On the Slow Train (7 page)

So, as darkness falls, I am on the No. 9 bus along the Newport Road, asking the driver to put me off at the abbey. ‘Never been there myself,' he says. ‘I expect you'll find some spooky type answering the door. If you need to escape, we're running until midnight.' Actually there appears to be nobody around at all when I ring the bell, and after twisting the handles on the various great oak doors of the monastery and the church, I find one that creaks open into a lobby. Here too the doors are locked, but under a heavy metal bolt is a scrawled note telling me to wait. I sit in the deserted quadrangle under the cypresses as the dusk settles for seemingly ages. A pair of red squirrels play around my feet. Might I have to head back to the bus stop after all? Then a slight figure, black habit flapping, comes running out of the church. ‘So sorry to keep you.' This is the decidedly un-spooky Father Spencer, who has been at a meeting. ‘There are only nine of us,' he tells me, ‘in a monastery that was designed for 120. I take it you are coming to dinner? Don't forget that we eat in total silence.' He shows me into a vast refectory with long polished oak tables in semi-darkness. The
monks
sit at one end of the room and a table is set for me at the other. ‘But first you must shake hands with the abbot – who is a large red-faced Irishman with silver hair. When you have finished eating, you can get up and leave.' The food is surprisingly good – a meat and lentil pie with red kidney beans and fragrant apples from the monastery garden – which is reflected in the speed with which the monks eat. There is a rapid scraping of cutlery on plates, and soon everyone is heading for the exit.

Afterwards, Father Nicholas shows me round the vast abbey church of Our Lady of Quarr, built in 1912 by the French monk-architect Dom Paul Bellot, who brought a community of monks from Solesmes in France, driven out by the anti-clericalism of the time. Constructed of Belgian brick by local workmen who had never put up anything bigger than a house, it is like nothing else to be found in Britain. Pevsner calls it ‘brilliant' and a work of international importance, comparing it with the achievement of the Catalan architect Gaudi. But I notice it is falling apart in places, with cracks in the brickwork over the nave, missing pointing and leaking gutters. ‘It's hard work for such a few of us to keep it going,' says Father Nicholas, a blunt but charming man who comes from Millom in Cumbria, and whose father was the manager of Barrow steelworks. ‘I've been here twenty-six years and I always wanted to be a monk and I've never doubted that I did the right thing. But our community is a small one. The youngest is forty-five and the oldest over ninety. The one thing I pray for above all is that it will be enlarged. We have a few possibilities . . .' He looks doubtful. And what about the Isle of Wight Steam Railway? ‘I've never been on it, although I would like to have done so. You see, I have never had enough money for the fare.'

As well as looking after guests, Father Nicholas is the abbey bee-keeper and runs a bookbindery in the basement. He shows me a magnificent copy of Oscar Wilde's
Ballad of Reading Gaol
, ornamented with a gallows with the rope represented in relief in braided leather. Appropriate fare for a community of monks? I don't know. ‘But do come to compline.' This is a night service, one of the
five
acts of worship held in the church every day of the year, starting at 5 a.m. I wonder how the monks find the time to do all the mundane jobs necessary to keep the monastery running. Walking to the darkened church with the moon reflected on the slate roof and listening to the same Gregorian chant that has been sung for more than 1,500 years is a humbling experience. The rule of St Benedict states that every monastery guest should be ‘received as Christ'. I think that the monks haven't failed in their duty when Father Nicholas waves me off to the bus stop in the morning.

It is ironic that the Southern Vectis Omnibus Company – the monopoly bus service provider on the island – was founded by the Southern Railway back in 1929, as it was instrumental in killing off large parts of the railway in the 1960s. You can see why as I get off the bus at Wootton, the terminus of the preserved Isle of Wight Steam Railway, which once ran all the way from Ryde to Newport and Cowes. The modern two-tone green buses run every nine minutes and carry slogans such as
T
HE SLEEK WAY TO TRAVEL
.
C
OOL OR WHAT
? ‘Cool' is a term that could never be applied to the railways of the Isle of Wight and it's no wonder the Cowes line was seen off by the buses. But enough of the line remains to catch a train back along the five and a half miles to Smallbrook Junction. I buy a ticket from a man in a baggy uniform with a remarkable resemblance to Charles Hawtrey, and in the platform a little former War Department saddle-tank locomotive is fussing around its train – the familiar
blink-blonk-hiss
of the Westinghouse brake pump gives the impression that it is impatient to leave.

