On the Slow Train (10 page)

I'd already been briefed about Millom by John Kitchen, who looks after the local railway lines for Cumbria Council. I had no choice but to break my journey there on the slowest of slow trains along the Cumbrian coast because all the Lake District hotels in
this
hot, high summer week were full. ‘Well, take Millom as you find it,' he said. ‘But I promise you, there is no other rail journey in Britain as good as this one.' What can he mean? By his reckoning, it is the most scenic coastal railway in England and the least discovered by tourism. Quite a claim, since Britain's most famous stretches of coastal railway – from Durham to Berwick on the East Coast Main Line and along the Great Western main line at Dawlish in Devon – are regularly voted the most attractive in the land.

The Cumbrian Coast line is also among the slowest, swinging in a great arc for 114 miles from Carnforth in Lancashire to Carlisle, sandwiched for most of the way between the Lakeland fells and the Irish Sea. By the time my 08.38 train from Preston to Carlisle plods its way to its destination, I could have travelled to London and back again. The Cumbrian Coast line is the last survivor of a cat's cradle of lines built to service the ironworks and coal mines of West Cumbria. Beeching finished off most of them and Margaret Thatcher in the 1980s did for the rest. Don't take this trip if you're planning to change your mind anywhere along the line. There are no branches; local bus routes are sparse: and you might have to book a taxi twenty-four hours in advance to get to the next village. Bluntly, there is no way out. In the era of the TGV and the Bullet Train, this is the quintessential slow train, and intending passengers must be prepared for something of an adventure.

So obscure is it that there is no consensus on the line in the tourist literature. Is it just a route, as some say, through a string of ugly towns which look as though they have been deposited like flotsam by some unusually high tide to disfigure the perimeter of Lakeland? Or is it a romantic survivor from a pre-Beeching age, with sensational views across an azure sea to the hills of southwest Scotland from one side of the train and of the dramatic crags of Wainwright country on the other? Either way, the Cumbrian Coast line is a near-complete survivor of a secondary railway from the golden age. Station gardens are still tended, station buildings are mostly intact, even if many are disused or converted into homes. Semaphore signals creak and clatter up and down, and at
almost
every halt is a little wooden signal box, where the signaller taps a bell announcing he is letting the train through to the next section. Above all the line still possesses the sense of community that defined the railways in the pre-Beeching era and is now almost extinct. This really is the railway that time forgot.

So, as the train from Preston swings off the main line to Scotland at Carnforth, there is no turning back. Despite having become a kind of
Brief Encounter
theme park with the famous tearooms and clock restored, no main line trains stop at Carnforth any longer, so a modern-day Trevor and Celia would probably have to jump aboard our two-car Class 156 Sprinter unit – a decidedly non-romantic diesel train dating from the British Rail era. At each stop the engines rev themselves into a frenzy before deciding reluctantly and noisily to propel the train into motion. Not much sprinting here. But at least the windows are clean and they can be opened for ventilation. Don't ever do a journey like this on an early BR train that claims to have air conditioning, I have been warned. And there are other potential horrors: Class 142 Pacer trains, built from old Leyland bus parts and known as ‘nodding donkeys' because they buck up and down so much on the uneven track are banned from the line now. But the operator, Northern Rail, is not awash with money. It is the most heavily subsidised of all the train companies and the Cumbrian Coast is hardly top of the priority list. So the Pacers have a habit of reappearing when they are least expected. Today is Carlisle race day, and John Kitchen has sent the control room a warning about overcrowding. ‘You wouldn't want to stand on one of those things all the way up from Whitehaven,' he tells me. Even so, it's not long before our train passes a dilapidated-looking Pacer on the southbound track.

What a contrast with the India-red steam locomotives of the Victorian Furness Railway, with their comfy ultramarine blue and white carriages, which once came this way. Luckily, Locomotive No. 3
Old Coppernob
, dating from 1843, is preserved in the National Railway Museum, York, although it was the victim of a sensational theft when its numberplate was stolen under the noses
of
museum staff in 2008. But never mind. There is plenty of Furness Railway heritage to be seen in the well-preserved stations at the little resorts developed by the railway company around Morecambe Bay as we cross from Lancaster into Cumbria. Spot the squirrels tucking into bunches of grapes on the cast-iron platform seat ends. They are collector's items, much sought after by enthusiasts. Even the names are evocative of this rustic coastline – Silverdale, Arnside, Ulverston.

