On the Slow Train (19 page)

But it's not the achievements of Concrete Bob nor the heritage of the Mallaig extension that attract people to travel on the Jacobite these days. I notice that many passengers, especially Japanese tourists, are pausing to press their noses against the window of our compartment. Malcy and Co. are smirking. ‘Do you realise,' Malcy tells me, ‘that you are sitting in Harry Potter's seat when they filmed the Hogwarts Express going over the viaduct?' As we pass over the vast structure, which has featured in three Harry Potter films, Neil says, ‘Look on the opposite hillside over there.' And sure enough there's a phalanx of photographers with popping flashes, busy turning the viaduct into as much an icon of popular culture as Abbey Road. ‘And there's probably barely a railway enthusiast among them!' says Gary. Eat your heart out, Bonny Prince Charlie!

Meanwhile Driver McDonald is making smart work of the 1
in
40 gradients, the bark from the exhaust ricocheting against the rocky sides of the cuttings – past Arisaig, Britain's most westerly station, and Morar with its white sands and grandstanding view across to the islands of Rhum, Muck and Eigg. Here is Scotland's deepest loch – 1,017 feet to the bottom – though maybe not the loneliest since like Loch Ness it is reputed to have its own monster.

In no time we're at the buffers in Mallaig. In the days when the town was one of the busiest herring ports in Europe you could hardly move for fish. Miles Kington writes,

It fell out of every boat, every nook and cranny. If you wanted to cook a fish on your shovel on the way home, you just picked one up off the quay. There's the legendary story of the man at the station who asked the driver if there were any spare fish on board. Aye, third car down, he said. The man opened the door to the third car down and ten ton of fish fell on top of him.

Now there's hardly a herring to be seen, and if you are offered Mallaig kippers, they have probably been imported from Canada. These days it is the prawn fleet that rakes in the cash, though you will get the finest, flakiest and freshest haddock and chips anywhere in the British Isles by going where the locals go – to the back doors of the cafes by the harbourside. I eat mine out of a brown paper bag on the quay, watching two fat seals creep up to a fishing boat, intent on larceny. I don't tell on them, partly because the hooter of 62005 is already blowing and passengers are scurrying back to the station for the train back to Fort William. I'm travelling back with Florence McLean, the ‘Queen of the Jacobite', who is the guard, the master of ceremonies, the issuer of tickets and the mother figure for the 300 passengers who travel on the train every day between May and October.

‘People in Fort William say, how did you get such a great job? It's the best job in the world. It's in my blood,' she tells me in the
sweet
local accent that is fast disappearing from the West Highlands these days. 'I was born and bred in the place, but I never tire of it – it's so green and so lush.' Florence has always been a pioneer. Back in the 1980s she was a freight guard on the line, quite an achievement in the macho west Scottish culture of the time. Nowadays, she tells me, life on the trains is just as tough, but there are many highlights: ‘I love it when people get engaged on the train. I usually don't know in advance, but I announce it over the loudspeaker and deliver the champagne. I can't even relax on my day off because I worry about the train so much.'

But there is nothing to fret about tonight as
Lord of the Isles
eases the train gently into Fort William, the evening sun reflecting gold off Ben Nevis. In the next platform, freshly spruced up for tonight's journey home to Euston, is the Fort William portion of the Deerstalker Express. Once upon a time, before Beeching and the modern corporate railway, in backwaters and branch lines up and down the land, there were what might be termed the ‘trains that Time Forgot': a couple of elderly main line carriages pensioned off from crack services, in the charge of a former express locomotive whose reason for existence had disappeared in the mists of time. The four coaches of tonight's train are a bit like this – two sleeping cars from the 1970s and a coach with seats of even earlier vintage which potters only as far as Edinburgh. But, hurrah, the fourth carriage is a restaurant car. It may be kitted out in the dated style of a mobile Angus Steak House, but where else on the entire railway would a full meal service be provided on such a diminutive train?

