England’s newest line: The human touch at the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway

LOCAL railways around the world and their eccentric operations have often come across as charming and the whimsical in their operation. The Southwold railway where trains would stop in the middle of nowhere for the guard to bag a rabbit, if he saw one, for his cook pot.
The main line that ran according to tides – as it connected with the boat train. The Irish line which had to balance loads each side of the wagons (hung from one central rail) and solved the problem of how to send a cow to market by sending two calves along too on the other side – and bringing them back one either side in the pannier-like trucks.
The headland railway where to give the horse a break, a mast would be erected on the truck and it would sail down the line, given the right wind.
Firmly in this tradition is England’s newest railway which I rode at the opening weekend – the Ecclesbourne Valley Railway.
I liked it not just because it makes a proper connection at the main line at Duffield, near Derby, with well timetabled connections of a few minutes each way plus through ticketing. Locals even now proudly boast: ‘Wirksworth to Paris in only three changes!’ Wirksworth is the charming higgledy-piggledy stone-built town at the other end of the ten-mile line. None of that going from nowhere to nowhere of some restored railways, but a real means of transport for local people. How many Parisians turn up remain to be seen, mais, bien sur, if they go, they will like it.
I loved it not only because of the sheer bucolic beauty of this river valley: primroses, blossom adorning every hedge, lambs springing about for the sheer fun of it, the stream chuckling along beside and often under the tracks. It’s not a grand railway with ornate stations or massive tunnels and viaducts: just a country branch that somehow survived more or less intact.
I loved it not only for the sheer achievement of rebuilding track that was lost in thickets of vegetation into a very high standard of track – despite losing its passenger service as long ago as 1947 and the remaining freight in 1989.
But also for the eccentricity in its level crossing operation, which gave me some feeling of the human nature typical of such a sleepy country line.
One was just after the intermediate station of Idridgehay – what a charming name. The crossing gate man was, a railwayman on the train told me (who was wearing his cap with EVR in metal letters on the peak), a stalwart volunteer who had worked hard for years in the rebuilding of the line. ‘He got diagnosed with cancer not long ago, so he’s on chemotherapy and having a very hard time. But he wouldn’t miss the opening of the line for anything.’
Approaching Wirksworth, the engine nears another crossing at Gorsey Bank with those white gates across the tracks and stops well short. The fireman walks up the tracks a seemingly unnecessary 100 yards to open the gates.
The reason?
‘It’s an old chap’s pigeons.’
What?
‘He says it upsets them having a railway engine stop right opposite, but they don’t mind if it goes past. So we stop short and do the gates from there.’
# The Ecclesbourne Valley Railway is based at Wirksworth Station, Derbyshire, DE4 4FB, tel: 01629 823076. www.e-v-r.com

Unlearning history’s painful lessons

WITH the greatest respect to the admirable Transport Secretary Lord Adonis, there are questions to be asked of his enthusiasm for trams on the Watford-St Albans Abbey branch line just announced. Or rather of all these schemes such as the Cambridge and Gosport guided busways and the Oldham Loop.

Why do they take places off the main network, so no excursion trains can go there, no freight can ever operate there, trains cannot leave and go to main city termini, and they cannot be connected to further extensions or through routes in the future?

Lord Adonis says: ‘The demise of the tram was a serious mistake in post-war transport policy’. I would suggest the same about this process. We don’t, of course, know the details of the St Albans Abbey experiment but I would guess that it’ll mean changed platform heights and be incapable of taking normal trains for some reason such as signalling incompatibility. A tram system is a fine thing if it goes on into the town centre (as at Croydon), but if you know St Albans Abbey station at the foot of steep Holywell Hill, that is never going to happen there. The onward route towards the City Station and Hatfield has long been blocked by development. Equally, at Watford, the branch is the wrong side of the main line to access the town centre, (although if someone is suggesting a flyunder, great. You could even join the Croxley line, as I suggested 30 years ago).

In other words, little gain for the loss of a part of the national railway system. These things always cost far more than just fixing the branch line (and this one isn’t even broke!). All that is needed to increase capacity on the St Albans Abbey branch is a passing loop halfway down which won’t cost much less for a tram than a railway, and a second-hand electric unit. Signalling is quoted as the big bugbear. Nonsense: The part from the loop to the end of the line and back could be a train staff type of arrangement – ie one train allowed up there and it must possess the authority. I could lend them an old walking stick.