Arnside station is the starting point for the famous Morecambe Bay walk – a four-mile trek across treacherous shifting sands. If you ask him nicely, the Queen's Guide to the Sands, a local fisherman, will lead you across. The high point of the journey is wading through the River Kent – the first of five rivers whose waters flow down to the Cumbrian Coast. But no wading is needed if you are on the train – the trip over the Kent Viaduct has been described as like skimming the waters on a seaplane. Ever since it was built, the railway around the edge of Morecambe Bay has always trumped the road route, with no need to divert round the little estuaries. The train progresses in a lordly way past mysterious Holme Island, its secrets protected by a shroud of trees which conceal a full-size copy of the Temple of Vesta in Rome. John Brogden, the consultant engineer who built the line, once lived here, but today the iron gates on the causeway are firmly and intriguingly padlocked. An odd place, since when the tide is out the island is surrounded not by sand but by the invasive spartina grass, now causing an ecological problem as it runs wild in Morecambe Bay.

Some passengers are baffled about the prettiness of the line as we head around the bay towards Barrow-in-Furness. Shouldn't there be some furnaces here, or at least the odd steelworks? ‘Don't get confused about the name,' says Peter Anderson, a retired council planner who is president of the Cumbrian Railways Association. ‘Furness has got nothing to do with furnaces. It actually means father of Ness.' Anderson, who leads a band of more than 400 enthusiasts from as far away as South Wales dedicated to supporting the line, meets me on the platform at Grange-over-Sands and briefs
me
over a pot of tea in the ever-so-genteel Cedar Tea Rooms. ‘No minstrels or anything of the noisy order,' proclaimed the 1906 edition of the
Guide to Seaside Places
in its entry on Grange. Clearly not much has changed in this resort, where feeding the ducks in the municipal gardens seems as exciting as it gets.

Even in Barrow, whose fortunes really were built on steel, there are not many furnaces these days, Anderson explains. You are more likely to encounter protectively clad engineers from the nuclear industry. But iron and coal run through the veins, literally, of West Cumbria, and through the veins of the men who developed it. Iron was first discovered by the Romans, Anderson tells me, as he pours the tea, and by the year 1200 was being mined by the monks of St Bees Priory along the coast. It was the reason for the development of a tangle of wonderfully named railways in the area – the Maryport and Carlisle, the Whitehaven and Furness Junction, the Ravenglass and Eskdale and the Cockermouth, Keswick and Penrith. Giants of the Industrial Revolution stalked the land round here. George Stephenson, designer of the
Rocket
, was appointed by his friend William Lowther, second Earl of Lonsdale, to link the Lowther family's mines and factories in Whitehaven to the national rail network in Carlisle. His ancestor Sir John Lowther was known as the ‘richest commoner in England' and built his factory chimneys in the shape of his favourite silver candlesticks. But two of Britain's greatest inventors defined the prosperity of the area and its railways. One was the Cumbrian John Wilkinson, who discovered a way of replacing charcoal with common coal for smelting. Henry Bessemer was an even more prolific genius, inventing a process that could transform pig iron into steel. There was no better ingredient than pure Cumbrian haematite, and for more than a century Workington, a few stations up the line, exported rolled steel track to build railways far and wide across the world. Sadly, it went the way of much of British industry, and Workington's rail-making works, which first exported to the Texas and Alabama Railway in 1872, were finally closed in 2006.

