass through, and I get off to say goodbye to Catherine Phillips, who is to pick up her car here. ‘What's so special about this line,' she says, ‘is the sense of place, don't you think? It just feels right in the landscape.' But there is a minor drama. A young couple stand disconsolately in the ticket office, having just missed their train. ‘Where do you want to go?' Catherine asks them. ‘I'll drive you. There won't be another train along till heavens knows when.' Can any volunteer have more love for their local line than this? ‘And by the way,' she says to me,
waving
farewell as she drives away with her charges, ‘don't forget to see Jack.' Jack? ‘Yes, he's the station cat. Just knock on the signal box door. That's where he lives.' And, sure enough, he is there sprawled on the steps – a broad-faced black and white tom, basking in the sunshine. I could swear he smiled at me.

There are few better evocations of the country railway than Yeovil, and even two hours pass quickly at an old-fashioned station on a sunny late summer's afternoon. But I must move on. I settle into a corner of the carriage on the next train south, taking me through some of the most charming villages on the line – Thornford, Yetminster and Chetnole. All are halts, where passengers have to flag down the driver to stop the train. Thornford and Chetnole are simply concrete platforms in the middle of fields, but at Yetminster, in the centre of the village the stationmaster's house has been splendidly restored as a private residence. The train pauses at Maiden Newton to let another pass in the loop, and the conductor announces, ‘We're going to be a few minutes, so anyone who wants to get off to stretch their legs and have a fag can do so.' Apart from me, the only person to alight in the warm afternoon sunshine is a young woman in hiking shorts, who is studying a map and looks far too healthy to want a cigarette. I can't help thinking of Edward Thomas's famous poem ‘Adlestrop' – listening to a bird singing its heart out in the elder bush on the down platform. ‘And for that minute a blackbird sang / Close by, and round him, mistier / Farther and farther, all the birds . . .' What sort of bird this one is I am not qualified to tell, but I am also reminded of Hardy's poem ‘The Darkling Thrush', for Maiden Newton is ‘Hardy Central'.

Thomas Hardy had a long-standing connection with the railways, from the time when, as a young surveyor in the 1860s, he supervised the removal of thousands of bodies from the graveyard of St Pancras Old Church when the Midland Railway extended its line to London. Among them was the body of the archbishop of Narbonne, which reportedly had a full set of porcelain false teeth.
Hardy
reportedly found the whole experience a gruesome one. Schoolchildren through the ages have recited Hardy's railway poems ‘Faintheart on a Railway Train' and ‘At the Railway Station, Upway', and with his young wife Emma he was reportedly fond of taking the train to travel round Somerset and Wiltshire. In 1886 he wrote to his friend the critic Edmund Gosse inviting him to Dorchester to travel to some of the places ‘newly opened up by the railway'. It turned out to be an unfortunate experience. The two men were stuck on the platform here at Maiden Newton for so long after missing their connection on the Bridport branch that Gosse told later how he had had the time to write a lengthy essay on his friend's poetic mentor William Barnes.

This little village station is almost unchanged since Hardy's day, retaining nearly all its stone Brunel buildings, although it is much quieter since the nine-mile Bridport branch closed in 1975. The days of Hardy and Gosse are long gone, and it is no longer possible to pass the time of day watching the Bridport branch train idling in the bay platform: ‘A pannier tank coupled to its “B” set standing under the overall roof in the branch bay with smoke drifting lazily from the chimney,' wrote the historian of the line, Derek Phillips.

A faint breath of steam swirling from the safety valves. The driver would be wandering around the engine complete with his oil feeder, giving the straps and glands a top-up, and there is the scrape of a shovel on the footplate, as the fireman puts a few rounds of coal around the firebox whilst waiting for the rumble and the roar of an approaching main line stopping train. Carriage doors would slam as passengers disembark and head for the branch train, the boards would be ‘off' and with a roar from the chimney as the vacuum ejector was opened and with a toot on the whistle, the pannier tank would pull away on the journey to Bridport, leaving a lingering smell of hot oil and steam in its wake.

While I wait, I don't spend my time writing a memoir like Gosse, but instead I walk part of the way along the old trackbed of the Bridport line, now converted into a cycleway. Here, their growth now uninhibited by passing trains, are those old-style denizens of dry railway embankments – tangles of evening primroses with their pale yellow flowers, and colonies of the snapdragon-like toadflax, with their yellow hoods and orange bulges like Adam's apples. And there is a bit of industrial archaeology too – old lengths of Brunel's original broad-gauge track still used as fence supports by a local farmer.

At the next station, Dorchester West, a group of men with a large Tesco bag overflowing with cans of Foster's lager are the only people on the down platform. This station was once nominated by the
Daily Telegraph
as the worst in Britain. ‘No use waiting here, mate,' they shout across at me as I get off and pause to look at the timetable. ‘There won't be another train along for two hours.' This used to be rather a grand place, with an overall roof and vast sidings that would echo to the bleating of sheep, the baying of cattle and the hue and cry of one of the busiest market towns in the south-west. All was swept away in the 1960s, but the elegant Italianate station building is still there, once housing first-and second-class waiting rooms. Even the booking office was partitioned so first-and second-class passengers didn't have to rub shoulders. Now it is an Indian restaurant, and as I wait for the final train of the day I try the Wednesday night special (£8.95 for three courses). The Alishaan is bright and cheerful in contrast to the gloom on the unstaffed platforms. Over a chicken shashlik in what was once the ticket hall, I ask the owner Mr Ali whether he gets people in trying to book for a journey. ‘Dozens every day,' he says. ‘If I am in a good mood, I let them in to use the toilet. If I am in a bad mood, I kick them out.' Grass grows high between the tracks as I wait for the train on the final leg of my journey. But half-close your eyes and it is just possible to imagine the packed Channel Islands Boat Express steaming into the platform from Paddington.

