On the Slow Train (3 page)

On the last stage of its journey down the hill into St Ives, the train passes through a heavily wooded cutting. When Paul Theroux came this way in 1983, he wrote, ‘There was never any question that I was on a branch line train, for it was only on these trains that
the
windows were brushed by the trees that grew close to the tracks. It was possible to tell from the sounds at the windows – the branches pushed the glass like mops and brooms.' You might expect from all the grandeur of the journey that the arrival into the town would be especially splendid. And so it is – in one sense. As the train emerges from the cutting and over the Porthminster Viaduct the view is heart-stopping. Here is a panorama of the whole bay with its silvery sands, the twisty streets of the town like barley sugar and the headland, all bathed in the pearly light that has inspired generations of artists.

But wait. Where is the station to match the unspoilt Victorian charm of the town? Sadly, the bulldozers reduced it to a pile of rubble in 1971, just six years before the line's centenary. All that remains to greet the modern passenger is a prefabricated bus shelter and a single concrete platform with an automatic ticket machine marooned in the middle of a car park. All the more poignant is the fact that the original granite walls around the perimeter of the old station still stand – a reminder of how extensive the tracks here once were. It was the complete country terminus – four roads, a solid little booking office with canopy. There was a goods office and a little engine shed, a couple of camping coaches and a siding for the trucks that would speed the fish up to market along with that other perishable Cornish staple, the broccoli harvest, now also sadly lost to the area.

Was the demolition retribution by British Railways managers for the refusal to let them shut the line? I am about to meet the man who can tell me, since he is arriving on the afternoon train. ‘You'll recognise me,' Richard Burningham explains, ‘because I'll be the only person getting out of the carriages wearing a suit.' It is even a pinstriped one – appropriate in a way, since Burningham is in a sense the ‘Fat Controller' for the line. As the representative of the Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership, he is responsible for the sustenance and development of all the railway lines west of Exeter, spearheading an alliance of train operators, passenger
groups
and local authorities. ‘Hmm,' he says, squinting at the map of St Ives at the end of the platform. ‘We could do with a better one of these.'

We retire to the Pedn-Olva Hotel over the road and join elderly ladies in Lloyd Loom chairs in the lounge overlooking the bay for a pot of tea. Since British Railways applied its scorched-earth policy to the station, the hotel is now the town's closest thing to a railway refreshment room. Burningham is passionate about the lines in his charge and has given me a faded copy of a press release from the Ministry of Transport dated 20th September 1966. Buried inside the officialese is the story of how the line was snatched back to safety from under the nose of Beeching's executioners by the Labour transport minister Barbara Castle. Castle was one of the most notorious or most effective transport ministers in history, depending on your view. She introduced the breathalyser, the 70 mph speed limit on motorways and car seat belts, but also presided over 2,050 miles of Beeching cuts in a betrayal of Prime Minister Harold Wilson's pledge to reverse them.

Even before Beeching, BR was swinging the axe in the West Country, Burningham tells me. The line from Gwinear Road to Helston shut in 1962. The Plymouth to Launceston route followed in the same year, though the piskies sabotaged the plans of BR managers in London by stranding a train at Tavistock in a snowstorm, preventing the closure of the line. Beeching was ruthless, set on obliterating almost every branch line west of Plymouth, including Bere Alston–Callington, Bodmin– Wadebridge–Padstow, Liskeard–Looe, Lostwithiel–Fowey, Okehampton–Bude, Okehampton–Padstow – and St Erth–St Ives. Flanders and Swann could have written an entire song using just the names of the stations on the main line from Plymouth to Penzance that passed from the timetable in 1964 – Boublebois, Grampound Road, Chacewater, Scorrier, Gwinear Road and Marazion.

But Mrs Castle clearly had a soft spot for St Ives as well as the little line from Liskeard to Looe, eastwards along the coast. You can hear the forthright northern tones coming through the faded typescript.

I have refused to close the branch lines serving St Ives and Looe in Cornwall. In spite of the financial saving to the railways, it just wouldn't have made sense to transfer heavy holiday traffic to roads which couldn't cope with it. Nor would expensive road improvements have been the answer. At St Ives, these would have involved destroying the whole character of the town. It would be the economics of bedlam to spend vast sums only to create greater inconvenience.

