On the Slow Train (6 page)

Back in the pre-Benidorm, pre-Ford Anglia era of the 1950s, the platforms here would be thronged with hundreds of thousands of families dressed in their holiday best, arriving on the railway company paddle steamers from Portsmouth. There was once a glorious dome-roofed ballroom here, where if you were lucky you might hear the latest hits of Victor Sylvester before going home to your B & B in Seaview (H & C running water, interior-sprung mattresses in every room). Today's foot passengers zip over on fast
Australian
-owned catamarans, and most of the people who still choose the Isle of Wight over Faliraki or Phuket arrive on the car ferries that dock along the coast at Fishbourne. Today, the day after a bank holiday, Ryde Pier Head station has a rather melancholy air. There are fifteen minutes before the train goes, and I buy a Minghella ice cream (‘famous in Ryde since 1950' but more famous still for being made by the parents of the late Oscar-winning film director Anthony Minghella) and chat to two boys fishing over the edge of one of the platforms next to a notice saying D
O NOT FISH HERE
. Nobody seems to care. ‘We got four wrasse and a bream today – really nice ones.' The train is busy enough, with mothers and pushchairs, business types with sharp haircuts and suits over from Portsmouth and elderly couples tugging suitcases on wheels, taking the traditional route for a late-season holiday, perhaps to a ‘nice guest house' in Shanklin or Ventnor. Sadly, there are no longer any porters, and the stand telling passengers to insert a coin for a luggage trolley is rusting and empty, the trolleys probably having been tipped into the ocean long ago.

But now it's time to M
IND THE DOORS
, and the train heads down the half-mile length of the pier as purposefully as it must have accelerated out of East Finchley for Charing Cross, past the rusting remains of the diesel tramway, with its own separate tracks, which functioned until 1969. In fact rust and genteel decline have defined the entire transport history of the island, which has always been a kind of anachronism, operating with the equipment of at least the previous generation. In the nineteenth century there were three different companies, with names like the Freshwater, Yarmouth and Newport Railway, running a ragbag of ancient locomotives over single-track branch lines which mostly seemed to go to nowhere. Between the wars the railways still captured the flavour of the 1890s, when Queen Victoria was in residence at her favourite home, Osborne House, near Cowes. And from the 1950s until the end of steam in 1966 the railway was a perfectly preserved museum of the pre-grouping world
before
1923, despite the modern liveries. Little tank engines pottered round single-track secondary routes tugging wooden-panelled non-corridor coaches. And now the Tube trains, which made their first outing when Neville Chamberlain was prime minister, are the biggest anachronism of them all.

There are many who say that the Isle of Wight never recovered from the death of Queen Victoria, when the smart set – who built their holiday homes to be close to Her Majesty and possibly get invited round for a fairy cake and some iced tea with Tennyson and Dickens – packed up and went home. But it has had moments of modernity since then. Parked on the sand next to Ryde Esplanade station is the Hovertravel hovercraft, waiting for its next flight to Southsea. As every schoolboy reader of the
Eagle
knows, this was a Great British Invention of the 1950s developed in the Isle of Wight by Saunders-Roe at Cowes. But sadly, like many other Great British Inventions, including flying boats, also built by Saunders-Roe but in the 1930s, hovercraft are no longer so futuristic. Passenger services have fallen out of favour and the Ryde–Southsea service is the last remaining in Britain. ‘Typical,' people say. The Isle of Wight can't resist clinging on to its past.

Even the station name Esplanade – the only one in Britain – is redolent of Ryde's Victorian heyday (there was once a Promenade station in Morecambe, but this closed in 1994). Esplanades, by definition, are not modern things, and reek of an idealised past – sandcastles, buckets and spades, the Punch and Judy man and donkey rides. Holidays and nostalgia are always a heady mix, and recollections of childhood summers in south coast holiday resorts are often so frozen in time as to exclude the modern reality of poverty, decline and unemployment which blights so many of them. Even so, Ryde appears rather perky and vibrant this morning, with the little shops of Union Street looking much as they might have done in the days when Oscar Wilde and Karl Marx might have strolled past during their stays on the island. In the Royal Esplanade Hotel on the seafront, Josef, the waiter who serves
me
morning coffee, is in jovial mood telling me about the ‘motor scooter festival' that took place the previous day – the world's biggest. Back in the 1960s the Vespa crowd used to go to Margate for a punch-up; now middle-aged and more respectable, they come to Ryde for tea and cakes. ‘Such nice people,' Josef tells me. ‘No trouble. No trouble at all.' A toot on the whistle as the next train south arrives at Esplanade station over the road. It's all perfectly in period. In its post-war heyday our Tube train would almost certainly have carried passengers to Leicester Square to watch Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn – riding side saddle – on their Vespa buzzing through the streets of Rome in
Roman Holiday
.

