On the Slow Train (13 page)

The train clanks to a halt at Bromley South in the heart of suburbia to pick up some more passengers – mostly silver-haired and well-heeled, I note. Robertson squints at his watch. ‘Marvellous, we're on time.' He goes on: ‘I wish I could claim the name Steam Dreams for myself, but I got half a dozen people from my PR firm around a table and had a brainstorm of names, and a young guy there came up with it. Do you know we were just about the first operator since BR to run timetabled steam on the main line? Can you imagine it – running steam spliced in with commuter trains in the rush hour? Back in the early 1990s this was totally unheard of.'

In fact it is fortunate that there is any steam running at all now. When
Oliver Cromwell
's fire was put out at the end of that fateful day in 1968, British Rail imposed a total ban on steam on the main lines, even quiet ones like this rural route through West Malling to Maidstone East. Even though many of the trains and stations at the time were notoriously filthy, BR bureaucrats didn't want some throwback to the Victorian age ruining their carefully cultivated
modern
image. It took another imaginative man with money – Peter Prior, the boss of Bulmers, the Hereford cider company, to change all that. Bulmers persuaded the curators of the national collection to lend them the famous Great Western Railway locomotive
King George V
, which had been lying in an unrestored state in a shed at Swindon since the early 1960s. In 1971 Prior put an advertisement in
The Times
inviting attendance at the ceremony to move the locomotive out of its shed. Cider drinkers were ‘especially welcome'. The event was so popular that BR gave in and allowed the newly restored King back on the main line. First of all, steam was restricted to few lines only, but today thoroughbred express engines from all the four pre-grouping companies are allowed to roam over most of the network. Some, such as
Oliver Cromwell
,
Lord Nelson
and
Flying Scotsman,
belong to the nation. Others are owned by syndicates of enthusiasts. The hedge fund manager Jeremy Hosking – No. 333 in the Sunday Times Rich List – owns several, including an A4 class streamliner,
Bittern
, and West Country Class
Braunton
, restored from a scrapyard wreck with the parts of thirteen other scrap locomotives. It is estimated he spent six figures on the restoration. Love, indeed.

Back in 2000 Robertson bought his own steam locomotive – the Southern Railway Merchant Navy Class No. 35005
Canadian Pacific
– one of the most modern and powerful steam engines ever built. ‘You could call it a big boy's toy, and I was exhilarated when I took delivery of it. In fact, as a boy in the 1960s when steam finished I dictated a letter to my mother to send to the general manager of the Southern Region asking how much would it cost to buy one of their Pacifics. So the thought had obviously been at the back of my mind for a long time!' But Robertson got his fingers burnt, literally on one occasion, when the loco blew hot steam back into the cab on a fast Cathedrals Express run to Waterloo, while the head of the Strategic Rail Authority was on the footplate. And a bit like an elderly Jaguar, the locomotive soon needed expensive and uneconomic repairs. It has since been sold to a preserved railway and is unlikely ever to run on the main line again. Robertson wasn't the
first
to feel the pain.
Flying Scotsman
, the most famous locomotive of all, virtually bankrupted two of its tycoon owners, Alan Pegler and Tony Marchington and severely tested the finances of another rich man, the construction magnate Sir William McAlpine. In the end it had to be rescued by the state in 2004 with a £1.8 million grant from the Heritage Lottery Fund. When the locomotive rolled up at York, National Railway Museum engineers were reportedly shocked by the cost of the further repairs needed.

No such problem with
Oliver Cromwell
this morning, newly restored from the wheels upwards in 2008 and in fine fettle – white wisps of steam floating in a blue sky over the North Downs. The train is running at a canter through the lovely villages of Hollingbourne, Harrietsham, Lenham and Charing, their peace disrupted in recent years not by steam trains but by the roar of the M20 and the high speed rail link to the Channel Tunnel, which run parallel. We don't stop at Ashford, once a famous railway town – the ‘Crewe of the Garden of England' as it was once known – though we're passing slowly enough to observe the brand new Javelin bullet trains, whose sleek polished snouts can be seen poking out of the sidings. These 140 mph Japanese-built trains can propel commuters to London's St Pancras in just thirty-seven minutes on Britain's only high speed commuter line.