There must be some real gain from these change to make it worth severing a line from the system. Otherwise we are entitled to ask why have the Bluebell, the Mid-Hants, the North Norfolk and the Swanage fought so hard to get back to the network when the authorities are disconnecting branches in other places? Our forefathers realised that having 4ft gauge near Dundee and broad gauge in the West was a mistake. It all had to be to inter-operable. It was lesson painfully and expensively learned. Don’t unlearn it now.

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Two cheers for high speed 2

YOU might have thought that as a tub-thumping evangelist for the joys of rail travel I’d welcome the Government’s announcement of a route for the proposed High Speed 2 railway from London to the North of England and Scotland.
After all, it’s not every day that the authorities suggest bunging about £37billion at a railway scheme, and this just a week or two after they said the Great Western route from London to Bristol and Swansea would be electrified.
Shouldn’t we be welcoming this as the best thing since Brunel? Shouldn’t we who want the railways to get a fair deal and move forward be like the kid in the candy store, all his dreams come true?
Well, no. I happen to think the whole approach is entirely on the wrong lines – literally as well as figuratively.
My first reason is – and please read this patiently before throwing the paper at the cat – that Britain’s railways are already too fast.
I don’t particularly want to be shoe-horned into something like a cross between an airliner and a Thuderbirds space ship and hurtled through the landscape at 125mph, the current top speed. You can’t see the glorious landscape this island offers,20the vvillages nestling in the clefts of hills, the burbling streams, the smoking cottage chimneys, cathedrals and castles. They pass in a rocketing blur. You can’t even see the names of the stations you pass through.
Increasingly, the fastest routes jam you in like steerage class airline passengers. You are not aligned with the windows, so probably can see only a blank wall and a seat back.
You can’t open the window any more, so your chances of seeing, smelling and hearing the countryside – yes, birdsong, lowing cattle, pine trees, salty seaweed in the sun, remember how it used to be and could still be? – are zero. Instead you will hear some adulterer, chav or show off yelling into their mobile and zillions of pointless announcements, as a Tory MP complained recently. Think how much worse it’ll be if they double the speed.
That’s who in my new book Britain From The Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide, I quite seriously suggest taking the slow trains, the secondary routes that often offer an alternative to the great main lines.
For instance, unless you are in a screaming hurry, why zoom from London to Norwich on the flat and dull Great Eastern Main Line out of Liverpoool Street? You could go up from King’s Cross, past Arsenal and Ally Pally, and soar over the beautiful Disgwell Viaduct, watch the landscape open up after Baldock into rolling hills then the flatlands around Cambridge, the glorious cathedral rising on the Saxon stronghold of t he Isle of Ely, the sandy forest of the Brecklands, with rising and dipping telegraph wires and the clicketty clack of old-fashioned track and into Norwich from the west. The return, not on the wham bam thank you mam main line, but east on the glorious Wherry Line over the beautiful Broads on rattling swingbridges and real signal boxes and gorgeous countryside to Britain’s most easterly station, Lowestoft. Then back via the East Suffolk Line at a civilised speed. Country stations at lovely places like Beccles, Saxmundham and Woodbridge, where you can get off and explore ancient markets towns, homely architecture and seaside treats.
Equally, going to Glasgow, the West Coast Main Line is a fine bit of expensively renewed engineering, but as an experience, it’s not a patch on the Settle & Carlisle line, which you can access via Leeds. True, there you do only about 90mph flat out, but with the beautifully restored stations at places like lovely Appleby and the glorious long views of the fells and Ribblehead viaduct’s dramatic plunge into Blea Moor Tunnel, or looking down into Dent Dale, you are in paradise compared to those hurtling through some Midlands dump in a 125mph Virgin Splendifico with no idea where they are and nothing to look at.
How much West Coast do they actually see? Er – virtually none. So on you way back, if you’ve got time to spare, take the little known Cumbrian Coast line round the outside of the Lake District, where it clings to the cliffs, an d stop for lunch in little St Bees. Roll around the great bay at Millom, with wonderful views up into the mountains, and rattle across thelow, long river viaducts along the side of Morecambe Bay back to the main line at Carnforth’s famous platform from the weepie movie, Brief Encounter, with Victorian ironwork, a great wooden station clock and top tea room.
Carnforth’s other platforms on the main line, which we are rejoining, have been smashed down the let the Virgin trains hurtle past at high speed – a symbol of two types of travel really.
Ah yes. Modern trains. Did you see that striking picture of an airliner full of our troops returning from the forward base in Afghanistan in the Mail his week? They seemed crammed in. But tell you what – our heroes were lucky they weren’t in a First Great Western rebuilt 125. They are awful, and this is a disastrous remodelling of what a great and comfortable design, the best carriage Britain has achieved. Things are going backwards in terms of the pleasure of travelling.
