On the Slow Train (14 page)

But for the people at the lineside and packing the little Kent coast stations this afternoon, it all appears different. I now know
what
it must have been like to be Princess Diana as crowds wave from the little wayside platforms of Sturry, Minster, Sandwich and Deal, and thousands of shutters snap. ‘Keep your head in,' Driver Peter Roberts barks at me, looking every bit like Jean Gabin in Renoir's film
La Bête Humaine
. He and fireman Les Perry have a hundred years of footplate experience between them – true aristocrats of labour, since the skills to drive a steam locomotive in the era of the Eurostar are in very short supply. The sheer brute force needed to feed the firebox means that there are lumps of coal rattling around our feet as Perry humps back-breaking shovel after shovel into the fire while at the same time keeping an eagle eye on the pressure gauge, never letting it drop below 240 pounds per square inch. As we approach the coast, the derelict concrete cooling towers of Richborough power station rear up on the left. During its lifetime it consumed three million tonnes of coal; now it is a poignant mausoleum to the defunct Kent coalfield, shut by Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s. Don't mention it to Arthur Scargill, but the coal being piled at such a rapid rate into
Oliver Cromwell
's firebox is imported from Russia

‘Get some more coal on, and don't let the water drop,' Driver Roberts shouts above the din. ‘This next gradient is steeper and longer than Shap.' We're coming up to the notorious Martin Mill gradient outside Dover – with a rise of 1 in 64, tougher than the 1 in 75 on the more famous Shap incline on the West Coast Main Line in Cumbria. The heat from the fire almost skins my eyeballs and the bark of the exhaust is reverberating inside my cranium. ‘What was the speed, Pete?' ‘We did it at 37 mph.' The eyes of both old men catch each other in triumph.

But if this is steam pushed to the limit, it turns out there is more to come. The route from here through Dover and under the white cliffs into Folkestone is one of the most spectacular pieces of coastal railway engineering in the world. ‘It was only seven miles from Dover to Folkestone, but the railway line had the magnificence that all lines do when they run beside the sea,' wrote Paul Theroux in
The Kingdom by the Sea
.

It was not just the sight of the cliffs and the sea breezes. It was also the engineering, all the iron embedded in rock and the inevitable tunnel, the roar of engines and the crashing of waves, the surf just below the tracks, the flecks of salt water on the train windows that faced the sea. The noise was greater because of the cliffs and the light was stranger – land shadows on one side of the train, the luminous sea on the other; and the track was never straight, but always swinging round the bays and coves. It was man's best machine traversing the earth's best feature – the train tracking in the narrow angle between vertical rock and horizontal water.

Could there be any drama greater than this? Well, actually, yes. Charlton and Dover Priory Tunnels don't see steam locomotives very often, and the effect of travelling through them is terrifying. ‘Get your head down,' says Driver Roberts as debris from the Victorian tunnel roofs rains down through the open hatch in the cab, blasted off the Victorian brickwork by the exhaust. There is a brief glimpse of the steam of the locomotive projected by the evening sunlight like conversation bubbles over Dover Castle. Driver Roberts keeps up steam through Dover Priory station as more cameras click, then through Harbour Tunnel and the docks, now looking weed-grown and derelict. The port of Dover, the creation of Victorian railway pioneers, has had the guts knocked out of it by its twenty-first-century successor, the Channel Tunnel Link, which begins its descent beneath the sea near the town's old rival Folkestone. Driver Roberts gives a toot on the whistle to the crew of a Polish-registered truck in the car park, as if in sympathy. But neither port is served any longer by glamorous trains such as ours. What a sight we must be to lucky passengers looking back at the coast from the Channel ferries at this moment. It is thirty-eight years since the last Golden Arrow passed through here and into the twin Gothic bores of the 1,387-yard Shakespeare Tunnel. Like the blinded Gloucester in
King Lear
, after whose author the cliff is named, this is high drama in total blackness.