By the end of 2009, even on the crack expresses, proper dining on trains was all but extinct. The best you could hope for, even travelling from Penzance to Aberdeen, might be a cheeseburger or a microwaved curry. But tonight, on a train which probably carries at most forty passengers on a good day, here is Scotland's finest. Shhh, don't spill the secret. Fancy some haggis, neeps and tatties? Or Cumbrian lamb hotpot? Alison, who runs
the
place, has already put fresh flowers on the tables and started pouring from the widest selection of malt whiskies to be found on any train anywhere. ‘If you want another wee dram,' she tells me, ‘I'll be serving till we get to Edinburgh, past midnight.' And so I settle back with a Bruichladdich for one of the best views in the world, rolling gently through the Highlands, following the setting sun. And so we climb through the valley of the River Spean, black water shooting into white rapids, alongside the hauntingly lonely Loch Treig, with a final glimpse of Ben Nevis over our shoulders, climbing up to the bogland of Corrour, once a private station for the grand estate nearby, though now owned more democratically by two Harvard academics. It's starting to get dark now, I catch sight of the welcoming lights of the Moor of Rannoch Hotel before the train runs downhill all the way, past the crossing at Gorton, where once the local children went to school in a railway carriage because there was no road out, and round the famous Horseshoe Curve, where the train double backs on itself to squeeze round the twin peaks of Beinn Dorain and Beinn Odhar – a cost-saving exercise by the engineers which served to create one of Britain's most thrilling bits of railway.

As the last remnants of dusk float gently down over the West Highlands on this June night, the Deerstalker Express halts at Crianlarich, crossing a freight train of alumina tanks heading north. My sleeper is a carriage like those of old, with that rare luxury a pull-down window. I lean out for a final swig of the sweet Highland air before bed – a draught of champagne before the fug of the Euston Road in the morning. There is just a single passenger waiting on the platform – a portly red-faced Englishman, who for all I know has a brace of grouse in the trunk he is carrying. There's no other sound on the evening breeze except the soft Scottish chatter of the driver and his mate, who have stepped onto the platform awaiting their signal. It's reckoned that it costs £2 million a year in public subsidy to keep this train running. It is money well spent.

CHAPTER NINE

THE 14.05 FROM SHREWSBURY – SLOW TRAIN INTO THE ‘UNPRONOUNCEABLE' HEART OF WALES

Shrewsbury to Swansea, via Craven Arms, Llandrindod Wells, Llangammarch Wells, Llanwrtyd Wells and Llanelli

A SINGLE RAILCAR
meanders through some of the richest and remotest countryside in Britain on its slow journey through the old counties of Shropshire, Radnorshire and Brecknock. No one is in much of a hurry here on the Heart of Wales Line. Somehow it seems to be permanently Sunday afternoon on this, the closest we have to the traditional rural railway of the Edwardian era. True, the thirty-four tiny stations with names that defy pronunciation by the English are now unstaffed and the sidings that once echoed to the clatter of milk churns and the cacophony of sheep on their way to market have long been lifted. But you are just as likely to run into Mrs Jenkins on the way to Llandrindod Wells to change her library books, or neighbour Dai alighting at Llanwrtyd for some of the local butcher's finest Welsh lamb chops and a couple of pints in the Neuadd Arms while waiting for the train home.

With only four services a day on the line, these are trains you don't want to miss – literally. My heart sinks like the axles on my main line connection from Birmingham as we run into floodwater outside Telford. Will I make it? I ring through to the station manager's office at Shrewsbury, hoping I can still catch the connection, but prepare for a long wet wait. As we limp in twenty minutes behind schedule, the little Heart of Wales train is still there, engines grinding in the bay platform. ‘Hop along,' says John, the conductor-guard. ‘We knew there were passengers on
their
way so we waited for you.' He adds, ‘Don't worry, we've got hours to make up the time!' How refreshing to find an antidote to the anonymous world of the privatised railway, especially as the train I'm boarding is run under franchise by Arriva, one of the world's mightiest transport conglomerates, which carries two billion passengers a year in Europe alone.