The aforesaid Virgin trains – in fact they are called Pendolinos and are Italian jobs built with the British tilting train idea after we lost our nerve – are not the end of the world. They were built to do 140mph, and some things such as head room and luggage racks have to be sacrificed to get a train to safely lean over on the curves when the bridges and tunnels don’t, if you see what I mean: to avoid hitting the brickw ork, they are tapered at the top.
Fine if you want to travel like that, except they don’t do the promised 140mph, but 125. The suspension, by the way, was designed for 140mph, so we’ll never know how good the ride was supposed to be.
Even worse, the diesel versions which came in at about the same time on Richard Branson’s gimmick-led empire, and were then called Virgin Voyagers, have the same cramped profile, but now have the tilt mechanism locked off. These cross country trains – which were far too crowded from day one – could only use tilt for a short Midlands bit of their long routes from places such as Bournemouth or Plymouth to Newcastle or Aberdeen, but when you”re standing for perhaps half that journey, it’s oppressive to have less space for no reason. If you’re not going to tilt, they could at least have had proper sized carriages.
Which leads us to subject pertinent to the current announcement: Labour spin and its dishonest divorce from delivery. Do you remember Transport Secretary Ruth Kelly announcing a few years ago that the Government would provide 1,300 new carriages to reduce overcrowding. Well the media totally failed to notice that almost that numbers of carriages were lined up hidden or mostly military bases and unused at the time. True some were old, but some were unused. If they were so useless, why have foreign countries such as Bulgaria, New Zealand, Canada and Morocco been falling over themselves to ship these bargain tra ins to their countries, while our own people stand in over heated, over crowded hell? Because Labour demanded such a premium from the train operators that they couldn’t afford the punitive charges the rolling stock companies wanted for moving even the old ones out of store. Whereas the much maligned old British Rail – come back, all is forgiven! – would have just said: ‘Busy summer Saturday? Roll everything out of the sidings!’
That greedy Treasury premium, by the way, is the reason why good operators such as GNER were driven to the wall, why more and more seats have been crammed in and restaurant cars removed on several main lines. Meanwhile, of course, the promised carriages have not all arrived.
So will this week’s dramatic announcement be so much spin? Well, Labour is signing all kinds of popular blank cheques at the moment it knows it won’t have to honour, as they will bounce after the next election, so we should be sceptical.
But rail planning should be long term, and this scheme could come to pass when the economy is healthy once again. At least the current Transport Secretary, Lord Adonis, is sincere and knows what the railways are about. Indeed, if David Cameron is as canny as some say, he could take on Adonis for his government – after all, his lordship doesn’t have to be re-elected.
And maybe some busy businessmen will benefit from hurtling up to Edinburgh is two and a half hours crammed into some kind of sealed uni t, much in tunnel and through ugly bits of England.
Well if I wanted that ghastly an experience, I’d have gone by plane. I’ll stick to the glorious East Coast Main Line, which clings to the coast north of Newcastle – the clifftop views of Lindisfarne and Bamburgh Castle, the glorious Royal Border Bridge across the Tweed into Berwick, the dramatic entry into Edinburgh through Calton Hill and then the fabulous Forth Bridge and on over the Tay to Aberdeen. That’s rail travel for the sake of it, and it isn’t just me and the late John Betjeman – look at the acres of ads for rail holidays in the media nowadays. So what if it takes a whole afternoon to Edinburgh – good, I’ve paid for the ride!
And don’t kid yourself that railways are always (last word itals) greener, by the way. Yes, they can be, with your train up the Lune Gorge from Lancaster to Shap (the bit shared with the M6) powered by the motors of the descending freight on the opposite track being used as generators to slow it down.
But very high speed trains, beyond 200mph, start to use more and more power to force their way through the thick air at ground level. There’s a reason why aircraft claw their way up to thin air before trying to do 600mph.
Back on the ground, I took 70 trips to research my book, and have started on Europe’s railways (as recounted in these pages in Slovenia and Norway). And you know what – in every country, the=2 0trains that are a real pleasure to travel on were the slower 1960s stock. Norway had a poncy tilting train, which made my companions sick, with the usual sealed windows, and got you there only 20 minutes earlier on a long route. But when we got onto the far north route, great big carriages gave us heaps of space and tables to relax and savour the glorious views. ‘The air con isn’t working,’ said one young twerp at one stop. ‘You just open the window,’ I said, and the sound of waterfall came through, and the scent of a pine trees, just as, at Addlestrop in the Cotswolds, Edward Thomas in his great poem famously heard ‘all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ when his train stopped there.
Marvellous. And it doesn’t cost £37 billion to provide.
# Benedict le Vay’s Britain From The Rails: A Wndow Gazer’s Guide is published by Bradt at £17.99.

