On the Slow Train (21 page)

Soon we are in industrial South Wales, much of it post-industrial now, with the scars left by former metalworks and collieries and the cat's cradle of tracks that once served them now almost all a memory. And, hurrah, here is the signal box at Pantyffynon that controls the entire line right up to Craven Arms – not some bland Network Rail construction, but a grand old Great Western Railway timber and brick building from 1892. It still has its finials on the roof and the paint is peeling authentically. At Llanelli we meet the junction with the main line, where the train reverses. Once it would have gone on directly to Swansea Victoria, the original London and North Western terminus of the line, but this was closed by Beeching in 1964 and is now a leisure centre. Llanelli was once known as ‘Tinopolis' and famous a century ago as the largest town in the world where more than half the population spoke a Celtic language. The train sprints along the main line to Swansea's old Great Western station, where the journey ends modestly at the buffer stops. On the way back I bump into John the Guard. ‘I've been looking out for you along the line all day,' he tells me. ‘We were stuck at a signal at the junction at Craven Arms for more than two hours as the floodwaters rose.' ‘Were the punters panicked?' I ask. ‘Not a chance,' he says. ‘I kept them amused by getting them to count sheep!' It seems inconceivable now that this remotest of backwaters once dispatched its own daily express trains direct to London. But nowadays we must give thanks that the line still exists at all.

CHAPTER TEN

THE 08.41 TO CASTERBRIDGE, VIA TESS OF THE D'URBERVILLES

Bristol to Weymouth, via Trowbridge, Westbury, Yeovil Pen Mill, Maiden Newton and Dorchester

IF THERE EVER
were a fantasy league of closed railway lines, the Somerset and Dorset would have to be at the top. Running from Bath over the rolling gradients of the Mendip Hills to Bournemouth on the Dorset coast, it has generated more melancholy, more nostalgia and a greater sense of loss than any other of the lines that Beeching closed, and probably all those that went before. Even prior to the Beeching era it was a kind of Holy Grail among railway lines. To have travelled on the Pines Express on a summer Saturday, loaded with holidaymakers from the factories and cotton mills of Lancashire and the Black Country over the gradients to Bournemouth behind one of the heavy S & D 2-8-0 locomotives designed especially for the route, was said to have been an almost mystical experience. Just before it closed John Betjeman did a television documentary about it. ‘Poor Evercreech is out of reach,' he eulogised, ‘now the Pines does not pass through.' An eccentric photographer named Ivo Peters spent years before the closure driving up and down the line in his vintage Bentley to try to recreate the atmosphere, and his work has added to the continuing mystique surrounding the railway. On the weekend of closure in 1966 thousands of people flocked to the line to travel on the final trains. These were pursued by streams of cars and almost every bridge and vantage point was packed to bursting. ‘As dusk fell on the evening of Sunday 6 March,' wrote the line's historian Robin Atthill, ‘two Southern Pacifics stormed their way up to Masbury summit with their nine-coach special. I
watched
the red tail lamp of the train disappear into the darkness. Only a minute before, I had seen a glowing pillar of fire racing through Binegar . . . This was the end . . . I had watched the line die.'

Even though the headquarters of the Somerset and Dorset were at Glastonbury, there is no alchemy, no superhuman power that can bring it back – the trackbed is severed, modern housing estates and new roads obstruct the route – and the trains will never run again. But wait. In the rush of nostalgia we have forgotten about the other Somerset and Dorset. The one that Beeching didn't close, which runs parallel just a few miles away and is equally charming, just as picturesque and just as much a period piece as its long-departed sister. And although Beeching managed to axe some of the intermediate stations, it still, incredibly, has eight services a day in both directions. This morning my journey will take me from Bristol to Weymouth, via Bath, Trowbridge, Frome, Bruton, Castle Cary, Yeovil Pen Mill, Yetminster, Chetnole, Maiden Newton and Dorchester – literally the heart of Wessex, the old kingdom of the West Saxons, revived by Thomas Hardy as his ‘dream country'. The line runs for eighty-seven miles through serene river valleys, rolling pasturelands and traditional market towns, as quiet today as when it was opened in 1857.

