On the Slow Train (16 page)

From the geyser ventilators

Autumn winds are blowing down

On a thousand business women

Having baths in Camden Town

Waste pipes chuckle into runnels,

Steam's escaping here and there,

Morning trains through Camden cutting

Shake the Crescent and the Square.

Early nip of changeful autumn,

Dahlias glimpsed through garden doors,

At the back precarious bathrooms

Jutting out from upper floors

Betjeman, who grew up in nearby Highgate, loved the North London, recalling that ‘the earliest sounds I can remember are the chuffs of its 4-4-0 engines coming up from Kentish Town to Gospel Oak'. He would certainly have approved of the transformation of Camden Road station, relatively intact and with new
paintwork
gleaming. It is the only one of Horne's original stations to survive in railway use and still sports its original name C
AMDEN
T
OWN
S
TATION
engraved in stone along the roofline. (It was renamed Camden Road in the 1950s.) Shame the period effect is rather ruined by the rather gaudy London Overground corporate colour scheme. Just before it enters the station, the train crosses the main lines from King's Cross and then St Pancras, and through the window is a fine panorama of the central London skyscape. The futuristic-looking tube over the tracks is the entrance to the twin bores of the Channel Tunnel Link, which runs underground for twelve miles, to re-emerge down the line on the east London fringes at Dagenham.

Soon the junction with the Euston main line branches away to the left, snaking over the top of Camden Market, now the fourth most visited tourist attraction in London. Brace yourself for the whiff of frying onions and patchouli oil, and it feels you could almost touch the chimney pots of the Hawley Arms, an old boozer famed as a temple to the indie bands of the Seventies but latterly the hangout of the singer Amy Winehouse and the model Kate Moss. To the left is the Roundhouse, the former engine shed of the London and Birmingham Railway in the days when the trains had to be hauled by cable up the incline from Euston. After many changes of fortune, the future of the Grade I-listed building, now an arts centre, is secure after undergoing a £26 million refurbishment. Sadly the same cannot be said of the splendid Victorian ironwork of the neighbouring Primrose Hill station, smashed down secretly by Network Rail one night at the end of 2007 after local activists had tried to get it reopened. The heavy freights that traverse the junction at this point from the industrial cities of the north are no longer destined for the London Docks, now long gone. Nor do they bear the names of proud Victorian industrialists, exporting to the empire from the ‘workshop of the world'. Instead the traffic flow is mostly the other way – imported through the docks at Felixstowe. The names of oriental shipping firms such as China Lines and Cosco on the long
trains
of container wagons tell of how much the world has turned.

This is an area rich in railway firsts. Robert Stephenson's London and Birmingham was the first main line out of London and the reason for the North London's birth. Turning west over the Hampstead Junction Railway towards Kentish Town, we pass the site of Kentish Town signal cabin, where in 1860 engineers installed a marvellous piece of equipment – the world's first interlocking signalling device, which physically prevented conflicting train movements happening at the same time, effectively stopping trains bumping into one another. The little North London had already been the first railway to establish everyday use of the continuous brake on its carriages in 1855 and the first to use coal gas to light its trains. In 1900 it became the first to install automatic ticket machines.

While in the world of superlatives it's worth noting that the Kentish Town Viaduct, which we are crossing now, has ninety-four arches. Good news for car breakers, but less so for inhabitants of the bedrooms of the houses in the little terraced houses that cluster round. Noise and vibration may be one thing, but dozens of prying eyes as you roll out of bed in the morning are quite another. Visible from here too are the spires of the many churches that came to minister to the huddled working classes of the narrow streets – St Martin's, St Luke's, St Silas's. This was a neighbourhood renowned for its rogues and villains in Victorian times and is not much different now, according to one of the local vicars, who I know well. In an attempt to bring the population nearer to God, the directors of the North London operated a strict rule that no trains should run during ‘church time' on Sunday mornings. This meant all trains being halted for around two hours, a practice greatly approved of by railwaymen, but not sadly on spiritual grounds. NLR staff rarely went to church themselves but took the opportunity for a rare decent lunch in what was often a sixteen-hour working day. John Betjeman recalls that the general manager of the line refused to allow WH Smith's bookstalls on the line to sell any papers which he considered vulgar.