Are we narrow-minded enough? 

I DON’T even remotely enjoy telling you ‘I told you so’ but the state of narrow-gauge railways in Wales causes some concern. They may now have too many for their own good. On the face of it, the Great Little Trains of Wales are marvellous, and a national treasure. But as I remarked elsewhere, they are like the architecturally grand buildings in Edinburgh — you can’t quite believe anyone seriously thought they needed another one.

Anyway, an absolutely massive project has been heroically achieved with the rebuilding of the long lost Welsh Highland Railway and I’m planning a trip all the way from Portmadog to Carnarvon. Well done guys, and it amused me
that there were two working volunteer working parties – the Black Hand Gang, who were Welsh speaking, and the Rest of the World. I went to see their work in Bedgellert and it’s just wonderful. Superb stuff; you guys really deserve to succeed.

The problem is, as I pointed out when all this started: how many narrow gauge steam railways do you actually need in Wales? There isn’t a set number of paying passengers and volunteers and charitable givers of cash, of course.
True, the number probably expands with the number of railways. But a rubber band can only be stretched so far.

Now we hear that the Talyllyn Railway is in deep financial trouble. It’s hard not to see this as partly caused by the exciting new project just up the road attracting all the attention.

I mean look at how many narrow-gauge steam railways there are if you come up from Shrewsbury towards the Cambrian Coast line. There’s the Welshpool and Llanfair at Welshpool. Then there’s a Vale of Rheidol Railway at Aberystwyth. Then the Talyllyn Railway at Tywyn near Barmouth. Then at Portmadog we have the famed Ffestiniog Railway and now the massive Welsh Highland Railway too. Plus I nearly forgot the miniature railway at Fairbourne, across
the water from Barmouth. Virtually within sight of the WHR is the Snowdon Mountain Railway. And round the corner is the Bala Lake Railway. That’s eight and I haven’t gone to South Wales yet!

Now I love these little railways and have travelled on all of them except the newest. What’s surprising is that all of them are completely different in character, so they are not doubling up in that sense.

(Another worry is that the only one which forms a useful part of the national network is the Ffestiniog. I have used this to get up from Harlech to Llandudno on the north coast, and a fine trip it is to. Timetables and tickets work right through as part of the national system. It’s a pity that more of these lines don’t carry passengers for transport and well as fun, and freight too. That isn’t going to change easily. There’s one in Kent that does school runs, for example, but that’s rare. And that’s another issue: you can run these just as museums or theme parks.)

But the worry remains in Wales that there are only so many railway trips the average holidaymaker will want to take: two in a week maybe. And given that some of the volunteers are English or Scots, and have a fair old way to come, there must be a limit to their time and effort and money too. Of course, if yet another massive Welsh narrow-gauge rebuilding project starts, it’s up to those who make the effort whether it happens or not – but the long-term future is the worry.

It would be a crying shame if this reaches the stage of ‘one new one in, one old one out’.