From Bristol it runs first through the deep, green Avon Valley, winding between the river and the Kennet and Avon Canal, through the ancient weaving town of Bradford-on-Avon. The valleys are left behind for the wide flat Wiltshire plain, past the famous Westbury White Horse, carved on the chalk hillside, and into the cider country of Somerset. Near here is Cadbury Castle, reputed to be King Arthur's Camelot, and everywhere on the horizon are the spires of honey-coloured churches, built with the wealth from the wool trade. At Yeovil the train passes into Hardy country, with several of the little stations having a counterpart in the Wessex novels and poems. The most famous is Casterbridge (Dorchester) where the house on which Hardy based Mayor
Henchard
's home in the novel is now Barclay's Bank, and the King's Arms, through whose window Mrs Henchard spied her husband again after he sold her, is still one of the busiest hotels in the town. We also pause at Maiden Newton, famous as the Chalk Newton of
Tess of the D'Urbervilles
. Passing the great hill fort of Maiden Castle, celebrated as the title of a famous novel by that other great Wessex novelist John Cowper-Powys, the railway sweeps over the Dorset Downs to the World Heritage Site of the Jurassic Coast, and two hours and fifteen minutes later arrives at Weymouth, George III's favourite spot for dipping his toes in the water. This timeless, meandering railway is a backwater to a backwater, and a conduit to some of the most hidden places in England. In many senses we must be grateful the old S & D passed away because it ensured the Bristol to Weymouth line would live on. In the modern world there never would have been room for both of them.

The first through train south of the day from Bristol Temple Meads doesn't run until as late as 08.41. But it is a very special service, because the normal two-car Class 150 diesel train has an air-conditioned Class 158 unit attached to it. It may not seem much, but this is a notch up in the hierarchy of the mostly elderly diesel multiple units that operate the secondary services in the West Country. The extra carriages have been laid on today to take the volunteers who help to keep the line running to a special meeting in Dorchester, where they will be entertained by the management of the train company. At each little station along the line this morning, the local volunteers will climb aboard. These are the people who pull the weeds and paint the seats and who wear out their shoe leather pushing timetables through the doors of local people who believe the line must surely have closed forty years ago.

Already on board at Bristol are the ranks of the hierarchy of First Great Western, who have detached themselves from their grand offices next to the statue of Brunel in Paddington to get the
‘red-eye' train to Bristol. Here is Mark Hopwood, the managing director himself, and his regional manager Julian Crow, along with assembled functionaries from Head Office. It is a bit like the humblest branch line being honoured with the presence of the old Great Western's Sir Daniel Gooch and Isambard Kingdom Brunel themselves, or the archbishop of Canterbury coming to wash the feet of poor parishioners on Maundy Thursday. (Although someone tells me, ‘The general manager is a bit of a gricer himself.')

I'm to be met by Catherine Phillips, the rail partnership officer, who people say could fuel the engines of the trains with her enthusiasm for the line. ‘I'm a large lady with a lot of leaflets,' she tells me. ‘You can't mistake me.' And she is just as I imagine her, a bit like a cross between Joyce Grenfell and Clarissa Dickson Wright. Which she needs to be since her job is to chivvy support for the line and keep the passenger numbers up. ‘Up 163 per cent in six years,' she boasts. ‘I used to be in the perfume business but I lost my appetite for the corporate world.' But she can't hold back her admiration for the top brass who have come to rally the volunteers today. ‘When they put in for the franchise, they can't have wanted a backwater like this. A little line like this must be less than 2 per cent of their income,' she says.

There is always a heart-stopping moment when the branch line train swings off the main line onto its own tracks. What mysteries lie ahead? What prospects might unfold as we head down the
tiddly-dee, tiddly-da
tracks into the countryside? For the first part of the journey we are in Bristol and Bath commuterland, although no less attractive for that, running alongside the River Avon and the Kennett and Avon Canal. The volunteers are already talking up the line's virtues. They are a curious crew. Here's Michael, a former British Airways pilot, neat in suit and goatee beard, who runs the team of forty volunteers, and his deputy David Greening, who is a stress engineer at the Agusta Westland helicopter plant in Yeovil. Here too is Terry Gough, a professor of forensics at King's College London, and Norman from the Ramblers' Association,
who
organises walks from remote stations. It is clear that all these men and women love the line with a passion that cannot easily be explained.

