On the Slow Train (11 page)

I wonder how much the fastidious Ruskin would have enjoyed a pint or two of Good Old Boy ale among the amply gutted men in ‘Coniston Beer Festival' T-shirts at the bar of the Prince of Wales, although aesthetics are not on the agenda as I attempt a House Special Giant Pasty with mushy peas and a pint of Foxfield Old Pale. He would at least have been close enough to the platform to jump aboard the next branch train to Coniston, where he would almost certainly have admired the Swiss-chalet-style station. There's a grand view of the signalman in his box here, kitted out with an array of levers fit to control a country junction, complete with water tower to fill the boilers of steam engines but without much more to do than control a level crossing and a farm track. The signal box, perched on top of a little weatherboarded waiting room, looks as though it might fall down of its own accord. A
crumpled
-up Somerfield plastic bag is stuffed in the window frame where the wood has rotted away. But the view from here, across the serene waters of the Duddon estuary, must be one of the most beautiful from a railway station anywhere in Britain.

Like the Foxfield–Coniston route, almost all the branch lines into the heart of the Lake District are now fading memories. The Lakeside branch from Ulverston, a few stops back along the line before Barrow, was killed off by Beeching in 1965 just four years before its centenary, although the northern section from Haverthwaite was saved by a group of enthusiasts and now operates as a heritage line, with some authentic former London, Midland and Scottish Railway Fairburn tank engines, the last of their kind still running. Further north, the line that passed through Keswick on its way from Workington to Penrith, and the only one to traverse the Lakes from east to west, was an even more tragic casualty of the 1960s closures, drawing fury from locals as Beeching had his way. The first section west of Keswick went in 1966, the trackbed being turned over to the builders of the new A66 road, and the rest went soon after.

But the little narrow-gauge line from Ravenglass, along beautiful Eskdale to Dalegarth, at the foot of England's highest mountains, lives on. ‘La'al Ratty', as the Ravenglass and Eskdale is known locally, is probably the only profitable secondary railway in Cumbria, and one of the few profitable non-nuclear enterprises on this part of the Cumbrian Coast. It takes my train just twenty-eight minutes to get here from Foxfield, and crossing the platform to change trains you can see why the Ratty is so successful. Two miniature replicas of mainline steam locomotives sit simmering in the sidings. The one that is to haul my train seven miles into the heart of the Lakes is the mustard-coloured
River Irt
, which, according to a notice on the platform, was ‘built in 1894, the oldest working 15-inch gauge locomotive in the world'. Being swung round on the turntable is her sister, the
River Mite
, painted in the India red of the Furness Railway. She looks like the fastest and most thrilling express engine in the world, but you have
to
get down on your knees and half close your eyes to imagine it.

But this is no toy railway; it operates throughout the year, carrying both locals and tourists. The Ravenglass and Eskdale was opened in 1875 to carry quarried haematite down to the Furness Railway main line, as well as the occasional passenger. But when supplies of the ore started to run out, it was rescued as the realisation of a grown-up little boy's dream. The saviour was a Northampton model maker called Wynne Bassett-Lowke. (The firm had a famous model shop in High Holborn, a mecca for young boys and their fathers until it closed in the 1970s.) Bassett-Lowke rebuilt the line changing the gauge from 3 feet to 15 inches. Since then La'al Ratty has gone from strength to strength. Some of its success may be due to the fact that it is one of the few non-imaginary railways to be enshrined in the Thomas the Tank Engine canon. The ‘Arlesdale Railway' in the Reverend W Awdrey's
Small Railway Engines
is based on the Ravenglass and Eskdale, where Awdrey spent a holiday with his clergyman chum the Reverend E R Boston; they take the parts of the ‘Thin Clergyman' and the ‘Fat Clergyman' respectively.