‘You know,' says Burningham, ‘this line is probably the most scenic in Europe, if not the world. Just imagine if it hadn't been saved,' he says, pointing out the huge crowds getting off the train over the road. To see what might have happened at St Ives you only have to listen to the words of the historian David St John Thomas, who travelled on the last train on the neighbouring Helston branch.

Platform, refreshment room, approach road milled with onlookers. Cameras flashed as a party of boys in top hats laid a wreath on the locomotive and a sandwich board mockingly declared ‘the end is at hand' . . . the crowd sang ‘Auld Lang Syne' as the engine exploded detonators and the train disappeared into the night. Nobody hurried to leave; people talked of the old days, of when everybody came and went by train, of father telling how he had helped build the line, of how uncle had lost money on it, of grandson aged seven who had taken his first train trip that afternoon. From Monday anyone coming from London could no longer change from the Cornish Riviera Express straight into a waiting train at Gwinear Road; many local residents would have to change cars or change jobs.

Lucky the redoubtable Mrs Castle stayed the axe at both Looe and St Ives. She clearly repented later in life of some of her more draconian actions, and Burningham shows me a poignant note that the ninety-one-year-old politician sent to him on 9 May 2001, shortly before she died. ‘Dear Richard,' she writes,

I am very sorry not to be able to be with you today but unfortunately a slight injury has put me out of action for a few weeks. I would have enjoyed immensely helping you to celebrate the anniversary of the opening of the line from Liskeard to Looe, which passes through some of the most beautiful country in England. I have an almost maternal feeling for it since I was able in the 1960s to save it from the slaughter of the innocence [
sic
]. Long may it and you continue to flourish.

And so does St Ives on this sunny day, with the town's five species of gulls, identified by the famous ornithologist W H Hudson, squawking overhead and children sucking cornets and foraging in rock pools. Hudson was a frequent visitor to the town, staying in a cottage in Lelant. Where once the train brought in lumps of rock for Barbara Hepworth's sculptures, clay for Bernard Leach's potter's wheel and canvases for its other great son, Ben Nicholson, now their disciples pour in to queue outside the hugely successful Tate St Ives and to dine in the town's smart new restaurants. There are still pasties and clotted cream galore to be found around town, but the new St Ives set are more likely to be found eating curried Cornish monkfish in the Porthminster Café, a former deckchair repair hut transformed into one of the trendiest restaurants in the West Country. And even though the old station has gone, the ghosts of the railway are to be found everywhere in the town. In the Tate I buy a postcard of a 1960s painting by the self-taught artist Tom Early of a single-coach train crossing the Porthminster viaduct. Farther along the quay, in the St Ives Museum, among the dusty jumble of
ephemera
so typical of small-town museums, is a section on the local railway. Here is the nameplate from Castle Class No. 5006, named
Tregenna Castle
after the Great Western Railway's famous hotel in the town – the first railway hotel to be opened away from a major terminus and purely for the benefit of the holiday trade. The hotel flourishes today, although the suites where elderly dowagers from Belgravia once came to take the sun have been turned into holiday apartments for families. The locomotive, the museum tells us, was withdrawn in 1962 having run a total of 1,809,297 miles. ‘She hauled the Cheltenham Flyer, which achieved a record time on the journey Swindon to Paddington – 77¼ miles in 56 minutes 47 seconds on 6th June 1932 – thereby becoming the world's fastest train.' Here too is a group portrait of the ‘Staff of St Ives Railway station, c.1955', which tells us everything about why the St Ives line went into decline. In the centre sits Mr M J Rich, the stationmaster, with his splendidly braided hat, along with six porters, two signalmen, four clerks, an engine cleaner and a carriage cleaner. There are twenty-three of them in all. No wonder Beeching took fright when he looked at the books.

But have things gone too far the other way? Jeremy Joslin thinks so. I meet the president of the Hayle Chamber of Commerce in the Badger Inn at Lelant on my way back to St Erth and Paddington. The old inn was once a favourite of the Stephens, Virginia Woolf's family, when they came on the train from Paddington for their summer holidays. Joslin is one of the line's most fervent supporters and dreams one day of taking it back into local ownership. ‘The people up at Paddington run it like any other railway. But the problem that Beeching identified is still there. The line is just too seasonal. I'd put bums on seats in the winter by running steam trains and dining cars. One of our biggest supporters is the local vicar and he'd love to do weddings on board the trains.' There's a gleam in his eye as he talks of plans to bring in low-cost trains powered by a flywheel and distribute
goods
to the shops in St Ives using mini-containers that would fit onto specially adapted motorbikes.