The Isle of Wight Steam Railway is almost unique among heritage lines in that the volunteers who run it got their act together almost immediately after closure and have a vast collection of authentic Victorian rolling stock. ‘Why then the relatively modern steam loco?' I ask Charles Hawtrey. ‘Well, she's reliable for a start,' he tells me. ‘And our star loco,
Calbourne
, is in the works having her boiler done.' No. 24
Calbourne
was one of the last locos to work on the line before British Rail closed it. He tells me a story about how the volunteers acquired it. ‘The wildlife artist David
Shepherd
wanted to save a steam loco from the scrapyard, so he went to the office of Ian Allan, the trainspotters' book publisher, to ask for advice. The publisher told him, “David, if you've got £500 to spend, why don't you buy an 02 tank engine”. And do you know, she's been running for us twice as long as she ran for BR!'

The train jogs along through a silver birch wood, the leaves just tinged with autumn red. It's the perfect period-piece slow train straight out of Philip Larkin's
Whitsun Weddings
: a warm afternoon, ‘all windows down, all cushions hot', ambling along with ‘shuffling gouts of steam'. The advertisements under the luggage racks offer Holiday Runabout Tickets for summer 1950 at a modest ten and sixpence, first class for fifteen shillings. Or how about ‘Southern Railway restaurant cars on principal trains. Lunch, two and sixpence, dinner, three and sixpence. Tea and light refreshments at modest prices.' At the Southern's Charing Cross Hotel there are ‘gas fires and telephones in every room'. But we're back to the real world at Havenstreet, the headquarters of the line – once a modest single-track platform with a siding serving a gasworks, now with its gift shop, tearoom and museum, the nerve centre of one of the island's most popular tourist attractions.

It's presided over with schoolmasterly precision by Alan Doe, the operations manager, a retired headmaster from Cornwall in charge of nineteen paid staff and 200 volunteers ‘Why are we so special?' He breaks off to order two tins of Brasso over the phone. ‘It's because we have original locomotives and original stations, with original carriages running on lines they used to work on. We're a proper working heritage site.' Now there's a gleam in his eye. ‘Let me show you this.' He leads me across the tracks to a shed away from the public gaze. Inside are two relatively modern but rusty 1940s Ivatt Class 2-6-2 tank locomotives once earmarked by British Railways to work the line when the Victorian tank engines went. It never happened because the Tube trains were drafted in. ‘Some old gents bought these at the end of steam, but they've got past the point of restoring them so they've given them to us. And soon we're going to get them running.' A secret
cache
of steam engines that haven't run for nearly half a century? It's every rail enthusiast's fantasy and Alan Doe's equivalent of the back catalogue of his thriving steam railway.

But what future for the electrified Island Line, with its superannuated Tubes? Can it survive in the bean-counting world of the modern railway? Until recently the line received the biggest subsidy per passenger of any in Britain. To get the answer, everyone says, ‘You'll have to ask Bobby.' Bobby Lock is the island's rail development officer, who, according to local legend, is responsible single-handedly for transforming the line's fortunes – a one-woman publicity machine and consciousness-raiser. Even gritty old railwaymen defer to her. John Little, South West Trains' operating manager, says of her efforts: ‘Now the railway has soul.' I track Bobby down to her home in Cowes, on the way attempting to decipher the remains of the old station. But there is nothing to be seen – it has disappeared without trace under a Co-op supermarket. But Bobby, small and blonde and busy feeding tea to her three-year-old daughter, is in upbeat mood. She shows me some safety posters that have been designed for the railway by local schoolchildren. ‘Of course the line won't close. Not now. We all love it too much. And I hear London Underground have a nice batch of Tube trains soon to be retired from the Victoria Line …' I get the sense the Tube bosses in London won't be in a position to refuse her.