Now we are truly in a bucolic world as the train rolls past the green acres of Hampstead Heath, with a fine view of Parliament Hill on the right. The latter gets its name from Civil War days, when it was occupied by troops loyal to Parliament, although nowadays it is better known as a favourite spot for children to launch their kites on a breezy day. The ambience is still green as we pass rows of allotments, where you might catch sight of a famous Hampstead author or two tending a row of runner beans or rigging up a scarecrow. Waiting lists for allotments in this most upmarket area of north London are among the longest in Britain at forty years, so don't set your heart on one. At Hampstead Heath station the sign reads, ‘Alight here for the Royal Free Hospital' – perhaps unfortunate since on Easter Monday 1892 the station was the scene of a terrible accident. Then as now, ‘'Appy 'Ampstead' was the playground of north London, especially popular on bank holidays, when tens of thousands came to ride the donkeys or take a spin on the roundabouts. But at 5 p.m. on that fateful day the sky grew overcast and the crowds headed for home. As they packed onto the footbridge heading to the platforms, it collapsed under the weight, killing six children and two women, as well as inflicting terrible injuries on others.

Even on the hottest of summer days there is a chill as the train enters the tunnel here, though it may have less to do with malign events than the fact that it runs at a great depth, 160 feet under the heights of Hampstead. Even though fourteen million of the finest Staffordshire bricks were used to line it, the London clay above is constantly shifting – the tunnel collapsed during its construction in 1858 and has needed constant remedial work ever since. The train emerges from the darkness at Finchley Road and Frognal, a lovely name gracing what must be one of the ugliest stations on the line, with a prefabricated booking office and bus shelters on the platform festooned with razor wire – an environment acknowledged by the local graffiti artists, who have had a spree here – although minus the talent of Banksy.

Nostalgia impels me to get off at West Hampstead because this is
the
stop from where my father caught the train to Broad Street every day without fail for his marathon in the City. It was called West End Lane then, named after the little hamlet along the road. I can dimly remember the place myself. The hiss of gas lamps, the buildings sooty and dilapidated after the war. But it had a proper staff of three in those days – a booking clerk, a roly-poly porter with an uncanny resemblance to the comedian Peter Kay and a ticket collector called Cyril. Cyril had a limp because he had been tortured by the Japanese in the war (something beyond my youthful comprehension). But I remember the peak of his hat was always well polished, and every morning in winter Cyril always lit a roaring fire in the waiting room. No waiting room here today – just another prefabricated bus shelter, littered with McDonald's wrappers.

The train rolls on – over the Kilburn High Road at Brondesbury, through Brondesbury and Brondesbury Park – prosperous with well-heeled BBC executives in spacious Edwardian houses – past the car breakers and scrapyards of Kensal Rise and Willesden Junction. Here is the site of the Old Oak Common engine sheds, where the King and Castle Class locos for the crack expresses from Paddington were once housed, and small boys crept in with their Ian Allan spotters' books, only to get a clip round the ear from the shedmaster if they were caught.

I take a break at Acton Central, where Ibrahim, the station supervisor, is whistling cheerfully to himself. Maybe it's something to do with the fact that the station has retained its Victorian country atmosphere, complete with level crossing at the end of the platform. Or maybe because Transport for London has installed new electronic barriers, which means he no longer has to deal with the fare dodgers that were long the bane of the line. Ibrahim is especially proud of the little home-made tableau of the history of the line on the westbound platform, composed of old black-and-white photos stuck onto card. Here is the station building as it was long ago, in much leafier surroundings. Next to it is a picture of one of the elegant little 4-4-0 tanks with a rake of carriages. ‘Built to last for ever they were. All made in the
company
's own works at Bow,' he tells me. Ibrahim is clearly a buff and warms to his theme: ‘And the carriages, all made of teak, with red and blue cushions. Very unusual they were because they only had four wheels, like cattle trucks.'