And what a jolly ride the two clerics must have had on the train up the valley. Today, in the open-top carriages, families with young children sucking on Starbursts mingle with stern-looking hikers in Tilley hats, shorts and Hillmasters – ‘Scafell Pike, here we come!' There is even space for bikes. ‘You can sit in one of the open carriages,' Geoffrey the volunteer ticket collector tells me. ‘But don't dance on the ceiling!' Ho-ho! Warm steam blows back in our faces as the
River Irt
chuffs past giant ferns and oaks, her carriages emitting a curious
da-da-tiddlypop, da-da-tiddlypop
. An upturned boat serves as a station shelter at Murthwaite. Here a red squirrel is briefly glimpsed scampering away from the train, while a buzzard hovers menacingly above the valley. The dark presence of Harter Fell, 2,129 feet, looms on the right. And then
whoomph
as the brakes suddenly go on, followed by the staccato
bish-bosh
of the Westinghouse brakes on the loco. It turns out that a flock of the local Herdwick sheep, with their curious black
coats
, have strayed onto the track, and the driver has to climb down to shoo them off.

Back at Ravenglass station there is a crowd quaffing Ratty Ale in the Ratty Arms, part of the miniature railway's empire, which has taken over much of the old Furness Railway station. The workshops are in the goods shed and the museum and pub are in the station buildings on opposite platforms. The sun is sinking over the Mite Estuary as the
River Irt
is put to bed in the engine shed, and I wait for the last train of the day to my own berth in the Millom Station hotel. Quarter past seven doesn't seem late for a last train, but clearly Northern Rail expects its customers to be tucked up early. (No clubbing round here, please.) But I wait half an hour, and no train appears. Then forty-five-minutes have gone, and I look around at the once-busy scene to find everything shut and no one to ask. No hotel vacancies round here in picturesque Ravenglass, which is why I'm slumming it in Millom. I think of Edward Thomas's ‘Adlestrop': ‘No one came and no one went on the bare platform . . .' Perhaps I shall have to walk. But then I remember not Adlestrop but Bangalore, and use my mobile phone to ring the nice lady at National Rail Enquiries head-quarters in India. ‘Your train is running precisely forty-nine minutes late,' she tells me, consulting her computer screen and beaming back the news across the world to Cumbria. ‘But supposing I didn't have a mobile phone,' I say to her. ‘How could I have known?' There's a crackly silence at the end of the line.

When the southbound train finally arrives, the conductor is apologetic.

A few days ago we had a Class 153 [single-carriage] train come off the track near Dalston. There were seventeen aboard and lucky none of them were injured. They reckon it was a rail that buckled in the heat. I spoke to the driver and he said it drifted off the rails into the ballast, just like that. They're playing safe today and slowing us all up. They like to call us a ‘showpiece line'. But do you think it really is? The
real
problem is the trains. They're too short and we haven't got enough of them. Sometimes I get twelve cyclists wanting to get aboard at Whitehaven, where the Coast-to-Coast Path starts. They get a bit iffy when they say I can't let them all on. And don't talk to me about the Pacers . . .

At Millom the darkened station is deserted and the bar at the Station Hotel is empty. The barmaid is resting on her elbows watching TV, and there seem to be no takers for the cheapo deal on vodka and Red Bull. Still, I get a good night's sleep before resuming the journey north along the line the next morning. But first I have something to seek out – the little house at 14 St George's Terrace where the poet Norman Nicholson, the ‘modern bard of the Lake District', was born and lived for most of his life. His poetry more than anything sums up the schizophrenic nature of the Cumbrian Coast railway's hinterland. I interviewed him just before he died in 1987 and he said something that I have never forgotten – that the rock that forms the noble high fells of Cumbria is the same rock that put bread on the table for thousands of families through the mines and quarries and ironworks.

Millom's once-mighty Hodbarrow steelworks is now a memory and its bulldozed site is a bird sanctuary – home to the rare great-crested grebe, once almost extinct in Britain. The only industries that put bread on the table for local people these days are the vast facilities run by the Nuclear Decommissioning Authority (formerly British Nuclear Fuels Ltd) along the ‘nuclear coast'. Millom station platform this morning is thronged with Sellafield-bound passengers, and looks more like rush hour in suburban south-east England than one of the most depressed towns in Britain. ‘It's a fact,' says the lady who runs the Millom Folk Museum in the old station booking office, ‘that Millom is the busiest station in the UK. You work it out by comparing the number of people who use the trains with the population. Footfall, they call it.'