Next morning, when I head back for Portsmouth, the pickets are out at Ryde bus station. It turns out there's a one-day bus strike on the island. And with high autumn winds whipping the Solent to a froth, none of the sleek catamaran ferries to the mainland are running because of the weather. But Bobby's Tube trains are still doughtily shuttling up and down the line to Shanklin. And eventually, after an hour's wait, an old-style ‘vomit bucket' ferry turns up at the pier head. ‘It may be a bit rolly and unpleasant,' announces the captain over the intercom, ‘but we'll make it to the other side eventually.' Old trains, old ferries. But at least they get you there.

CHAPTER FOUR

THE 10.30 FROM WREXHAM CENTRAL – UP THE LINE TO LONDON'S LAST TERMINUS

Wrexham Central to London Marylebone, via Gobowen, Shrewsbury, Wolverhampton, Banbury and High Wycombe

‘GO THROUGH THE
multi-storey,' says the nice young man in the Games Workshop. ‘Take a left and you'll see a pile of Asda catalogues.' I'm in a bleak shopping centre in Wrexham, North Wales, looking for what must be the most forlorn railway terminus in Britain. And here it is, tucked in between Argos Extra and Asda Living. It may have a grand-sounding name, but Wrexham Central is nothing more than a single track and a large red set of buffers sandwiched between the shops. There are piles of broken glass on the platform and a group of youths flick stones at beer cans on the track.

It is a small miracle that this, the farthest outpost of one of the grandest railway companies in the land, which once spread its tentacles from Scarborough to Stratford-upon-Avon and from Newcastle to Neath, should have survived in this inhospitable place. Once you could book a ticket at London's Marylebone station and travel behind the magnificent green engines of the Great Central Railway, pompously named after the directors of the board, on the line to Wrexham (or Manchester or Sheffield, Nottingham or Hull) without leaving the company's metals.

It is hard to imagine on this rainy morning in Wrexham that this was part of one of the most grandly conceived projects of the Railway Age. Back in the 1890s, Sir Edward Watkin, chairman of the Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, as the Great Central was
then
known, had a dream. It wasn't enough to fill the company's coffers with the profits from humping coal and iron across the Pennines; he would build a new line to London. Never mind that all the other railway companies had already built their own lines to the capital, he would park his own terminus in the Euston Road to rival Euston, St Pancras and King's Cross. But Sir Edward, described by one of his contemporaries as a ‘gambler and a megalomaniac', wasn't going to stop there. There was an even grander master plan. In 1881 he promoted a parliamentary bill to build the first Channel tunnel, even getting so far as to begin drilling a pilot tunnel into the chalk, where he audaciously hosted a champagne party for investors. Soon, he promised them, it would be possible to travel direct from the industrial towns of northern England to the Continent and beyond. The rewards would be beyond compare.

But it was all doomed. The magnificent engineering of Watkin's London extension rivalled that of Stephenson and Brunel, with a generous loading gauge, easy gradients and just one level crossing in its entire length. But despite the huge razzmatazz when it opened in 1899, with a splendid dinner hosted on the station platform, the last conventional main line to be built in Britain was simply too late and never caught on. It was the first main line to lose its passenger services, and fizzled out ignominiously at the hands of Beeching in 1966, when the once-grand expresses, such as the Master Cutler and South Yorkshireman, had dwindled to three semi-fast trains a day to Nottingham, pulled by filthy, wheezing Black Five Class steam locomotives. The Manchester, Sheffield and Lincolnshire, dubbed the ‘Money Sunk and Lost', had spawned a new acronym in the Great Central, the Gone Completely. But not entirely, as we shall soon discover. Watkin was simply ahead of his time and would have enjoyed the irony that although it took Britain another century to get round to building its next new main line, this one really did run through a Channel tunnel.

Just imagine it. Book me a ticket from Wrexham to Vienna or St Petersburg. How about Istanbul? Vladivostock even? Yes, and I'd like a first-class sleeping berth too. ‘Rapid Travel in Luxury' was the
slogan
. ‘Jason fought for the Golden Fleece in mezzotint panels on the dining car ceilings,' observed the railway historian C Hamilton Ellis, ‘and as you lounged on a splendiferous pew of carved oak and figured plush, the sun, shining through coloured glass deck lights, gave a deliciously bizarre quality to the complexion of the lady opposite.'