Will there be change? Maybe. But the truth is that the St Ives Bay line, with its summer trains packed to the doors, is quite successful as it is, thank you. As I squeeze aboard, joining exhausted but happy families heading back to the park-and-ride, I wonder: can there be any other branch line in the land whose future has been secured by the motor car?

CHAPTER TWO

THE 15.03 FROM CARLISLE TO THE ROOF OF ENGLAND

Carlisle to Leeds, via Appleby, Dent, Ribblehead and Settle

EAT YOUR HEART
out, Trans-Siberian. Take the slow line, Orient Express. This seventy-three-mile railway from Carlisle over the roof of England to West Yorkshire is up there with the grandest and most thrilling train journeys in the world. Blasted across the bleak and unforgiving limestone and black marble of the Pennines, this former Anglo-Scottish main line was the final truly grand gesture of Victorian railway building. It was the last to be constructed using the sheer brute muscle of men working with just pickaxes and dynamite. Hundreds died in the six and and a half years it took to construct the ‘Long Drag' across the great wilderness of northern England. Many perished from accidents, cold and disease in the unforgiving terrain. Some simply hanged themselves in despair as floods and storms swept away their handiwork. This was truly the
Götterdämmerung
of the railways.

Ironically, this – possibly the craziest – enterprise of the Victorian railway mania need not have been built at all. Back in 1869, when the Settle and Carlisle was begun, there were two perfectly good main lines to take passengers to Scotland – the London and North Western route from Euston via Crewe, and the Great Northern route from King's Cross via York. But back amid the mahogany and crystal of the Midland Railway's boardroom in Derby, James Allport, the company's general manager, was restless. The Midland was making a fortune trundling coal, beer, iron and bricks around the Midlands. But this ‘Fat Controller' of his age wanted something more daring, more glamorous. He'd
already
marched his forces into London, planting the magnificent Gothic towers of St Pancras station as a taunt to his rivals along the Euston Road. And so the order went out: ‘Hang the terrain. Don't bother me with trivia! Just build me a railway to Scotland that will be better than all our competitors, by God!' Allport was a religious man and his vision was messianic in the true Victorian sense. So a pencil line was drawn over the mountains between Leeds and the Borders, and 6,000 men spent the next six and a half years hacking their way across them.

Since this is to be a journey of superlatives, it seems appropriate that I should be standing as dusk falls on the platform at Dent station in Cumbria, after arriving up the line from Carlisle. A notice underneath the lamp declares that this is the
H
IGHEST
M
AIN
L
INE
S
TATION IN
E
NGLAND, 1,150 FEET ABOVE SEA LEVEL
. Once there would have been a roaring fire in the waiting room and a cheery porter with a fob watch ready to announce the time of the next London connection. Tonight, there is nobody to be seen on this unstaffed platform. As the lights of the train from which I have disembarked disappear into the blackness and all I can hear is the eerie rush of a gill running beneath the tracks, it is perfectly easy, on this bleak autumn evening, to imagine I might be the last soul left alive in the universe.

Still, it's thanks to the doggedness of local folk that the line is running at all. Back in 1981, British Rail decided the entire railway must close because the 440-yard Ribblehead viaduct, striding heroically across the wastes of Batty Moss, was too expensive to repair. Never mind that with its 24 arches, 104 feet high, held up by 1.5 million bricks faced with limestone it was one of the engineering marvels of the Victorian age. No matter that it had a Grade II * listing from English Heritage and that its domination of the landscape is every bit as great as that of Stonehenge, the estimated £6 million cost of repair was deemed uneconomic by the BR accountants in London. But they didn't reckon with the 25,000 people (and a dog) who put up objections. After a six-year
campaign
, the bureaucrats, worn down by the gritty folk of North Yorkshire, backed off. It would be a reckless official indeed who ever tangled with this hardy breed of locals to propose its closure again.