In its day, the Heart of Wales too was an audaciously commercial enterprise. Built in 1868 as a long tentacle from Crewe to give the mighty London and North Western Railway access to industrial South Wales, it was a cheeky infiltrator onto turf which the Great Western believed to be its own. For much of its life it was dominated by heavy coal and mineral trains, but now you are more likely to spot the rare red kite that sometimes swoops overhead and rabbits scurrying over the tracks than a freight wagon. Once upon a time, laden passenger trains carried hundreds of thousands of city dwellers to take the waters at Builth Wells or Llandrindod Wells, genteel spa towns that owe their entire existence to the railway. It is hard to imagine now, as the line quietly settles back into its slumbers. It was slated for closure in 1963 but saved after a vigorous local campaign. It's said now that the line is unshuttable since it runs through six marginal constituencies, and it has a healthy and assured future, supported by the pro-rail policies of the Welsh Assembly and a vocal passenger group, the Heart of Wales Line Travellers' Association.

I'm well stocked up with food and drink, as this is one of the longest journeys in the land without refreshments being provided on the train nor available at stations on the way, although in the summer it is sometimes possible to get a snack as trains wait to pass at Llandrindod Wells. My little Class 153 railcar is generally clean, but like all British Rail-built coaches from the 1980s has high windows that are sometimes hard to see from, and the noise and vibration from the underfloor engines can be wearing. Despite the rain, this is high summer, and the trackside is lined with vegetation, reducing visibility over long stretches.

Luckily John the Guard is in chatty mood. Do passengers know
that
the towering signal box outside Shrewsbury is the biggest still operated manually by levers in the UK? And so it goes on as we head out on the main line to Newport, along gentle border valleys dominated by Wenlock Edge and the Shropshire Hills. John, it turns out, used to be a train builder at the famous railway works in Crewe. But Britain no longer makes many trains these days, so John, at sixty, has embarked on a new career, selling tickets, chatting up tourists and helping old ladies onto the platform. ‘I spent twenty-nine years building trains like this. Then I was made redundant. But now after all this time I've found my true vocation. I'm a people person,' he says. ‘But I still can't pronounce half the names of the stations down the line,' he says in a broad Cheshire accent.

At Craven Arms, the junction with the main line, the driver leans out to pick up the token that gives access to the seventy-nine miles of single track that will ultimately join the South Wales main line near Llanelli. There is water everywhere, with the fields flooded to Noah-like depths as far as the eye can see. A flag flutters on the medieval tower of Stokesay Castle, the finest fortified medieval manor house in England, and looks quite surreal above the waters. Here is the serene countryside of Housman's
A Shropshire Lad
, but it's also famous for its rabbits. I can't see any of them this morning. ‘But you should be on the first train of the day,' says John. ‘Hundreds of them, scurrying all over the track.' Soon we are in the handsome border town of Knighton, where the station is in England but the town centre in Wales. The hotel next to the station, it is said, was deliberately sited in England so that boozers could top up on Sundays in the days when Wales was dry on the sabbath. The driver gets out of his cab and pops into a little grey fibreglass hut on the platform. Not for a quick pee, as some passengers think, but because it's the housing for the magnificent old cast iron Tyer's token machine that controls the signalling on the line. The driver takes a large old key from the machine, obtaining permission to enter the next section to Llandrindod Wells. He can only do this after he's rung the signalman in the old Great Western Railway wooden signal box at Pantyffynnon, seventy miles to the south,
which
controls the whole line. No fancy radio signalling or computer technology here. This is good old primitive technology, fuelled by Welsh natter between drivers and signalmen, which prevents trains colliding head on in single-track sections. Old-fashioned and reliable, it still works as well as when it was invented more than a century ago.

Next stop is Knucklas, dominated by its grand viaduct, one of the most famous in Britain, taking the line on thirteen stone arches seventy-five feet above the Heyope valley. The castellated turrets reflect the style of the ruined castle on the hill nearby, although they are a bit of a sham – just hollow floor-less constructions and too unrealistic for any railwaymen with Walter Mitty-like tendencies to pretend they were taking part in a medieval siege. It's possible to see the viaduct from the train on the approach curve, although far better to get off and tramp up through the mud on the neighbouring hill. The local farmers are used to it. It's worth waiting between trains to take advantage of one of the best vantage points for photographing a country railway in the whole of Britain. Refreshment can be taken in the village's Castle Inn, whose landlord, a claret-faced former RAF officer, once opened up the pub early for me, just to have a chat. He told me that he had met his wife in a bar. ‘She's a fantastic cook' – a view amply justified by the quality of a specially prepared lunch.