On the Slow Train (24 page)

A push on a door opposite some skeletal hulks of rotting boats on the riverbank and I am inside a dark wood-lined interior, fragrant with an ancient beery smell of hops and malt. No trendy Norfolk pub this, serving posh seafood to north London second-home owners. Rather, it is a scruffy old boozer stuck in so much of a time warp that I am able to order chicken in a basket without irony. There are few pubs in the land inaccessible except by train (or also by boat in the case of the Berney Arms), and it makes me
think
of the Adam and Eve, the railway pub described in
Brensham Village,
John Moore's famous book about English village life: ‘The stationmaster had his morning and evening pint there, pulling out his great turnip-watch every time a train went by; our only porter spent a great deal of time there as he could afford to do, since the even tenor of his life was interrupted only by four stopping trains a day; and at noon the gangers came in and ordered pints of cider, sat down in the corner with their bait.'

At Berney Arms nowadays of course there is no stationmaster, no porters, nor any staff at all, and woe betide any ganger ordering a cider over lunch. But the landlord, John Ralph, tells me he depends on the railway for his trade, even with the current scorched-earth train service, along with the boaters and walkers who come up from Yarmouth. ‘The fact is, there's nobody living round here, so we're a pub without locals – although the occasional farmer pops in for breakfast. The old days, when country people would walk miles to get anywhere, have long gone. It's manic in the summer, but utterly desolate in the winter. And try getting staff. There's just me and the wife – though we've got a Colombian girl in at the moment.' John is a big, bearded Brummie, amply tattooed – a sparks by trade, he tells me, though he looks as though he could have played bass guitar with Meatloaf. He bought the pub after coming here on holiday one summer, although things are not always quite so sunny now. ‘We have to go down three miles of local farm tracks to get to the nearest road. Imagine that in the mists we get round here in the winter. One false move and you could go off the road into a dyke. But you'd better get your train. There won't be another along till tomorrow.'

At the station there's just time to admire its single glory, the Indonesian hardwood station sign bearing the name
B
ERNEY
A
RMS
in gunmetal characters. It was made in a local boatyard and installed after the last one got stolen. Somewhere, presumably, there is a back garden masquerading as Britain's smallest station.

I wave down the train back to Reedham and the driver slides open the cab door to let me into the carriage. ‘Goodness me, it's rush hour at Berney Arms this afternoon,' he jokes. Even though I already have a return ticket, I splash out on a single to Reedham from the conductor. Around twenty tickets a week are sold to and from Berney Arms each week, so I have done my bit in single-handedly increasing usage by 5 per cent. And in return I get an unusual star-shaped clip in my ticket.

My train from Reedham to Lowestoft runs gently onto the swing bridge across the Yare before heading towards Haddiscoe, where we cross the border into Suffolk. (There's a local joke about a Norfolk man and a Suffolk man standing on the boundary, where a genie asks them both for their wishes. ‘My wish is for a high fence all around the county,' says the Norfolk man. ‘And mine,' says the Suffolk man, ‘is for it to be filled to the brim with water.') Haddiscoe church, which can be seen from the train, is one of the most unusual in England, with a round tower built by the Saxons and a thatched roof. ‘The place is so tranquil,' says Simon Jenkins in his book
England's Thousand Best Churches
, ‘that we can still imagine the longboats pulled up on the banks of the marsh by what is now the churchyard.' The train is now running upstream along the south bank of the River Waveney, before calling at Somerleyton station, a short distance from Somerleyton Hall, one of the most magnificent Jacobean stately piles in Britain and the home of the Victorian civil engineering entrepreneur Sir Samuel Morton Peto, whose firm constructed the line as well as many buildings in London, including Nelson's column. Charles Dickens was sometimes a guest of Peto here. How much the novelist's time at the hall influenced the writing of
David Copperfield
we cannot know but Copperfield's fictional birthplace at Blundeston (Blunderstone in the novel) is not far from here, and Dickens claimed he chose it after seeing the name on a local signpost.

