On the Slow Train (26 page)

Once out of Stalybridge, we are climbing hard, the antiquated underfloor bus engine of the train feeling the strain as we ascend through Mossley and Greenfield, on the edge of the Peak District National Park, into the Colne Valley and alongside the Huddersfield Narrow Canal. (‘Narrow' equalled cheaper to build, since this is the highest canal in England.) Without notice we plunge into the murk of the Standedge Tunnel, three miles and sixty yards long. Standedge (pronounced Stannige) may be only the third-longest rail tunnel in Britain (after the Severn Tunnel and Totley Tunnel on the Hope Valley Line), but it is certainly the most dramatic, with four parallel tunnels of railway and canal running beneath the high fells. As you might expect, it is drizzling as we enter from Lancashire, but emerging in the West Riding, the sun is skidding across a fluffy sky. Two of the rail tunnels are disused now, but the canal tunnel is an astonishing feat of eighteenth-century engineering – the longest, highest and deepest canal tunnel ever built in Britain. And it's still possible to drive a boat from one end of Benjamin Outram's masterpiece to the other.

I have a hunch that I might be able to climb up to its entrance, and so I get off the train at the next station, Marsden. Everything here is deserted. There are no buildings on the station, no passengers on the train and I pass nobody on the steep road up to the tunnel entrance. There is a pub along the way, but it is shuttered and closed. The empty moors up above, the thin Pennine air, the watery sunshine and some rooks cawing overhead make the
scene
somehow even more surreal. Around here is some of the emptiest moorland in Britain, including Saddleworth Moor, location of the Moors Murders, where the body of at least one of the child victims of Ian Brady and Myra Hindley has yet to be recovered.

As I approach the tunnel entrance a figure emerges from the darkness of the portal. He turns out not to be a ghost, but a man in a high-visibility jacket who introduces himself as Fred Carter, the tunnel pilot, an occupation that cannot be claimed by many in modern Britain. He tells me the tunnel fell into disuse in 1943 but reopened again in 2001. ‘But it's very narrow and there's no towpath. In the old days the boatmen used to “leg” the barges through lying on their backs paddling their feet on the roof. Boats can't pass in there and it can take two hours to get through. I make sure people don't panic in the darkness. If people do get claustrophobic halfway through, I have a way of getting them out,' he says with a wink. ‘There's a boat handy. Fancy a trip?'

Tempting, but I can't take the risk of getting stuck, since I have to get the next train down to Huddersfield, where I have an appointment with a train driver. The journey is only seven miles and I am early into the town, which is famous among other things as the birthplace of Rugby League and the former Labour prime minister, Harold Wilson. The grandeur of the station, however, eclipses both. Built in the Greek style by J P Pritchett in 1846–7, with a huge central block framed by six Corinthian columns and colonnades leading to little pavilions on each side, its magnificence is quite out of proportion to what is only the tenth-biggest town in Britain. Not surprising that Betjeman rated it ‘the most splendid station façade in England' and the historian Professor Jack Simmons ‘one of those towns where the station is the best building there'. Sadly, Huddersfield has had no direct service to London since the 1950s. Both the station pavilions, which were once booking offices, have been converted into pubs, and inside the Head of Steam, a shrine to railway enthusiasts, its walls
covered
in signs and nameplates, the barman Kevin says, ‘If this station were in bloody London, folk would be slavering over it. It's better than Euston any day. But because it's in Huddersfield, nobody down there gives a toss.' But I wonder whether they really care a lot here either. A gaggle of schoolchildren are larking around by the statue of Harold Wilson in the centre of the splendidly restored George Square outside the station. I ask them who they think it is. Most look blank then one replies, ‘Charlie Chaplin.'

But the Grade I-listed station has always had a future, unlike the little branch from Huddersfield to Penistone and Barnsley in South Yorkshire that is the next stage of my journey. Pottering for twenty miles through the
Last of the Summer Wine
country, past remote mining and weaving villages, the Penistone Line has probably come back from the dead more times than any other railway in Britain. Back in 1963 Beeching condemned it, but it was reprieved by Barbara Castle in 1966 because of fears of ‘road congestion'. British Railways and the local transport authorities wouldn't give up and there were two more attempts to shut it in the 1980s. But they didn't reckon with the Yorkshire doggedness of people like driver Neil Bentley, who is waiting for me in the cab of the afternoon train in the bay platform to run me down to Barnsley. ‘Don't worry, we're very informal round here,' he'd told me the day before when I'd rung to enquire about the services. ‘No one's going to mind if you ride in the cab.' Neil is not just a Northern Rail driver, but he's also the chairman of the Penistone Line Partnership, a group of local people who love and defend this railway in the back of beyond with a passion. If there ever was a modern equivalent of
The Titfield Thunderbolt,
then this is it. The line, built by the Lancashire and Yorkshire in 1850, was never anything special in railway terms, though the South Yorkshireman express from Marylebone to Bradford once ran over its tracks. But it has spectacular scenery, jaw-dropping civil engineering and a special place in the iconography of British branch lines as the
first
on the national network to introduce evening trains as a kind of travelling music hall, with live music and real ale. ‘They're mostly packed,' Neil tells me, and I believe him.

Even the train this afternoon – although one of the ubiquitous Pacers – looks rather festive, painted in the jolly crimson livery of the West Yorkshire Metro. Neil, who tells me he is thirty-four and has been with the railway since he was seventeen, presents me with a bottle of their latest gimmick to pack in the passengers – a bottle of Penistone Line Rail Ale, specially produced by the Summer Wine Brewery on the route of the railway near Holmfirth. ‘We delivered the first batch to Huddersfield by train and rolled the barrels ceremonially along the platform to the buffet. Sorry about the dirty windscreen,' he says as we pull away from the main line on the wobbly single track down along the Holme Valley. We're joined by Lenny Kinder, the driving team manager, and the men keep up a commentary all the way, a delightful counterpoint between Neil's strong West Riding accent and Lenny's rich Barnsley tones.