We're now into our second cup of Assam, and discussing the merits of the Italianate style of the local station architecture – with nice touches such as the monogram of the Furness Railway set into the cast-iron lamp holders. Grange station is especially attractive, and a plaque on the wall pronounces it
W
INNER
.
B
EST
I
NTERNATIONAL
S
MALL
S
TATION OF THE
Y
EAR
2007. Another grander plaque says the station was built in 1872 to the design of James Brunlees and is a replica of the top storey of the Grange Hotel. ‘This is quite wrong,' says Anderson, who clearly knows as much about the line as it is possible to know. But the next train is due, and life is slow enough on the Cumbrian Coast for me not to be able to afford to miss it. The train is surprisingly full as we rumble over the next estuary crossing and onto the Leven Viaduct, an even grander piece of engineering than the Kent Viaduct, recently rebuilt by Network Rail, who closed the line for four months during its reconstruction. In 1903 the Whitehaven to Carnforth Mail was blown over here, though fortunately not into the water. But the passengers were left to crawl to safety on their hands and knees through the storm. There was even greater drama farther along the line at Lindal, where the engine of a goods train disappeared into a hole opened up by mining subsidence. It was never recovered, an intact piece of industrial archaeology frozen in time and waiting to be exhumed by generations hence.

The views are especially lovely here, as the line weaves through the Vale of Nightshade and past the remains of Furness Abbey, built by the Cistercians and second only in importance to Fountains Abbey in Yorkshire. The construction of the railway infuriated William Wordsworth, who called the company's directors ‘profane despoilers'. He had already publicly warmed to the theme with a sonnet attacking the building of a new line to Windermere. ‘Is there no nook of English ground secure from rash assault?' he wrote. One wonders what he would have made of the hideous rectangular bulk of Heysham nuclear power station, which disfigures many of the views from our train window along this part of the coast.

It seems incredible that during the nineteenth century the directors of the Furness turned the docks at Barrow into England's third-largest after London and Liverpool. In modern times the shipyards were renowned as the place where Britain's Trident nuclear submarines were built. But the naval industry fell on hard times at the end of the Cold War and there is not so much reason to come here now: the last direct trains to London Euston were withdrawn in the 1980s. As one commentator observed, ‘There were not enough submarine salesmen journeying to the consulates and embassies of the capital to justify a through service.' Building nuclear submarines is hardly a vote winner these days and the number of people working in the shipyards is a fraction of what it once was. In any case, the town has other claims to fame. In 2002 it suffered the world's fourth-biggest outbreak of legionnaires' disease in which seven people died. In 2008 it was judged the most working-class town in Britain, something of a contrast with the 1870s, when it had the largest number of aristocrats per head of any town in the land. While the train is waiting I alight briefly to use the gentlemen's toilet, which I discover to be the cleanest I have ever seen on a railway station. Could there be a connection?

‘Where do you want to get off?' asks Brian, the conductor. North from Barrow is the least used section of the line and many of the stations are request stops. Brian seems constantly to be popping his head round the driver's door to let him know. He tells me that one conductor at Carlisle got into trouble for announcing, ‘All stations to Whitehaven and beyond – though why anybody would want to get off there, I have no idea.' Today I have a very good idea of where I want to alight. I am planning to stop for lunch at Foxfield on the edge of the sands of the Duddon estuary, where I'm joining the lunchtime crowd at the Prince of Wales, a legendary local boozer opposite the station. Its fame in brewing its own real ales extends far beyond Cumbria. The City editor of a London newspaper, well versed in the fare of the finest private dining rooms of the Square Mile, told me he considers the Prince of Wales, Foxfield a ‘paradise on earth'.

I tell this to Brian, who says, ‘Sometimes we get trainfuls of thirsty blokes travelling up the line at lunchtime for the pub. We pick them up legless on the last train home. But doesn't do any harm, does it? They're mostly nice people. And what else is there to do round here since the Millom steelworks closed?' Brian, who is sixty-two, tells me he comes from Ipswich and taught in local schools for sixteen years before he joined the railway three years ago.

You get mostly nicer people on the train than I generally encountered in teaching. But shame they took the passenger services off the Foxfield to Coniston branch back in 1958. They didn't even hang around till Beeching came along. Said it was losing £16,000 a year – does that sound like a lot to you? One day they came along and just closed it, just like that. It was the prettiest branch line in Britain. You could have changed at Foxfield and gone right up to the lake. Now the cars are just nose to tail on the local roads – they can't pack any more in. They had special little steam-powered carriages with big windows so you could see the scenery more easily. You know, the writer John Ruskin would have gone this way – he had a place up at Coniston.