A train journey to the soul of Britain

[John Ashworth]

A train journey to the soul of Britain

By Matthew Engel
FT.com
Published: April 25 2009 01:27 | Last updated: April 25 2009 01:27

It would be hard to design a nation better suited to modern rail travel than Britain: it is a natural hub-and-spoke country. London is an overwhelmingly dominant power in the land. The trunk lines radiate out from there; so do the major suburban lines; the need for complicated cross-country journeys is much less urgent than in, say, Germany where, as in the US, there are plenty of cities contending for influence.

Yet on a high-speed railway map of Europe that is already taking shape, Britain is represented by one remote spur, the line optimistically known as High Speed 1, connecting London to the Channel Tunnel. This was finally completed in 2007, a mere 205 years after the idea of a tunnel was first mooted.

One must allow for three factors: the difficulties of building through the British countryside; the weary fearfulness that afflicts a governing class with a long record of disastrous management of major public projects; and the temptations of short-termism that inevitably afflict here-today-gone-tomorrow politicians whose main aim is not to be gone until the day after tomorrow at least. But it is still all a mystery. How come the British, who invented the railways and remain curiously obsessed by them, seem so incapable of running them?

To help me find out, I bought a two-week Rover ticket – valid everywhere on National Rail services except the Heathrow Express, and the Heathrow Connect service between the airport and Hayes and Harlington. (I loved that Hayes and Harlington bit; it made the place sound so enticing.) First-class, second-class, whatever. Eight hundred and sixty quid, a bargain.

I made 77 separate journeys. Long ones, short ones, lovely ones, vile ones, packed in sardine cans, sprawled out in luxury. Was I late? Not once, at least not within the railway industry’s definition, which doesn’t count delays of less than 10 minutes (five on short trips). Not in 77 train journeys. The perversity was unspeakable.

Because I was free: free from schedules and deadlines and meetings and pressure. If I couldn’t catch one train, I’d get another somewhere else. The very notion of punctuality became an ethereal kind of concept.

I did have a plan, of sorts. The aim was to go down to Penzance, the southern and western extremity of the system, and then to Thurso, the northern extremity, as fast as possible, and after that come back at leisure. So the immediate task, when I left home on the Welsh Border, was to get on to a First Great Western commuter train to catch a connection to Penzance.

The 08.15 from Newport to Bristol Temple Meads was jammed full at the start, though it became much fuller once we had gone through the Severn Tunnel and back into England. When another train went by, the doors rattled alarmingly and the air whooshed from underneath, which on such a morning was rather welcome. As more people joined, at Patchway and Filton Abbey Wood, the conductor asked us to move further down the car. “Is it always like this?” I asked a woman who had stood with me since Newport. “Oh, no,” she replied. “It’s usually much worse.”

“What’s a bad day, then?” “When it doesn’t turn up and you have to wait an hour for the next one.” “Or when the previous one hasn’t turned up and two lots have to pile on yours,” someone chipped in. “You’re all lucky,” said the conductor. “You should see the trains they have down at Exeter on the Exmouth line ... They don’t trust them to get this far. They have to take them to the depot and fix them every night.”

And so a cheery general conversation began. “Public transport is not run for the convenience of the public,” said a jolly man with a beard. And we all ruminated for a moment. Then a man in a check suit said suddenly: “Something’s going to go wrong in a minute.” And, sure enough, we squealed to a halt outside Temple Meads, and spent five minutes waiting for a platform.

. . .

After we had left Bristol with the customary FGW sound effects of squawks, rattles, clanks, rumbles and hisses we settled into a gentle West Country kind of rhythm. The miles went by, until we reached the most spectacular stretch of main-line railway in Britain, from Exeter to Newton Abbot – first along the Exe estuary and then, thrillingly, along the sea wall at Dawlish, before returning to the calm of the Teign estuary.

Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose to build this southward extension of the Great Western hugging the sea, though it is not at all clear why. He was by temperament a showman and a gambler, and no doubt the route appealed to his sense of drama. It appeals to anyone with a sense of drama: YouTube has a selection of clips showing the waves crashing over the tracks.