The Talyllyn Railway should have a special place in our hearts as it’s the oldest preserved railway. In fact it never really stopped, just somehow magically morphed from a slate line to an enthusiasts’ one. I have to confess I was, until I heard this news, planning a trip with some chums on the Welsh Highland, (and have mentioned its unique crossing with the Cambrian coast line in my new book Britain From the Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide and put a picture in there). But now I realise what danger the beloved Talyllyn Railway is in, I am changing my plans to go there too. Go on, make it the year you go back to this lovely mountain railway. You won’t be disappointed, I’m sure.

Yikes! Unsolicited praise for my railway book

There’s a funny story in one of my earlier books – about eccentrics – concerning a Victorian chap who deleted all the words in his family Prayer Book such as ‘almighty’, ‘magnificent’ and ‘holy’ concerning God. His rationale was that ‘God is undoubtedly a gentleman, and a gentleman does not care to be praised to His face.’
In this more self-promoting age, we don’t have such a problem, and find his attitude funny. But it’s still easier if the praise has come out of the blue. Such was the comment of senior Tory MP Michael Gove in The Times this week:

… the book that will hold me absorbed, in anticipation and during the journeys is Benedict le Vay’s Britain from the Rails: A Window Gazer’s Guide, a quite superb, indeed incomparable, combination of maps, railway trivia, engineering insights and breathtaking landscape features to look out for. It also has, and I know this will be a prerequisite for many of you men out there, a quite superb gazetteer.

My excitement on coming across this book meant I felt like some watcher of the skies when a new planet swims into his ken, or like stout Cortés, when with eagle eyes he stared at the Pacific.

Blimey. I’m overwhelmed. You can’t really ask for better comments than that. You know, I’m beginning to think the Tories aren’t so bad…

East Coast Main Line woes

Shock horror: National Express has given up the prestigious East Coast Main Line because it’s losing money, but the public and media seem incapable of seeing the real story – or rather they are just beginning to.
The public think these main rail routes are subsidised by the Government. In fact it’s the other way round: the greedy Treasury wanted more than a billion pounds from this operator for the privilege of running this London-Edinburgh-Aberdeen route. Gordon Brown was inflexible in the face of a recession which has severely hit the more expensive fare grades (you don’t make business travel if you’ve been made sacked). Result first GNER (the previous very good operator) and now National Express have been driven to the wall. New Labour wants for its own reasons to be seen to be punishing not helping these train operating companies; talk of corporate greed pleases their supporters. Odd when it is Brown’s greed that has caused the crisis and he flung countless billions at banks, etc.
The other factor is overcrowding. British Rail would have simply rolled spare stock our of the sidings for summer Saturdays and other peaks. The companies are charged a fortune by rolling stock companies for rolling one yard, even with carriages that were paid off years ago by British Rail. That’s why people are standing from Durham to Southampton while lines of perfectly good stock lie hidden in old airfields and military bases round the country (I’ve seen them, hundreds were there even when the Government promised 1,300 new carriages in a great Labour spin that didn’t come true). It’s the logical outcome of an illogical system.
Now the Government have got what they want, a temporary nationalisation, a deal will be eventually struck that could have saved either company. Playing politics with our railways, again. Bad enough when the Tories created the useless Railtrack in the first botched privatisation.
The good news is that this superb railway will keep running whatever political deals are done. Ironically the reason why it is so good, reliable, fast, environmentally friendly etc is entirely down to British Rail – the track, electrification and trains were that nationalised industry’s last great fling of modernisation. The privatised companies have added diddly squat, apart from some style, in the case of GNER, and removing it again, in the case of National Express.
So take this for the loveliest main line in Britain, particularly from Newcastle up to Aberdeen. Book well in advance and reserve a seat and you will have a joy, a bargain and an scenic experience you will recall with pleasure for years to come. And forget who the operator is or isn’t, nationalised or not. The real shock horror is that it doesn’t make any difference.