But now we're heading through the 391-yard tunnel to Ryde St John's Road. We must be thankful for the tunnel. Its small diameter is partly responsible for the railway becoming a kind of working museum, since it's always been difficult to find trains to fit the line. It also explains why the Tubes were such a godsend. Their arrival allowed engineers to raise the floor of the tunnel so that it would flood less frequently at high tide, although there is still an operative pumping station near the Esplanade.

Lucky old Ryde. It is one of the smallest towns in Britain to have three stations of its own, and St John's Road is the nerve centre of the railway – the Crewe, the Doncaster and the Swindon of the island, rolled into one. Literally, since almost all Britain's great Victorian railway works of the past have been closed or sold off, and Jess Harper and his engineering team at Ryde – the works building still bearing the insignia of the old Southern Railway – are the last on the national network still maintaining their own rolling stock. And they reckon they know more about old Tube trains than even the people at London Underground; after all, they have been keeping them going for forty-five years.

Back in 1963, when Beeching proposed closure of the entire Isle of Wight network except for the section between the Esplanade and the ferry terminal at the end of Ryde pier, he was mainly influenced by the fact that the rolling stock on the island was ancient and would
have
to be replaced. The carriages dated from before the First World War, cast-offs from the London, Brighton and South Coast and London, Chatham and Dover railways. The little Victorian O2 Class 0-4-4 tanks were already hand-me-downs from Waterloo suburban services when they were transferred from the mainland by the Southern Railway in 1922. Although the little engines ran what in 1966 was the most intensive single-track service in Britain, hauling holiday trains up to ten coaches long, they were literally worn out, with cracked frames and wonky bogies, and the pumps that operated the Westinghouse brakes had to be encased in metal sheets to stop them spitting scalding water on unwary passengers. The Isle of Wight lines might have been a paradise for transport enthusiasts, who flocked there from all over the country, but there was a simple answer for Beeching as to what to do with all these geriatric trains – eliminate them.

But Beeching didn't get his way entirely, and it was announced in 1964 that the busiest part of the line, from Ryde to Shanklin, was to be saved. Miraculously, the old Southern Region decided to electrify it and bought a job lot of redundant London Tube stock from the 1920s at a cost of between £120 and £200 a carriage. These elderly trains, of a design which ran over the Piccadilly, Central and Baker-loo Lines and ended their London lives on the old Northern City Line from Moorgate to Finsbury Park, were not much younger than the trains they were replacing, and it is instructive that as the first cars were being sent to the Isle of Wight one of their sister coaches went on display at the Science Museum in London. These early Tubes have now gone to the scrapyard, being replaced by ‘young things' from 1938, which have operated the Ryde line since.

Ryde St John's Road is a cheery place where many of the old Victorian buildings survive and the cast-iron spandrels supporting the canopies bear the monogram of the original Isle of Wight Railway, opened in 1864. There is a handsome Victorian signal box, which controls the whole line, festooned with tubs of flowers. On the up platform is one of the most prolific displays of
colour
-coordinated flowers I have ever seen on a railway station – I have to touch the giant red lilies, begonias and busy lizzies to make sure they are not made of plastic. The displays are done by local disabled people, Tony Dickinson, the station manager, tells me. Tony, a slick young man with a neat white shirt and tie, with a South West Trains badge on a clip, controls all the stations on the lines, and his office is a buzzy place shared with drivers and conductors drinking from steaming mugs of tea. ‘We've had a good year,' he tells me. ‘A total of 1.3 million passengers – I'm very pleased.' Not surprising, since this means that nearly half the 2.7 million passengers who travel to the Isle of Wight each year get aboard one of his Tube trains. Not exactly Piccadilly Circus, but not bad for a small island off the Hampshire coast. ‘And we're operating sixty-seven trains a day,' he tells me. I am too polite to remind him that recent economies mean the service runs to an odd timetable, with alternating intervals of twenty and forty minutes between trains. Not exactly convenient for most people.