I ponder this as the packed train heads towards Sellafield, where the vast cooling towers and chimneys dominate the landscape for miles around. Even the names of the local stations have a sinister ring. Drigg, for instance, sounds as though God could have created it for the purpose of storing nuclear waste. Ten thousand people, nearly all of them local, are employed in Sellafield and its related plants, and while international environmentalists would like to see the whole place closed down, the locals will have none of it, believing it to be entirely good for their economic, if not physical, health. The original name Windscale was changed to Sellafield after a major fire in 1957 led to a core meltdown and the discharge of vast amounts of radioactive material into the local landscape and the Irish Sea. Another leak from the Thorp reprocessing plant in 2005 went undetected for nine months. Even according to the management, building B30, in the heart of the facility, is the most hazardous industrial building in Europe. Now another giant nuclear power station is to be built on the coast here with enough power to meet the energy needs of Leeds, Cardiff and Glasgow combined. Yet nobody seems fazed. The railway station at Drigg has a splendid platform garden full of pre-nuclear age delights such as roses, antirrhinums, delphiniums and petunias tended by the lady from the gift shop next door. She even has a home-made set of steps to help passengers from the trains – it is not deemed economic to rebuild the low Furness Railway platforms. Just down the road is Britain's main low-level nuclear waste dump, although let's not dwell on it now.

In the sidings near Sellafield station I count eight flasks of spent nuclear waste from power stations all over the nation. Enough nuclear material here, mixed in the right cocktail, for a new Hiroshima and much more than is at the disposal of the presidents of Iran and North Korea, yet yards away workers are nonchalantly playing golf on an immaculate green in the shadow of the cooling towers. ‘They're some of the best players in the world,' the man opposite me on the train remarks, ‘because they've got six fingers
on
each hand!' Somehow everything seems sinister here when it's really perfectly mundane. I start to wonder why two watering cranes for filling steam locomotives have been retained on the platform, nearly half a century after steam ended. Conspiracy theorists might ponder on a low-tech evacuation – or did they just forget to take them away? Certainly the ranks of cormorants and herring gulls lined up on the beach like sentries look as fit and spruce as can be.

The line becomes single track most of the way to Whitehaven from here, hugging the coast, and in the days when you could open carriage windows in trains you could almost reach out and touch the sea. No road anywhere in Britain takes you so close to the waves for so long. Domesticity reasserts itself at Seascale, once intended by the Furness directors to be, like Grange-over-Sands, a ‘Torquay of the North'. But only one hotel was brave enough to open and the town is little more than a few grey houses clustered around an expanse of featureless beach. It's a tough choice which side of the train to sit for the finest views. The railway staff say they never tire of the moods of the sea here, whether the smooth azure ocean of July or the vicious grey sea of winter, when huge waves sometimes crash over the tracks. But the views of the Lakeland fells on the land side of the train are just as exciting – Seatallan, Haycock, Pillar and High Stile pass by in procession – though never be surprised to encounter a forest of wind turbines round the next bend. There is hardly a stretch of the route from Silverdale to Maryport where lazily rotating fins are not visible somewhere on the horizon.

Along the beach is a community of shanty dwellers, whose homes bear names such as Sea Breeze and Peacehaven. Legend has it that under the roofing felt and weatherboarding with which most of them are covered are some original Furness Railway carriages. A goods train once rolled off the embankment here, crushing many of them, but fortunately their inhabitants were out at the time. The shacks extend nearly as far as St Bees, where on this sunny morning elegant schoolgirls in whites are playing
tennis
in the shadow of the medieval priory, where the organ is famous for its 2,000 pipes.

‘It's not always so peaceful,' the guard tells me. ‘The boys go into Whitehaven for supplies of alcohol, which they smuggle in their rooms. Sometimes they get back on the train swigging from two-litre bottles of White Ice cider. It's like industrial fuel, and you could fire up Sellafield with it. The kids are rowdier than the grown-up drunks a lot of the time!' I ask him for a request stop at Parton, a bleak little former smelting village, but with sensational views along the coast. From here I plan to take the Cumbria Coast Path back to Whitehaven, the most important town on the line. ‘Oh, you mean Dolly's nipple,' he says, cheerily referring to the fact that the train rounds a promontory. The line here is known as ‘Avalanche Alley', owing to the frequent landslides caused by the unstable geology of the cliffs and the colliery workings on the cliff top. Rails can become buckled overnight or even carried away by the sea. Three separate slips sometimes occur within forty-eight hours, placing this stretch of line very much between the devil and the deep blue sea. But for passengers who venture this far, there are fewer more thrilling rides in the whole of Europe.