After the wide-open drama of the marshes, Oulton Broad
North
on the last lap into Lowestoft seems disappointingly suburban, though not so disappointing as Lowestoft itself, where the station, constructed by Lucas Brothers, who also built London's Royal Albert Hall, has lost its once-magnificent Baltic timber overall roof, although the walls still stand, giving it the melancholy appearance of a bombed-out church. It is a pity, since a blue plaque on the wall outside proclaims it to be the most easterly station in England and it still retains a large blue enamel sign saying
B
RITISH
R
AILWAYS
L
OWESTOFT
C
ENTRAL
, although it is a long time since BR ceased to exist and even longer since Lowestoft had any other stations to confuse it with.

It is a long time too, since holiday trains disgorged thousands here every summer Saturday or loaded fish wagons crossed the road from the docks. In their Edwardian heyday Lowestoft and Yarmouth were among the herring capitals of Europe, landing up to a billion fish a year and dispatching fish trains every hour to London and the Midlands as well as to Harwich for export to Europe. Even the fish waste, processed by hundreds of young women who travelled down from Scotland especially to do the gutting, was dispatched from here – dyed green and destined to be spread on East Anglian fields. The smell is said to have been indescribable.

These days the herring quays are deserted and the fish trains have gone. The produce – mostly shellfish – from the tiny remaining inshore fleet is loaded into the back of vans. Lowestoft's PR people have done a brave job rebranding the town as the capital of the ‘Sunrise Coast' although this does not seem persuasive as I wait two hours in the drizzle for my connection to London. Still the 16.58 to Liverpool Street is a train worth waiting for, and the journey over the East Suffolk Line through Beccles, Saxmundham and Woodbridge is one of the great secret treats of the national system.

This is a line that should never, in any logical world, have survived. Although it was once a main line in its own right, it runs
parallel
to the Great Eastern main line from Norwich through Stowmarket and was thus targeted early by Beeching for closure. Never mind that it was used by crack expresses such as The Easterling – hauled by Sir Nigel Gresley's famous Sandringham Class – it had to go as ‘surplus to requirements'. But Beeching did not reckon with the tenacity of the local Suffolk burghers, nor the obduracy of one of his lieutenants, who happened to live along the line. Gerard Fiennes, general manager at the time of the British Railways Eastern Region, believed that Beeching was wrong in his view that rural railways could never pay their way and should thus be eliminated. Why not try simplified signalling, single tracks, pay trains and automated level crossings first? argued Fiennes. (Determination clearly runs in the family, since his relative is the explorer Sir Ranulph Fiennes.) Eventually he was sacked for writing a book called
I Tried to Run a Railway,
which displeased Labour transport minister Barbara Castle, who presided over many of the Beeching closures. But Fiennes's legacy lives on. Mrs Castle reprieved the East Suffolk Line and it thrives to this day on the ‘basic railway' principles he espoused, linking sleepy villages, ancient treasures and areas of outstanding natural beauty on its 117-mile route to London.

I've invested in a first-class ticket to sit behind the driver on this modern Turbostar train so I can eavesdrop on the patter as he negotiates our way to Ipswich with the radio-controlled signalling centre at Saxmundham, using virtual tokens issued by a computer rather than the big brass keys or tablets that drivers once had to swap with signalmen to enter single-track sections. (However, the East Suffolk was always double track throughout, with conventional signalling, until downgraded by Beeching into its present mode of operation.) Only three people and a computer are needed to operate the entire line these days, but from my position at the front of the train, this is grand travel indeed, with only seven well-upholstered first-class seats in an exclusive closed-off section, although there are no refreshments, not even a
cup
of tea in a plastic container from a trolley. With fifteen stations and more than twenty level crossings between here and Ipswich – and pulling into passing loops, to make way for northbound trains – this is not going to be a fast journey. The trains are slowed down still further by the ‘sawtooth' gradients on the line, which was built on the cheap in the 1850s, avoiding cuttings, embankments and bridges wherever possible. This is just as well, since the understated scenery of east Suffolk is best enjoyed at a slow pace.