We swing north over the junction to the Stour Valley line through some of Kent's finest landscapes and historic unspoilt villages. This is the route that Chaucer's pilgrims took – and from the train there is a fine panorama of downland, woodland, orchards, lakes, dykes and marshland. Running through the villages of Wye, Chilham and Chartham, this is as beautiful as any secondary railway in Britain – lucky it was electrified in British Rail's 1955 Modernisation Plan, since this almost certainly saved it from the Beeching axe. But Graeme Bunker, the man in charge of the Cathedrals Express
,
is less interested in the scenery than whether we're going to get to Canterbury on time. The appropriately-named Bunker is a fully qualified steam fireman, he tells me, ‘though you can tell from my newly pressed shirt today
that
I won't be doing any firing. But I'll be up front with the shovel when the train does a trip to Portsmouth next week.' Bunker is a former high-flying manager from privatised rail who has ‘gone native' – he used to be boss of Arriva Trains Wales – but decided to invest his money in ensuring the future of steam, even though at thirty-five he is far too young to remember its heyday. As the writer Brian Hollingsworth points out in
The Pleasures of Railways
, ‘There can be few industries which include amongst their staff such a high percentage of people for whom going to work is just another opportunity to indulge their favourite pastime and who go home after nearly every shift secure in the knowledge that they have earned real folding money just by doing what they like doing best.'

‘On the face of it,' says Bunker, ‘this is the most perfect job in the world – playing trains all day. But there's a lot to do behind the scenes. There's a congested network and you have to get it right, otherwise you end up with a lot of unhappy people. Today we're having a very nice run and we're on time, despite running in with an intensive suburban service.' With his Brunel-like sideburns, you can imagine Bunker back in the mid-nineteenth-century days of railway mania. There is a gleam in his eye as he tells me,

As far as the other train operators are concerned, it's best that we're invisible. They tolerate us because the running of steam trains like this is enshrined in European legislation. Whether you love or hate steam, they have to accept us – so long as we're safe and pay our bills. Don't worry. We work hard to make sure we remain safe, so the engine is fitted with the latest train protection equipment – modern black box technology comparable with the latest modern trains. And Network Rail, the people who own the tracks, work hard to make us work. What did Peter Parker, the old boss of British Rail say? ‘Steam warms the market for the railways in general.'

I had met Bunker a few weeks before, when I had been invited to join a record-breaking run from London to Edinburgh behind
Tornado
, a brand new steam locomotive built to the design of the LNER A1 Class Pacifics, probably the most popular modern locomotive type that hadn't had an example preserved. In one of those unlikely stories of true British grit, a group of businessmen had raised £3 million to build it from the 1940s working drawings of its designer Arthur Peppercorn, and Bunker had been appointed the locomotive's operations director. The fact that
Tornado
was simply a reproduction of the real thing seemed not to matter to the thousands of people who lined the trackside, nor to the BBC, who chartered the locomotive to race a vintage Jaguar to the Scottish capital for the
Top Gear
programme with presenter Jeremy Clarkson on the footplate. Regrettably,
Tornado
didn't win, although it would have been a one-way bet if water troughs had still been present on the East Coast Main Line and the loco hadn't needed to stop three times to be topped up, like
Oliver Cromwell
today, from a fire engine at the lineside. Still
Tornado
won a convert from Britain's most famous petrolhead, and the BBC reported that the programme was one of the most successful ever in a show purportedly about cars.

‘
Tornado
,' says Bunker, looking dreamily out of the window, ‘has made steam cool again. It was really cool in the 1950s, when every boy was a trainspotter, but in the 1980s railway enthusiasts became the butt of jokes – you know, all the stuff about anoraks, halitosis and enamel badges. But we've bridged the gap. If you walk through Cathedrals Express today there are lots of young people who would never have known about steam.' Bunker warms to his theory: ‘There are now three tiers of interest in steam as you grow up. For the little ones, it's Thomas the Tank Engine. As kids grow older, it's Harry Potter and the Hogwarts Express, and then through to the
Top Gear
generation. There are three points of access and you can get aboard at any point.' But we have to break off because already, rising silvery through the window on this shimmering summer's day, are the towers of Canterbury cathedral and we are almost at our destination, Canterbury West.