All traces of the engine sheds, which were once outside his office and in the 1960s attracted droves of young boys who preferred the thrill of trainspotting to a boring afternoon on the beach with their parents, have gone. However such is the measure of affection still held for the little locos running at the end of steam that their handsome brass nameplates (all commemorating island towns and villages) can fetch up to £15,000 at auctions of railwayana.

But time to head off on the next train south to the island's newest station, Smallbrook Junction, one of a tiny number of stations in British railway history never to have had any external access. This is where the lines to Newport, the island's capital, and Cowes once diverged, until Beeching got his hands on them. A signal box once stood here and the signalman doled out tokens allowing track access to the respective drivers as they raced off with their trains full of holidaymakers down the lines to Ventnor (then the terminus of the Shanklin line) and to Cowes. In the 1960s it was the busiest mechanical junction box in southern England. But
the
Cowes line was too good to lose and a bunch of preservationists saved part of it to become what is now the Isle of Wight Steam Railway. In an astonishing act of generosity, the old British Rail management built Smallbrook Junction station in 1991 to allow passengers to change from the Tube trains on the Shanklin line.

But renewals since have been rare – and the platform and signal box at Brading, the next station down the line, are now weed-grown and derelict, with the boarded-up station setting the tone for the rest of the line. At Sandown, the loveliest resort on the island with wide sandy beaches, the station cafe is derelict, with dust-covered tables visible through a broken window, although the newspaper kiosk is still open, bearing its former WH Smith sign, proclaiming in faded paint,
N
EWSPAPERS AND MAGAZINES POSTED ANYWHERE IN THE COUNTRY
. A notice on the toilets announces that they close each day at 12.25 p.m. – a time at which bladders presumably cease to function and which explains why, at the Shanklin terminus, a man is hosing down the subway with a watering can of disinfectant. Wasn't like this once. I have a black and white photograph of Shanklin from 1963, spruce and smart, with hundreds of folk in their holiday best making their way to the taxi rank for their seafront hotels. There is not a single taxi here today and the walk down to the beach is a long one, although some of the best sands in the south of England make it worth the effort.

Until 1966 the trains went on from here to Ventnor, through a 1,312-yard tunnel under St Boniface Down to a spectacular station set in a chalk cutting. But the tunnel, which is now used by the local water authority, would be far too expensive to reopen. It is tempting to walk the rest of the course of the line over the down, but I must return to Ryde because I have an appointment with a monk. Not to confess uncharitable thoughts about the rather run-down state of the railway, for whose continued existence we must be grateful, but because I am to stay tonight with a community of Benedictine monks at the Grade I-listed Quarr Abbey near Fishbourne.

I, like many other travellers to the Isle of Wight, have long held
eternally
sunny images of the island imprinted on my mind after being taken on holiday there by my parents as a child, and one of these was of Quarr, its pink bricks glowing in a kind of perpetual sunset. Would it still be there? I sent an email, not expecting a reply, but within a day a message had pinged back – from Father Nicholas Spencer, the guestmaster, who told me how interested he was in the Isle of Wight railways and that I could come and stay the night at the abbey if I liked. There's long been a ‘general kinship between the religious life and the railway scene', as Canon Roger Lloyd put it in his book
The Fascination of Railways
. Archbishop of Canterbury William Temple is said to have memorised the railway timetable of his day; Canon Victor Whitechurch of Christ Church Oxford was the creator of the vegetarian railway detective Thorpe Hazell, and the Reverend Wilbert Awdry was, of course, the author of the Thomas the Tank Engine books. Fans of the Ealing comedy
The Titfield Thunderbolt
will recall that the train was driven by the local vicar.