Sadly, the most evocatively named station on the line, Upwey Wishing Well Halt, closed in 1957, and the final station, Weymouth, is nondescript and modern – not much of a gateway to this elegant Georgian resort. This is also the terminus of the old Southern Railway line from Waterloo and the destination for the very last regular main line passenger steam trains in Britain in 1967. The Great Western had long lost its steam trains, so after all the battles of the rival companies to Weymouth, Waterloo had the last hurrah. But the journey does not quite end there. Buried under a tangle of ragwort and buddleia, the rusted tracks of a branch line disappear around the back of the station beyond a set of level crossing gates. This was once the Weymouth Harbour Tramway, where until the 1990s express boat trains would edge their carriages past holidaymakers in the town's narrow streets and quays to deposit their passengers alongside the Channel Islands ferries. Opened by the Great Western in the 1860s, it was the only street railway in Britain ever to carry regular main line passenger trains and was originally constructed in broad gauge, although Brunel's wide trains must have caused consternation on the narrow quays of the town. Theoretically it could carry trains now, although the last actual train operated in 1999, when a special tour ran from London. I follow the tracks round the back of the B & Q car park, and apart from the cars parked on the tracks in defiance of modern notices telling them not to, the line is intact, its rails worn shiny, not from rail use but from the regular motor traffic that passes over it. On the quayside, the little pannier tanks that operated it had bells to warn pedestrians, and the engine crews were known to be specially strong-armed, lifting parked cars out of the way. The lines are still intact and weed-free right up to the ferry terminal, although it is a long time since daffodils and Jersey potatoes were loaded into wagons to be sped up to London. Weymouth is to host the sailing events at the 2012 Olympics and some hope the line might see trains again as a green way to get spectators to the harbour front. ‘Should it
happen
?' I ask a group of fishermen parking their catch, including a giant conger eel, in the middle of the tracks on the Old Harbour. ‘You've got to be joking,' says one of the men, who has what seems to be an even more monstrous conger tattooed on his back. ‘It's bad enough along here already. The last thing we need is a load of trains getting in our way. Green? It's a load of b******. Look what they've done to the fishing industry in the name of being green!' Until the 1960s this little railway was bustling. Now it looks unlikely that wheels will ever turn here again. Catherine and David and Norman and Terry and the other Heart of Wessex volunteers might hope that one day loaded trains might race down the tracks from Paddington, unloading cargoes of passengers in exchange for fresh flowers, fruit and vegetables from the fertile fields of Jersey and Guernsey. Sadly, like the revival of the Somerset and Dorset, here is another dream that seems destined to die.

CHAPTER ELEVEN

THE 08.04 FROM NORWICH – ‘SECRET' LINES TO LIVERPOOL STREET, VIA BRITAIN'S SMALLEST MAIN LINE STATION

Norwich to London Liverpool Street, via Buckenham, Berney Arms, Lowestoft and the East Suffolk Line through Beccles, Saxmundham, Woodbridge and Ipswich

‘ON WEDNESDAY LAST
, a respectably dressed young man was seen to go into a London station and deliberately take a ticket to Cambridge. He has not been heard of since.' So wrote
Punch
in the early 1860s, lampooning the awful train services of the Eastern Counties Railway, the company that in mid-Victorian times ran most of the trains to East Anglia. The novelist William Makepiece Thackeray commented at the same time in a similar sardonic vein, ‘Even a journey on the Eastern Counties Railway comes to an end.'

But perhaps we should be grateful for East Anglia's remoteness and relative inaccessibility. It still has dreamy branch lines and slow secondary railways of the sort that disappeared from much of the rest of the network long ago. True, some of the quieter branches have gone. It's no longer possible to change at country junctions onto little two-coach trains pulled by antiquated engines for stations with lovely East Anglian names such as Lavenham, Brightlingsea, Aldeburgh, Southwold or Snape. No longer do trains loaded with holidaying mill workers from the West Midlands halt at Melton Constable and all stations beyond on their way to the holiday camps and camp sites of the Norfolk and Suffolk coasts. But there still are slow trains to be discovered on
byways
with quaint titles like the Bittern Line, the Poppy Line and the Wherry Line – ‘winding slow' as John Betjeman put it ‘to some forgotten country town'. Astonishingly, the East Suffolk Line (which does not have a nickname but is as lovely as any of them) still has direct trains from Lowestoft to London, stopping at stations in slumbering market towns on quiet river estuaries, much of the way on a single track.

It is tempting to hope that the managers up at Liverpool Street may still be oblivious to the lines beyond Cambridge, and that trains will somehow continue to chug in obscurity through quiet fenland stations in a parallel universe for ever more. But the survival of East Anglia's remaining branch lines has been hard won and communities are ever vigilant. None more so than around the little triangle of lines from Norwich to Yarmouth and Lowestoft, where local people have fought to preserve trains to both the smallest station in Britain and the station which has just about the tiniest passenger numbers of any in the land.