Blood on the Tracks: A History of Railway Crime in Britain (32 page)

What Trollope effectively does (and this has a contemporary ring) is to turn a critical eye not only on the aristocratic and middle class sections of society but also anyone who blindly worships money and aspires to have it. The sycophants who sucked up to Melmotte, like those who toadied to presentday financiers, get their fingers burnt. The aristocracy, in typically hypocritical fashion, was always happy to attend the parties at Melmotte’s house and partake of his generous hospitality but now they spurn him. Shades of Hudson.

A comprehensive knowledge of railways was the defining mark of the stories written by Freeman Wills Crofts (1879-1957). Opinions differ over Crofts. Some consider him to be the doyen of British railway crime writing whilst others, less kindly, view his work as humdrum and plodding. For Crofts, attention to a well-constructed timetable could take precedence over human emotion, intrigue or evil cunning. Born in Dublin he worked in railway engineering and wrote detective stories as and when he could. His long series of novels, written between 1920 and 1957, feature his best-known character, Inspector French.

Writing in what is often regarded as the ‘Golden Age of Crime Fiction’, which was the 1920s to the 1940s, his books included
The Cask
(1920),
The
Sea Mystery
(1928),
The 12:30 from Croydon
(1934),
Death of a Train
(1946) and
Mystery of the Sleeping Car Express: And Other Stories
(1956). In
Inspector French’s
Greatest Case
(1925), a clerk of a diamond merchant firm is found murdered and the safe plundered. Inspector French painstakingly analyses railway timetables (his specialism) as part of his attempt to track the suspects. In many of his books, Crofts demonstrates a detailed knowledge of the railway network and its complexities, as if he enjoys showing off this knowledge and perhaps when it is not always germane to the plot.

In
Crime on the Footplate
(1955) Crofts starts in his trademark style: ‘The August day was stifling as the 11.55a.m. express from Leeds beat heavily up the grade towards the summit in the foothills of the Pennines. From there the run down to Carlisle would be easy and rapid. The train was on time and travelling at the full thirty miles an hour customary at the place… All seemed well with the train, yet all was not well.’ All was not well indeed, because on the footplate Fireman Grover was planning to murder his driver, William Deane.

Railway tunnels feature as crime scenes in many narratives. In the short story
The Mystery of the Felwyn Tunnel
(1898) by L.T. (Elizabeth Thomasina) Meade (1854-1914), Robert Eustace, a signalman has been found dead at the mouth of a tunnel in suspicious circumstances. Shortly after another signalman is also discovered dead in the same place. The Lytton Vale Railway Company in Wales calls in a detective to solve the mystery and the investigation begins.

Railway tracks are the setting for the discovery of a horribly mangled body that appears to have been dragged along by a train in
Dead on the Track
(1943),
by John Rhode. In another story by Rhode,
Death on the Boat Train
(1940), Waterloo station is the site where a dead body is found following the arrival of the Southampton boat train. Another variation on the railway station is Margery Allingham’s
Dancers in Mourning
(1937) where a bomb planted at a station blows up a murder suspect. Ethel Lina White’s (1876-1944) short story,
Cheese
(1941), which appears in Peter Haining’s collection
Murder on
the Railways
(1996), sees Victoria station as the location for a tale of murder. Interestingly, Alfred Hitchcock’s classic film
The Lady Vanishes
(1938) is based on the novel
The Wheel Spins
(1936) by White.

Anthony Trollope (1815-82) achieved success with his ‘Barchester’ novels with their effective plots and characterisation. He used trains extensively during his time as a Post Office Surveyor. In that role, he was responsible for the erection of some of the earliest postal pillar boxes; in this case in the Channel Islands.

Train crashes are not always what they seem. A suspicious accident involving a steam engine and an electric train is the theme in
The Knight’s Cross
Signal Problem
(
News of the World
24-31 August 1913) by Ernest Bramah. ‘An ordinary Central and Suburban passenger train, travelling non-stop at Knight’s Cross, ran past the signal and crashed into a crowded electric train that was just beginning to move out… For the first time on an English railway there was a good stand-up smash between a heavy steam engine and a train of light cars… Twenty-seven killed, forty something injured, eight died since… But was the engine-driver responsible?’

No doubt if most people were asked to name a story involving both railways and crime they would probably say
Thirty-Nine Steps
(1915) by John
Buchan which has also been adapted into a number of film versions. The novel, which introduces the famous adventuring hero, Richard Hannay, is set in 1914. Hannay hears of a plot to destabilise Europe beginning with a plan to assassinate the Greek Premier. Our hero is soon fleeing from German spies. Hannay decides to go to Scotland and a ‘search in Bradshaw informed [him] that a train left St Pancras at 7.10’ and would arrive at any Galloway station in the late afternoon. As the train progressed through Scotland, it ‘rumbled slowly into a land of little wooded glens and then to a great wide moorland place, gleaming with lochs, with high blue hills showing northwards.’ The film has a different take on the railway journey but more of that later.