It took only five months from the line’s opening in 1846 for it to be severed by a storm. Still, the trains have run for more than 160 years, minus interruptions for inundations. The other two rail links connecting Plymouth to the east were closed in the 1960s. Network Rail spends £400,000 a year to maintain the cliffs, the track and the sea wall. The tide was high when we passed, and there was a serious hint of chop in the Channel. The spray leapt upwards and hurled itself towards the windows. I was enthralled. The man opposite me just kept doing his Sudoku puzzle.

Then it was on to the South Hams and towards Cornwall. There are moments to be really grateful that these ancient high-speed trains are not wholly enclosed like the new Virgin ones. It is still possible to disobey the traditional injunction of railway companies and lean out of the window to get the perfect view as you approach the Royal Albert Bridge that links Devon and Cornwall. Recent restoration works to coincide with Brunel’s bicentenary cleared the view of the entrance to the bridge. And the words “IK BRUNEL, ENGINEER, 1859” shine out in white above the iron-grey arch.

. . .

My friend, the writer Simon Barnes, had insisted I should take the line from Lowestoft to Norwich. East Anglia cannot compete with the thrill of the Devon waves or the mountains of Mallaig on the west of Scotland. But for sheer English-rose loveliness, this was my favourite journey.

It was a springtime evening of limpid clarity, and we crossed the water meadows by the Waveney to reach Somerleyton. The oaks of Norfolk stood out against a sky that began as sapphire (or at least National Express corporate blue) before slowly turning violet. Did I mention that I love the railways?

The next day, something even better happened. I timed my exit from Norwich to catch the National Express afternoon tea. Thin-cut sandwiches. A scone with very rich cream. And there it was on the table: An Individual Pot of Strawberry Jam, a railway memory from childhood when we had tea on the train home from Euston.

Through Needham Market, with its mysterious chimneys and towers like a miniature Gormenghast, and Stowmarket, which itself does a nifty line in cherry Madeira cake. I added both to my list of favourite stations. They joined Glasgow Central, Lancaster, Birmingham Moor Street, rebuilt like a film set, tarty Sheffield, Church Stretton in Shropshire, with its sign indicating latitude and longitude, classical Huddersfield, which could serve as the capitol of a small but pretentious American state (Britain perhaps?). Kents Bank on the Barrow line with its splendid awning, and remote Dolau on the Heart of Wales, lovingly maintained by locals. Splendour, splendour everywhere, as Betjeman wrote in a completely different context – after birdying the par-four 13th at St Enodoc. How he would have loved this journey, and the scones and jam.

It all seemed too good to be true ...

And it was. As late as November 11 2008, the operator’s public relations office was still churning out self-congratulatory press releases: “National Express East Anglia has a great reputation for its restaurant service.” On November 18 it announced the dining cars were being axed. “Passengers wanted smaller meals and snacks served at their seats,” a spokesman said.

Two days after that, the company announced – in common with the other companies – its annual round of way-above-inflation price increases. It was said that the restaurant cars were losing £10m a year, a totally absurd statistic: it also costs money to provide seats, roofs, walls and other post-1840 fripperies.

One of the nasty surprises of privatisation is just how dreadful firms like National Express have been in offering any sense of style or pride or even marketing – all the things that private enterprise is supposedly good at. The original Great Western had locomotives called Pendennis Castle and Lord of the Isles. First Great Western, to take an example, has Environment Agency and Oxfordshire 2007.

If you think well of Britain’s railway companies for a second, they will turn round and prove you wrong. Standing on Leeds station, I was struck by a big double TV screen showing that all the trains for the next hour or two – about 50 of them – were allegedly on time. I thought this was magnificent enough to be worth a picture and whipped out my camera.

Up strutted a junior jobsworth, full of institutional paranoia and his own importance, to denounce me as a potential terrorist. “Show me those pictures!” “Why?” “You could be photographing the pipes!” Railway magazines regularly report how the handful of 1950s boys who still care enough, as pensioners, to spend their days on station platforms writing down train numbers are forever being tormented by these clodpoles.

. . .

On a cold and misty January evening in 2009, after a day of London meetings, I arrived at Paddington to catch the train home: First Great Western’s 16.45 to Swansea. It was cancelled: mechanical failure. As an old hand with time to make plans before the next train, the 17.15, I played guess-the-platform, got it right, boarded ahead of the crowds, and won a prize, precious under normal circumstances but doubly so when the previous service has been cancelled: a seat.