To Slovenia for rails

ASK ten people in the street where Slovenia is. I just did and eight of them couldn’t exactly place it. Nor are they unusual; a certain U.S. president mixed it up with Slovakia, and the flag (another red white and blue tricolour) doesn’t help it stand out either.
And that’s a good reason to go there: few people know about this Wales-sized, beautiful country in the heart of Europe. For the record it’s south of Austria, touches the top right of Italy and has its own tiny bit of Adriatic coast, and borders Hungary in the west and Croatia in the south. And it has Alps.
The scenery is just superb, with national parks more storks than I’ve ever seen before (‘How many does it take to make one tub of margarine?’ quipped one wag). The people are welcoming and often English-speaking, the architecture often charming (onion-bulb churches arising from islands in lakes, alpine chalets in lush meadows, glorious rivers and mountains) and in small patches a bit Stalinist with towers blocks and smokestack industry (‘just like haeme, then!’ quipped a Scot in our group). The cuisine takes something from each of illustrious neighbours, but in fact is just Slovenian. This refusal to be pigeon-holed defines the whole country.
They are not Balkan, having somehow wrested themselves from communist Yugoslavia only in 1990; they are not western European; they are not Swiss or Austrian; they are not Mediterranean. They are Slovenian. Mind you, having won independence without as much bloodshed of their southern neighbours they pretty darn quick joined the EU and Nato to keep things that way.
The Romans, the Austrians, Yugoslavs, Napoleon, Nazis and Turks have all ruled here, usually very badly. Now the people are overjoyed to run it themselves, and they do it well.
In fact I did know where this country was because I drove down here as a Seventies hippie student, having more sense than money, in a girlfriend’s Morris Minor Traveller, with an ex-Army tent. I probably said then (in Austin Powers-style cringeworthy language): ‘Far out, man, this is more out of sight than Austria. Wow, babe, if only they’d dump the deeply square communism it’d be groovy come back.’ They have, it is.
So when one the world’s best and innovative rail touring companies, PTG, offered the first British-led tour of the country, I leapt at the chance.
The rail network is centred on the capital, Ljubljana, and has the merit of having no journey too long. A couple of hours in any direction and you hit the country’s edge.
The must-do rail journeys start with from Jesenice up in the north-west near the Austrian border to Nova Gorica on the Italian border on the west. This is as pretty a rail ride as anywhere in the world, with the turquoise rivers, crossing a mountain range, and the beautiful lakes of Bled and Bohinj near the route. Stunning bridges and sensational views abound. Also in the far south-west, the tortuous line to the country’s only port at Koper offers superb views on its radical height-losing horseshoe curve (or rather doesn’t at that precise moment, as will become clear). You first see the port in the shining sea below as if from an aircraft. You then spot far below in the valley, whose upper cliffs we are descending at an oblique angle, the line we will shortly be on. But how to reach it with a mountain wall blocking the end of the valley? We enter a horseshoe shaped tunnel and arrive on the lower level.
Another line absolutely not to be missed is the one in the north-east, from Maribor to Bleiburg in Austria, or at least as far as Dravograd. This follows the might Drava river in great curves upstream with constantly changing views.
Luckily the main line joining these two somewhat secondary single-track routes sweeps through mountains and forests, through Ljubljana and the picturesque city of Selje, passing through a majestic river gorge en route, and so is a cracker in itself.
PTG pioneer rail tours in new countries all the time: Bulgaria, Peru as well as their favourites such as Spain and Portugal. They ran two types of tours – the cultural ones, which take in the features such as castles, caves and cities, and the railfan ones, which this was. As I wanted to see the whole system in a week, it was ideal, but others might prefer the more relaxed pace of the cultural option and fewer odd branch lines.
Mind you, it did let me see the great British railfan in all his (or her – yes, honestly!) glorious eccentricity. There was jovial Glaswegian Dave who has a huge collection of railway hats. He always somehow manages to charm one out of the staff at every country he visits. So on our visit he got five – including somehow getting one in a five-minute halt over the border in Italy, hopping back to the train to cheers from the Brits on the train. ‘I know they surrender fast, but this is ridiculous,’ quipped one of the group. And how many Welshwomen have blagged a cab ride on the train from Cakovec, Croatia (where despite high security from the border crossing) up the isolated branch to Lendava? Answer: one. Vivacious blonde Marion was up there blowing the train’s horn and somehow getting by in a combination of languages. Welsh may not have been much use; I heard Spanish being tried at one point!
At every station the station master stood smiling outside in his red cap (the ones Dave hadn’t blagged yet) and waved us through; the stations themselves were spotless and often charming with blooming windowboxes and flowerbeds and Austrian architecture.
The whole trip was great, and the companions made it all the more enjoyable. But contemplating PTG’s special touring train (with a bar, bags of seats at big tables and big windows you could open to smell the pine forests and hear the chuckling mountain streams and bird songs as well as the clickety-clack of the old-fashioned track) and superbly enthusiastic Slovenian crew, also considering the luxury air-con double-decker bus which shadowed the whole trip, taking people to cultural side trips, carrying our luggage and transferring us and from the three and four-star hotels every night, I wondered if I had gone soft.
Remembering that youthful camping trip, when in an Alpine storm I awoke to see my boots floating out of the tent in the swirling floodwater that soaked my sleeping bag, I decided it was a question of yes, a bit more more money … but a lot more sense. Leave all the timetables, accommodation and language problems to PTG and just let the inspiring Slovenian countryside roll past. Marvellous.
# PTG tours are on 01235 768855 and www.ptg. com. Benedict le Vay’s latest book is Britain From The Rails published by Bradt at £17.99.