More recent books about railway crime include those by Andrew Martin and there is no ambiguity about the subject of his books with titles such as
The Necropolis Railway
(2002),
The Lost Luggage Porter
(2006),
Murder at
Deviation Point
(2007),
Death on a Branch Line
(2008), and
The Last Train to
Scarborough
(2009). The first of these,
The Necropolis Railway,
is set against the engine sheds around Nine Elms, Waterloo and the eponymous Necropolis Railway at Brookwood at the turn of the nineteenth century. The central character is Jim Stringer who starts his career on the railways only to find that his predecessors have met a premature and gruesome end. It seems that Stringer might become the next victim.

Edward Marston is another contemporary writer who has written some forty crime novels. His series about the railways involves the dandy Robert Colbeck, an Inspector in the Detective Department of the Metropolitan Police in the nineteenth century. Marston’s books include
The Railway
Detective
,
The Excursion Train
,
The Railway Viaduct
,
The Iron Horse
and
Murder on
the Brighton Express
.
The Railway Detective
is set in 1851 where the London to Birmingham mail train is stopped and derailed, seriously injuring the driver. Colbeck is faced with solving the well-organised train robbery.

In
Underground
(2000) by Tobias Hill, a mysterious person is pushing women under trains, and a Polish immigrant who works at a north London station – a loner with a complicated past and a secret fear of the dark – is determined to stop the killings.

These, and other, contemporary writers continue a tradition as old as the railways and by so doing reflect an ongoing interest and enthusiasm for those particular areas that still carry a fascination: railways, crime and reading.

The entrance to the former Necropolis Railway part of Waterloo station. The Necropolis Railway opened in 1854 connecting Waterloo with Brookwood cemetery near Woking. Much of this part of the station was destroyed by enemy action in the Second World War.

J
ohn Huntly aptly makes the point in his book,
Railways and the Cinema
(1969) that ‘like the steam locomotive, there is no exact moment in time when the cinema came into existence.’ Whenever that moment was, film-makers quickly tapped into the potential of railways as an ideal subject for films. Starting with a range of silent documentaries such as
Express Trains
(1898),
Railway Ride Over the Tay Bridge
(1897) and
Building a British Railway
(1905), feature films soon followed. Typically it was the United States that responded to this with films such as
The Great Train Robbery
(1903),
The Lost
Freight Car
(1911) and
Helen’s Sacrifice
(1914).

British film-makers followed with
When the Devil Drives
(1907), a rather surreal film, in which a taxi driver of a four-wheeled cab takes a suburban family to a railway station. Suddenly the cab driver changes into the Devil. As he arrives at the station he then mysteriously vanishes, leaving the confused passengers alone with their luggage. As they board the train and settle down the Devil reappears, this time as the train driver. The Devil gets rid of the driver and his mate and then embarks on an incredible journey, much to the anguish of the terrified passengers. The film ends with a close-up of the Devil’s manic, laughing face. Following the success of American serials such as
The Hazards of Helen
, British attempts at the genre included
Lieutenant Daring
and the
Plans of the Minefields
(1913), which involved villains travelling by train from Charing Cross to Folkstone.

Towards the end of the silent era
The Wrecker
(1929) was adapted into film by Gainsborough from a stage play written by Arnold Ridley. The story concerns an engine driver who believes his engine is malevolent. His fears are confirmed in the finale when there is a huge train crash. Arnold Ridley
(1896-1984), probably more well known for his role as Private Charles Godfrey in
Dad’s Army
which ran on television from 1968 to 1977, also wrote
The
Ghost Train
(1923) which was a huge success for over two years when performed at St Martin’s theatre in London. It was later adapted into a film, first in 1931 with the comedian Jack Hulbert and the better known version in 1941 starring Arthur Askey. Ridley’s inspiration for writing the play came from stories he had heard about Mangotsfield station in Bristol, closed in 1962. The 1931 version made generous use of the Great Western Railway with a number of scenic shots en route from Paddington.

The
Ghost Train
centres on a group of passengers travelling to Cornwall who miss their connection and have to spend the night in the waiting room of a remote and eerie railway station called Fal Vale. While they wait, an agitated stationmaster tries to persuade them to leave because, he warns them, there is a local legend of a ghost train that brings doom and death to all who see it. During the night the stationmaster is murdered and tensions begin to mount. However, as we discover later, the train is in fact smuggling arms and the story has been concocted to frighten away strangers.