But now the level crossing gates are closing and I dash across to the other platform for the next train. We really are out of town now, stopping at Kew Gardens station, built in the London and South Western Railway style, with cherry trees on the platforms, and indistinguishable from many of that company's stations in farthest Devon and Cornwall. There is a perfect little station buffet here, although access is no longer available from the platform since the Mayor of London's diktat that alcohol shall not be drunk on London stations.

We are now sandwiched between the red, white and blue trains of the District Line for the final gallop into Richmond. The North London appears a bit of an interloper in this station, built in the breezy seaside art deco style of the Southern Railway. Appropriate in its own way, since we are only a few hundred yards from the sunny banks of the Thames – not the dark grungy river we left behind in east London, but a much more cheerful-looking Thames that rolls sweetly down from Oxford, fitting for the end of the line on London's country railway.

But the journey didn't quite end here. A few weeks later I was in the York National Railway Museum at closing time. This is the nicest part of the day at the museum, since with most of the visitors gone home it is possible to summon the shades of the great steam locomotives which inhabit it. They may be dead and lifeless now, but with the dusk falling it is possible to imagine them as they were once – fast and furious with fire in their bellies. And there it is in the twilight. The little 4-4-0 from my childhood, still in its glass case and still working – though now you have to insert a 10p coin to get the wheels turning. Sir John Betjeman, who so loved the North London, believed it was lost. Would he have died a happier man, I wonder, if he had known that it was found?

CHAPTER EIGHT

THE 21.15 FROM EUSTON – THE ‘DEERSTALKER EXPRESS' TO THE REMOTEST STATION IN BRITAIN

London Euston to Mallaig, via Edinburgh, Glasgow, Crianlarich, Rannoch and Fort William

THERE ARE FEW
more unlovely gateways to a long-distance railway journey in the world than Euston station in London. ‘Even by the bleak standards of Sixties architecture,' wrote one correspondent in
The Times
in 2007,

Euston is one of the nastiest concrete boxes in London: devoid of any decorative merit; seemingly concocted to induce maximum angst among passengers; and a blight on surrounding streets. The design should never have left the drawing board – if, indeed, it was ever on a drawing board. It gives the impression of having been scribbled on the back of a soiled paper bag by a thuggish android with a grudge against humanity and a vampiric loathing of sunlight.

The contrast today with what was once here could not be starker. Nowadays the only monuments travellers will find where the famous old Euston once stood are the temples to the global empires of fast food – Burger King, Harry Ramsden's and Café Ritazza. But here, just by the ticket collector on Platform 9, once towered the huge, soot-stained and romantically majestic emblem of Britain's mighty Railway age. Built by Philip Hardwick in 1837, it was inspired by the Doric propylaeum at the top of the Acropolis in Athens and built to celebrate the arrival of Robert
Stephenson
's London and Birmingham Railway from the north. It was the largest Doric propylaeum ever built and reached a height of more than seventy feet. The fact that it was widely judged the most significant monument of the Railway Age did nothing to save it, and despite a campaign by John Betjeman and other architectural worthies its death warrant was signed by Prime Minister Harold Macmillan in 1961 to a chorus of public outrage. At the end of 2009, as the credit crunch set back plans to demolish Euston and start again, millions were spent tarting the station up, although the twenty-nine million passengers who use the station every year may fail to notice the difference.

But all is not lost. Even in the modern Euston it is possible for determined souls to summon up some of the glamour and romance that rightfully belongs here. Sneak past the Square Pie shop and the Bangers Bros sausage takeaway, and turn left at the statue of poor old Robert Stephenson, the only surviving remnant from the booking hall of the old station, now marooned beneath the black glass and concrete Network Rail HQ – a handy toilet for pigeons and a repository for discarded coffee cups. Just by the bus station is a pub called the Doric Arch, unexceptional in itself, but at the top of the stairs to the bar is a poster which I've always regarded as one of the most evocative to be found of any railway station in London.