Emerging from the tunnel, there's another poignant moment as we ride high over the back streets of Folkestone, and the line down to the harbour station trails away to the south. Until quite recently heavy boat trains, including the English portion of the Orient Express, would be nudged slowly down the steep gradient so that passengers could embark in comfort directly onto the ships. Now the Eurostars burst at speed from the tunnel along the coast at Cheriton and race through Kent at up to 186 mph. By the time
Oliver Cromwell,
with its slow train, has finished taking on water, courtesy of the local fire brigade, at Folkestone West, the Eurostar set are well on their way to London. But there are special pleasures about travelling at such a leisurely pace as ours. In the kitchen the train's catering supervisor Jackie Bateman and her two chefs are busy preparing a freshly cooked menu of ‘Butternut blue cheese and sage tartlet, lemon and rosemary chicken supreme, summer vegetables with creamy vermouth sauce and summer pudding stack with strawberries and clotted cream'. Menus like this are almost extinct on conventional main line trains these days. Once commonplace, railway dining, invented by the Midland Railway in the 1870s, effectively came to an end in 2009, when National Express withdrew its restaurant cars on the King's Cross to Edinburgh line. ‘It's a tough business doing freshly cooked meals on a train, especially an old one like this,' says Bateman. ‘By the time I've provisioned up the train, overseen the cooking and the washing up and got back to the depot in Southall, west London, it's a twenty-one-hour day.'

Not as long a day, though, as for the locomotive support crew, a bunch of enthusiasts from the 5305 Association, a preservation group subcontracted by the National Railway Museum to maintain and nurse
Oliver Cromwell
who travel with her faithfully wherever she goes. As the train stops briefly at Bromley South before the final leg into Victoria, I am allowed into the holy of holies – the coach behind the engine, whose door is generally locked against the rest of the train. Here is a jumble of greasy overalls, sleeping bags, coffee cups and oil cans, presided over by the chief custodians of
Oliver Cromwell
while on tour – a young married couple, let's call them Jane and Justin. ‘Please don't print my real name,' says Jane. When I ask why she peers with mock amazement at her breasts inside the bib of her overalls. She's had enough of the media focusing on her just because she's a woman. ‘Actually, I'm a qualified steam driver, like Justin. When we're not with
Oliver Cromwell
, we drive passenger trains on the Great Central Railway in Leicestershire. Our home is in Nottinghamshire, but when we're with
Cromwell
, we're in the sleeping bags here.'

It is fashionable to take the jaundiced view that interest in steam on the main line will disappear when Marcus Robertson and his cohort of middle-aged schoolboys passes on. Robertson frowns when I raise this with him. ‘Look around you. I can tell you that at least 50 per cent of people on this train haven't the remotest interest in steam. There will always be people who want a nice day out on a train, whether they remember the old days or not.' But maybe this is just nostalgia too. Back in 1952 L T C Rolt, one of the earliest preservationists, wrote, ‘A future generation denied the spectacle of an express train in full cry will suffer a loss as great as we have suffered who have never seen a full-rigged ship with all her canvas set.' But who ever sees a fully rigged sailing ship these days? Or cares? Ian Carter in his book
British Railway Enthusiasm
, the first ever academic study of the phenomenon, believes that interest in railways is a passing fad, probably now in its final days. ‘British railway enthusiasm is a creature of its time and place, waxing and waning in close relationship to the full-size railway's reputation.' He reckons that ultimately ‘the British railway enthusiast's world will vanish like a badly fixed photograph'.

But I wonder. After all the passengers have dispersed,
Oliver Cromwell
reverses out into the twilight at Victoria with a sharp bark and a shower of sparks. The locomotive is now in the care of Justin and Jane and the other young people in the support coach, who are, they have told me, going to ‘put her to bed and just make sure she is all right for the night'.

I have a hunch that Carter and the other sceptics may be wrong.