The line rises from Beccles, plunges into Halesworth and climbs again out of the town on the far side of the River Blyth. These cosy little market towns, off the beaten track, still have a life of their own as centres for the surrounding villages, though once they were junctions for a series of little lines that branched off to the coast. At Halesworth, until 1929 when it shut, you could change for the narrow 3-foot gauge line to Southwold. Passenger services from Saxmundham to Aldeburgh lasted until 1965, long enough to serve the town's most famous resident, Benjamin Britten, on his journeying to and from London. Today it is still open to Leiston for a rather less artistic function – carrying spent nuclear waste from Sizewell power station. At Woodbridge, one of the nicest towns on the East Suffolk Line, the station has been restored and you can almost dip your toes in the River Deben, which laps along the lineside. There are superb views of the town on one side and the estuary on the other. The fabulous gold treasures of the Sutton Hoo ship burial site are located not far from here. Those in search of what is reputedly the best all-day breakfast near the Suffolk coast need look no further than the Whistlestop Café in Woodbridge's old Great Eastern station building, named by the
Guardian
the second-best railway station buffet in Britain.

Before we join the main line at Ipswich there is a long stop, and the driver jumps down from his cab to make an agitated phone call to the signalling centre, with an incantation of numbers and
codes
. There is a ‘failure of lineside equipment', he announces to passengers over the intercom, meaning that we get to Liverpool Street half an hour late. The Grade I-listed building with its magnificent iron roof is the most cathedral-like of the great London termini and is at its most dramatic as dusk is falling. But I ponder on an even bigger marvel than this – that it is possible in the modern age to travel with ease from the smallest station in Britain to the third-busiest. What a score! Berney Arms 1,014 passengers a year; Liverpool Street 57.8 million.

CHAPTER TWELVE

THE 07.06 FROM FORMBY – THE STATIONS THAT CAME BACK FROM THE DEAD

Formby to Chester-le-Street, via Southport, Manchester, Stalybridge, Huddersfield, Penistone, Barnsley and Sheffield

No more will I go to Blandford Forum and Mortehoe

On the Slow Train from Midsomer Norton and Mumby Road.

No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat

At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street.

We won't be meeting again

On the Slow Train

FUNNY THE WAY
some of the most unpredictable things have the power to resonate through the decades. Even to people who haven't a clue who Beeching was or what he stood for, the name still produces a frisson. ‘Doing a Beeching' – there no mistaking the meaning, shorthand for the senseless axing of public services.
Private Eye
magazine still runs a satirical column about the railways called ‘Dr B. Ching'. And so it is with some of the words of the comic songwriters Michael Flanders and Donald Swann. This odd couple of middle-aged middle-class men in suits, one in a wheelchair and the other seated at the piano, seem permanently frozen in the black-and-white era of 1950s entertainment. Yet many of their songs have entered the national psyche. Who doesn't remember ‘Mud, mud, glorious mud' or ‘That big six-wheeler, scarlet-painted, London Transport, diesel-engined, 97-horsepower omnibus'? Or ‘Slow Train', written in 1963, the year of the
Beeching
report. The song is a litany of some of the poetic-sounding country stations that were due to be closed by Beeching. But it is something more than that. It is an elegy to a vanishing, less-hurried way of British life, and no less resonant now than when it was first written. You can find it on YouTube, and there have been several cover versions, including one adapting the lyrics to the stations on the route of the Orient Express.

In their travelling revue
At the Drop of Another Hat
Flanders and Swann introduced the song thus: ‘It's quite a serious song, and it was suggested by all those marvellous old local railway stations with their wonderful evocative names, all due to be axed and done away with one by one, and these are stations that we shall no longer be seeing when we aren't able to travel any more on the slow train.' But, fortunately for us, some of their predictions were wrong. Five of the individual stations mentioned in the song ultimately didn't close. One entire route also escaped the axe. The St Erth to St Ives line, my journey in
Chapter 1
, stayed open to become one of the most profitable rural branches on the national network. Arram station, between Driffield and Beverley in Yorkshire, survived, as did Ambergate in Derbyshire and Gorton near Manchester (then called Gorton and Openshaw and referred to as Openshaw in the song). How tantalising, then, to take the final journey in this book between the other two survivors, both now busy stations and linked by one of the most beautiful journeys across the Pennines from the western to the eastern sides of northern England. It is difficult to conceive now that either Formby, on the busy Merseyrail suburban network in northern Liverpool, or Chester-le-Street, near Durham, on the East Coast Main Line, which has one of the busiest ticket offices in Britain, could ever have been candidates for closure. And a journey between them is a voyage not just through some of the most diverse landscapes in Britain but across the varied landscape of today's railway system – city and country, ancient and new, jolty old branch lines and restored and reinvigorated modern railways.