A troubled conscience impelled me to give it up at Didcot to a woman who thanked me so profusely I felt a complete swine, since I’d been ignoring her and all the other standers for the previous 40 minutes while I read the papers. She was paying the full rush-hour fare for the 133 miles to Newport, which had gone up the previous week by 9 per cent, from £155 to £169 second-class return. (First-class was up from £237 to £259.) “Nightmare,” said a man close by (seated).

Oh, come on, I thought, we ought to be giving these train companies some credit. The genuine nightmare of western governments that strange, cold and economically fearful January was of deflation – falling prices leading to out-and-out depression. No one was doing more to counteract that danger than Britain’s rail operators. And this journey was not really the stuff of nightmares, not by British railway standards. By Swindon, an hour out, just about everyone had a seat. It might then have been at least theoretically possible to accept the regular invitations to visit the buffet, or to ask for a copy of the safety leaflet in Braille.

The British are used to grot when travelling. They expect it. They almost revel in it. I know: I’m one of them. The typical British railway experience is not being sworn at by a buffet attendant (though it did happen to me, spectacularly, most buffet attendants are delightful if you can fight through the crowds to reach them); nor does it consist of marvelling at the mountains of Mallaig or sapphire-blue skies at Somerleyton. It is the high-price, low-grade hopelessness of journeys like this.

The previous day’s Guardian had reported that new 220mph trains from Madrid to Barcelona had led to a huge rise in rail usage and a 20 per cent drop in domestic air travel. The Spanish government has major plans to expand its high-speed network. That’s backward old Spain, you know: mañana, Manuel, all of that. Britain that week was announcing a third runway at Heathrow instead. Yesterday’s solution to tomorrow’s transport problems.

A mysterious love of the railways remains a peculiar and often secretive British affliction. It is wholly unrequited. The people who run the trains do not love us.

BREAKFAST NEWS

Farewell to the fruit compote

The mood on the 07.25 from Cardiff to London this Budget week was grim – and it was nothing to do with the chancellor. At least not directly. The news had filtered through that First Great Western were axeing the Pullman dining car from May 15. The name Pullman has been a byword for the occasional hints of luxury on Britain’s railways since 1873. Alas, the words “First Great Western”, are often associated with everything sluggish, unreliable, overcrowded and overpriced.

In my book Eleven Minutes Late I raved about the breakfast but added: “I expect its abolition any minute.” The company refused to promote the service, often failed to announce it properly and sometimes left the Pullman car behind at the depot.

And so it’s farewell to the fruit compote and the kippers and sausages and toast and to Diana and Billy who always greeted their customers warmly and gave them a sliver of hope for the day (even Budget Day) and the future of the railways. They follow the East Anglian afternoon tea into history.

“The breakfast is of an extraordinarily high standard, served by people who are utterly dedicated and in a very civilised setting,” said one regular, Andrew Thornhill QC. “It will be replaced by a plastic cafeteria system and it’s a great pity.”

It may look like a cost-effective decision in straitened times. But the appeal of trains rests on the lingering folk-memory that they offer something more stylish than a bus or a motorway. Modern railways managers don’t get that.

The rail minister Lord Adonis travelled round the system over Easter and was shocked by the absence of refreshments not so much on trains but on stations outside peak times. The only companies making any effort are the “open access” operators, allowed on to the system on sufferance – a gesture to the promise of competition that supposedly underlay the Conservatives’ botched privatisation.

These include the Wrexham and Shropshire, which last year reintroduced a direct service from Wrexham to London after a gap of more than 40 years. The trains are slow and hemmed in by restriction but they made enough impact to force Virgin, which has the north-west franchise, to find out where Shropshire is on the map and announce plans to compete.

Virgin was blasted by bad publicity (for the umpteenth time). In vain did Sir Richard Branson try to point out that far from being a heroic tiddler, the interloper was owned by the very untiddly Deutsche Bahn, German state railways. The British will tolerate almost anything these days, especially on trains, but they still like an underdog.


An edited extract from ‘Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain’ by Matthew Engel, published on May 1 by Macmillan. Available through the FT Bookshop at £11.99 plus p&p (RRP £14.99) tel: 0870 429 5884;
www.ft.com/bookshop
www.matthewengel.co.uk

Copyright The Financial Times Limited 2009