Most of the passengers who disembark here are hotfooting it
for
the cathedral, a few pausing to admire the unique Victorian signal box which spans the tracks and to watch
Oliver Cromwell
's tender being refilled by the local fire brigade. But I notice on the wall by the exit a little plaque announcing that this was once the terminus of the Canterbury and Whitstable Railway, which in 1830 predated the opening of the more famous Liverpool and Manchester as the world's first passenger railway by four months, although much of it was cable-hauled by stationary engines and so disqualifies itself from the premier league. Still, it strikes me that there is a perfect symmetry about arriving at the site of one of the birthplaces of railway passenger travel behind the very last locomotive to haul a normal service passenger train in Britain.

I vaguely recall that
Invicta
, one of the original locomotives of the ‘Crab and Winkle', as the Canterbury and Whitstable was known, had been preserved and was on display in a local Canterbury park. ‘Dunno where it is, mate,' says the man at the barrier. ‘Haven't got a clue. You'll have to ask at the tourist office.' What ignominy for the locomotive that should have been as famous as its sibling the
Rocket
, since both were designed by George Stephenson and emerged from his Newcastle production line at around the same time.
Invicta
has an extra claim to fame as the locomotive that kick-started the preservation movement, having been set aside for posterity in 1844, so legend has it at the instigation of none less than Benjamin Disraeli, who was MP for Maidstone although there is no proof of this story.

But now her fate appears to be obscure, and I have to scour the back streets of the city to find her – wedged into a tiny room of the medieval Hospital for Poor Priests, now the Canterbury Museum. ‘You want to see
Invicta,
do you?' says the lady behind the desk, her tone of voice expressing surprise that anyone might have come here, especially to see a bit of old scrap iron. ‘Well, I can sell you a Rupert Bear concession for half price.' (Mary Tourtell, the creator of the famous children's cartoon strip, she tells me, was born in the city.) Eventually I find
Invicta
, squashed into a back room next to a Dansette record player and a 1950s
washing
machine, and it strikes me that she has an uncanny resemblance to Ivor the Engine, whose creator Oliver Postgate was also born in Canterbury. There's a copy of the locomotive's original purchase receipt, written in copperplate, for a surprisingly expensive (by 1830 standards) £635, and a notice that reads, ‘The driver stood up on the driving platform for the whole journey – operating the start lever with his left hand, the forward/reverse pedal with his foot and the speed regulator with his right hand.'

Pity I don't study the driving technique more closely, since when I get back to Canterbury West for the next stage of the journey I am ushered up to the footplate of
Oliver Cromwell
to take my place beside the driver for the next thirty-seven miles of the journey to Folkestone. Despite the gap of 120 years, the practical mechanics of steam locomotives scarcely changed between
Invicta
and the Britannia Class, and within a few minutes of the start of this leg of the journey any sentimental views about the great days of steam and why British Railways got rid of the steam locomotive are rapidly dispelled. Not that sharing the footplate with the driver and fireman isn't the thrilling ride of a lifetime. Here is a powerful express locomotive preparing to pull a heavy train up one of the steepest main line gradients in Britain, passing under the white cliffs of Dover through some of the most sensational coastal scenery in the land. But the experience is also a reminder that the sheer filth and physicality of the job would have made it impossible to continue with steam as the era of the train driver as working-class hero drew to a close at the end of the 1960s. The Britannias were the last word in ease of operation – as far as steam locomotives were concerned – with seats for driver and fireman, enclosed cabs, ‘self-cleaning' fireboxes and rocking grates that shook the ash down onto the track. Yet they were really no different from the primitive little
Invicta
. If this deafening, sooty, baking-hot monster is state-of the-art, then no wonder crews were clamouring for jobs on unromantic diesels.