Railways: reasons to be cheerful

 

Reasons to be cheerful

GIVEN Britain’s bad habit of moaning about the railways, deservedly or not, it comes as something of a surprise to note all the positives around at the moment. For my new book, Britain From the Rails, I took 70 train journeys around Great Britain. Only one of these was late – a breakdown ahead of us as we came from the just lovely Welsh coast at Barmouth to Shrewsbury. It lasted maybe half an hour.

I looked at my next 70 medium to long road journeys for comparison.  The disruption caused by resurfacing the A3 and the tunnelling under Hindhead, which route I often use, has meant that 55 of these were delayed beyond what used to be the normal ‘timetable’ for my journey. But even if you extend that timetable to allow for those, there were 11 bad delays. Obviously, many other had the same horrible experience, yet you don’t get people writing to the Press and MPs, demanding the roads be closed down or privatised as a result and the ministers sacked. We just put up with it.

Nor is it just me. Transport Minister (now Transport Secretary) Lord Adonis took a tour of the system recently and he found few delays too.  Repeatedly, as I stood on platforms at Leeds or Glasgow or St Pancras, I looked up at lists of trains and all were listed as ‘on time’. That would have unbelievable 10 years ago.

Part of this is down to new trains. Several times I have stood on the platforms at a busy junction and thought: ‘Hang on; all these trains are new.’  But where BR-era trains such as the ‘flying banana’ High Speed Trains still operate (as on the Great Western and Midland main lines), it because new engines and electronics have been installed in what was a very good design and have hugely increased reliability.

Another ground for optimism is the investment in infrastructure. Several  branch lines have been reopened (Alloa in Scotland, Ebbw Vale in South Wales) and have been great successes. There are more than a hundred new or restored stations on existing routes (all during a time when 99 per cent of Brits would tell you the railways were failing and contrating). Equally important but less visible is the new track and signalling which increases capacity and reliability.

Most of these investments have been in Wales and Scotland, mainly because of devolution of power – and the fact that these are Labour-voting areas can’t have escaped Government attention. Travel is vastly more subsidised in those areas too (to be fair, there would have been cross-subsidy from busy southern routes in British Rail’s day too – it makes sense).

But a freaky thing happened the other day. I was looking at a double page spread of news about rail investment in a magazine and said to myself: ‘Hang on, all these schems are in England!’ New station at Blackfriars, new routes to Oxford from Marylebone, redoubling of West of England line between Salisbury and Exeter. A whole new junction at Reading. Flyover at Hitchin. Moves to restore to line north of Uckfield, to redouble the one between Swindon and Gloucester. Things are happening. Not to mention the much modernised West Coast Main Line between Euston and Glasgow, and the heroically imaginative Channel Tunnel to St Pancras High Speed One route (186mph is everyday there, and it was on time, on budget and it has been done well, not on the cheap) and the Government’s apparent enthusiasm for taking a similar route north.

 Meanwhile the stupedndous safety record has got better with yet another year completed without a single passenger killed (or staff member). Meanwhile 3,000 people a year are killed on the roads and no one says a word about it.

So it’s looking sunny for Britain’s railways; even though some train operators say they are having  hard time with the recession, that doesn’t matter (because some firm will run the route, come what may). There is however one dark cloud hovering over the railways and over one project. I will make that the subject of my next posting. Meanwhile, thanks for reading, and happy window-gazing…