David Greening, proud of his award as the ‘railway volunteer of the year', tells me he has been supporting the line since he was a boy, when he wrote to transport minister Barbara Castle, deploring the possibility of its closure. There's little he doesn't know about the history of the line, including how it was planned by an independent company, the Wiltshire, Somerset and Weymouth, back in 1845 with the backing of the Great Western. ‘Sorry about the track. You'll find some of it is in a pretty terrible state, particularly as we get farther down the line,' he tells me as we lurch through Avoncliff. ‘But look at the fabulous view.' He points out at the frothing waters of Claverton Weir and then explains the line was a battlefront in the turf war between the Great Western and its rivals at Waterloo, the London and South Western and its successors the Southern Railway.

The Great Western wanted to push their broad gauge as far as possible into the West Country and eventually they put Brunel in charge of building the line. Hard to believe it now, but this was a main line once, and a very lucrative one. It gave the Great Western access to a south coast port for trade with the Channel Islands and France. Until the 1960s the line was full of great Channel Islands boat expresses and freight trains loaded with fruit and flowers. And it's still important now for strategic reasons.

He winks at me conspiratorially. ‘You know, the old Portland naval base – you never know when they might want to bring it back into use and run supplies there. Why do you think they've put new signals in at Yeovil? Hmm?'

We're now bouncing through Freshford and it's standing room only – a jolly middle-class church fete atmosphere. Catherine points out the station garden, where nearly everyone in the village
has
contributed a planting. At Bradford-on Avon the platform seats still have the original cast-iron ends displaying the crest of the Great Western Railway in its pre-1923 incarnation, along with the original stone buildings, and unlike most of the stations on the line there is still someone to sell you a ticket. As well as its prettiness, this, like many other rural secondary lines, is a lifeline for the disenfranchised – schoolchildren, students, the elderly who cannot afford a car. And just like the Somerset and Dorset of old, it still carries heavy summer traffic. ‘Not everyone goes on holiday by car or aeroplane, you know,' Catherine says. ‘We still have huge numbers of people in the summer, and they have to lay on locomotives specially to haul the trains. Then it's standing room only.'

It's not quite like the 1950s and 1960s when twelve-coach trains had to have a second engine to push them up the gradients. Like many lines, it was never able fully to recover from the economies imposed by Beeching. Hard to believe, as we bump and rattle over the non-welded track through Trowbridge, Wiltshire's county town, that the line had its heyday as recently as 1960, when Waterloo withdrew from Channel Islands services and the Heart of Wessex line had the traffic to itself – full to capacity with expresses. This was the height of the trainspotting era, and boys on their summer holidays were out in force to ‘cop' the elusive Counties, the last class of main line steam engines designed by the Great Western Railway, which worked many of the last expresses on the line. It looked finally as though the Great Western had won its battle with Waterloo. But then came calamity. Running through an area of thin population with no heavy industry, the Heart of Wessex was a prime target for the Beeching axe. The names of the stations that closed in 1966 are an evocative rollcall of rural Dorset – Evershot, Marston Magna, Grimstone and Frampton and Bradford Peverell. No longer would even the slowest trains stop there. Worst of all, Dorchester West, the station serving the county town, was to close, although it was later reprieved. Much
of
the line was cut back to single track, transforming it at a stroke from a main line to a back route. But at least it didn't suffer the fate of the old Somerset and Dorset. There are still conspiracy theorists who claim that Great Western dirty tricks were at work and that the Paddington bosses were rubbing their hands at the closure of their old rival.

‘Nonsense,' says David Greening. ‘Brunel designed this line and it was simply the better engineered.' And here is the evidence, as we roll to a halt at Frome, where the great man's station, with its wooden overall roof, stands perfectly preserved and newly repainted in the old Great Western colours of chocolate and beige. ‘All our own work,' says David. The volunteers have played a big part in the restoration of the station, which not long ago was in danger of falling down. (All this volunteering is not surprising, really, since all these little Avonside towns are in the heart of middle-class Middle England.) ‘The station's in museum condition, now,' says David. Maybe so, but even Brunel's genius was not unflawed. The Great Western had to back down in the gauge war when the company was forced to concede that 7-foot ¼-inch track was not what the rest of Britain wanted. The line was converted to Robert Stephenson's ‘narrow' gauge in 1874, using the labour of 1,800 navvies. The railway company sustained them with straw for bedding, along with coal and copious quantities of oatmeal which the navvies brewed into their favourite non-alcoholic drink, barley water.