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.
Two cheers for high speed 2
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