CHAPTER SEVEN

THE 08.29 TO RICHMOND – LONDON'S COUNTRY BRANCH LINE

Stratford to Richmond, via Camden Road and Willesden Junction

I'M ABOUT TO
take a journey on inner London's only country railway. Sitting where I am, this may seem a peculiar claim, since apart from the odd tuft of ragwort and rosebay willowherb growing between the tracks of Stratford station's Platform 11, I am in the midst of a concrete-and-glass futuropolis. Over there is the vast bulk of the new 80,000-seat stadium for London's 2012 Olympics; behind us are the rising towers of the Olympic village. Not far away, rearing out of the morning mist, are the towers of Canary Wharf, dominated by César Pelli's No. 1 Canada Square – the tallest building in the land. Clustered around are its Manhattan-style neighbours, including Norman Foster's HSBC tower, not quite so proud since the collapse of Lehman Brothers, whose HQ stands empty nearby. But with the Olympics in prospect, grimy old Stratford is in bullish mood. There is the growl of earth movers everywhere as new blocks of flats sprout up in what was once the bleakest part of the old industrial East End.

Yet as our little three-coach train rattles down under the Great Eastern main line and veers westwards past the new Stratford International station on the fast line to Paris, we are entering a different world. True, we could hardly be in a more urban setting, yet the North London Line has more in common with a rural branch line than any other in the capital. Running in a huge arc for twenty-two miles around the north of the city, from Stratford to Richmond, it is the only line to cross the capital without traversing the centre – although you almost feel that you could reach out and
touch
St Pancras station or the BT Tower as you pass by a mile or so away. It was also the only major line within London to be slated for closure by Beeching, who may have confused it with a country railway since for much of the way it passes along the ends of green and leafy back gardens, linking the three oases of Hampstead Heath, Kew Gardens and Richmond along the way. Luckily it escaped the axe, and to this day it remains the most pleasant way to travel from one side of the hurried metropolis to the other.

Like a proper country railway too, the North London demonstrates that the greatest metropolis in the world is little more than a series of villages. They may jostle together geographically in an urban melee, but socially and culturally they are often a million miles apart. In the sixty-two minutes it will take our train to trundle from Stratford to Richmond we will pass from neighbourhoods where newcomers from Albania to Zaire eke out a life in slums that would have been familiar to Mayhew or Booth, to the Islington heartland of City bankers with their multi-million-pound Georgian villas and on to the posh suburbs of Kew and Richmond.

Originally, the directors of the North London Railway didn't care much about people at all. Projected in 1850 to carry goods from Birmingham and the great manufacturing cities of the north to the London Docks, it branched off the Euston main line at Primrose Hill, meandering eastwards through north London till it bumped into the Thames at Poplar. But as the city expanded on its northern heights, there was a lucrative new market for a hitherto undiscovered species – the suburban commuter. The line was soon extended through the ‘two up, two down' west London suburbs, as John Betjeman called them, crossing the Thames to posh Richmond. An army of clerks thronged the new line, and to cater for them, a large and handsome terminus was built next to Liverpool Street in the Lombardic style by the company's engineer, William Baker. So splendid was the new Broad Street station, with its ornate roofs and chimney stacks and ironwork, it made the Great Eastern's huge terminus appear very modest
indeed
. The little NLR had hit the big time. As the
Railway News
commented at the time, ‘The history of the North London is … a curious one and if a railway be a sensitive thing it must feel as much astonished at being brought into Broad Street as Christopher Sly, the tinker felt when he found himself metamorphosed into a duke.'

Until the coming of the Tube, the North London was the biggest suburban railway north of the Thames. But in the 1950s it went into a long slow decline. After decades of being allowed to moulder, Broad Street was demolished in 1985 and is now interred under the hideous corporate red marble of the Broadgate office block. The North London was diverted to Stratford and now runs into no central London terminus, but this little railway has always been a fighter, and after many scrapes with oblivion and rebrandings, has finally joined the Tube system with a grand new title – the London Overground – and an extension along the course of the East London Tube Line to Crystal Palace, West Croydon and other stations south of the Thames.

‘Did you know it's always been faster to travel across London on our line than on the District Line of the Tube?' Grace, the guard, tells me. (The NLR was a rarity on urban railways until recently in still having guards – although they are being eliminated as new more sophisticated trains and signalling are introduced.) Grace, whose parents came to London from Nigeria, has been with the line for nine years, through its previous brandings as the North London Link and the absurdly named Silverlink (‘Always sounded like my auntie's tea service,' she says). Now Grace is particularly pleased with her smart new jerkin in the grey and orange house colours of the Tube. She proudly displays the embroidered London Transport roundel, a badge of permanence if ever there was one.