Viewed from the cab, the line looks even more rickety since it zigzags from one side of the trackbed to the other – the result of it being singled in the 1980s, the engineers using the bits that were least worn out. ‘If there ever was a line that serves its local community then this is it,' Neil tells me. ‘There are no buses along much of the route so we're stopping and starting constantly at tiny wayside stations, some only three minutes apart.' Lockwood, Berry Brow, Honley, Brockholes, Stocksmoor, Shepley – all of them sleepy little stone-built villages thankful that their stations never closed.

We cross the 121-foot Lockwood Viaduct and Lenny gives a parp on the horn. ‘That's for his missus, who lives up on the hill,' says Neil. ‘He always gives a toot to let her know he's passing by.' This was once prime textile country. Streams have always poured down the valley sides, draining the high moorland, providing soft water for washing the wool and powering the mills. Then the
Industrial
Revolution came along and what was once a cottage industry was turned into sixty smoking mills, all within a stone's throw of here. All are now closed or changed to more modern uses, and these days the local mill may well be a graceful converted home for well-off commuters to Sheffield or Leeds.

Brockholes used to be the junction for the branch to Holmfirth, once famous across Britain for Bamford's, publishers of the saucy seaside postcards of Donald McGill, but more recently as the setting for
Last of the Summer Wine,
now in the history books as the BBC's longest-running sitcom. I peer out of the cab window to see if Compo or Nora Batty are getting aboard, but the train crew are busy telling me about badgers. ‘The second-biggest badger ever recorded was found round here,' says Lenny. ‘And we see lots of tawny owls too,' says Neil. We pass some signs by the track pointing out that this is a Site of Special Scientific Interest because of the badgers hereabouts. ‘Barmy to advertise it,' says Lenny. ‘There's nothing they like better down in Barnsley than a bit of badger baiting.'

Yet there is much to boast about as we head south towards Barnsley, the men talking over the constant
ping
of the train's automatic warning system. Here is the station at Denby Dale, famous for its monster pies, baked for special occasions – the first in 1788 to mark King George III's recovery from madness, and the most recent baked for the Millennium, weighing 12.52 tonnes. Then onto the dramatic Penistone Viaduct, higher and with more arches than even the celebrated Ribblehead Viaduct on the Settle and Carlisle Line. ‘S & C fans hate it when I point out to them that our viaduct is better,' says Neil. Penistone has its own claim to fame as reputedly the coldest town in Britain, but it doesn't stop cinema fans flocking there to hear the mighty Compton organ at the Penistone Paramount, one of the last working cinema organs in Britain.

The Penistone line ends at Barnsley station, now blandly called Barnsley Interchange, and as I wait for the next train north to
Leeds
I wonder what its plain-speaking sons Michael Parkinson and Arthur Scargill would make of such an uninspiring place. I have no regrets about leaving Barnsley, but I am sorry to say goodbye to what must be the friendliest line in Britain as I head along the main line to Sheffield, where I change for my final destination at Chester-le-Street, just north of Durham on the London to Edinburgh main line.

Although Chester-le-Street, an ancient town on the Roman road to the north and famous as the home of Durham County Cricket Club, eluded Beeching's axe, it survived with just a sprinkling of trains. All the fast London to Newcastle and Edinburgh expresses hurry through without stopping and there is a big gap in the middle of the day with not much of a service at all. But it does sport a real-life ‘station master' in the form of Alex Nelson, who is waiting to greet me on the platform. At least, ‘Station Master' is what it says on his business card, which is printed on what appears to be a platform ticket.

‘Welcome,' he declares, ‘to the centre of Britain' – perhaps an odd way of describing this out-of-the-way corner of rural Durham. But Alex, it turns out, is no eccentric throwback to the old days of the railway, nor is he really a stationmaster. Instead, he runs one of the most successful independent railway ticket agencies in Britain, having rescued Chester-le-Street station, with its charming North Eastern Railway buildings, by making it his headquarters. His claim to be at the centre of Britain is based on his ownership of the Internet domain name nationalrail.com, which he snaffled perfectly legally in the 1990s from under the nose of the newly privatised railway. Now, he explains, anyone who goes on the Internet to buy a ticket may well find themselves – virtually– at Chester-le-Street station instead of the National Rail website. ‘People are mystified about the pricing of railway tickets and haven't a clue what the best deals are, so my staff (he has five working for him) talk them through it,' he tells me over a mug of tea in his bustling booking office. So what's his best tip?
‘Book in advance. And go first class,' he says. ‘A standard single from Newcastle to Durham costs three pounds. But if you pay £4.50 to go first class, you don't only get a comfy seat, you get a ploughman's lunch, a coffee and a newspaper thrown in with the price. Not bad, huh?

‘I'll tell you something else that many don't know,' he says. ‘The Bible was first translated into English here in Chester-le-Street.' He whisks me across the main street to the parish church of St Mary and St Cuthbert, and like the stationmasters of old, who were once pillars of their communities, Alex receives many a wave and a handshake from the local people, who seem to know him well. In a glass cabinet in the darkness of the church is a replica of the magnificent illuminated manuscript of the Lindisfarne Gospels, one of the great treasures of world literature, brought to Chester-le-Street in the ninth century by monks fleeing from Holy Island, where it was originally made. (The original also reposes next to a railway station – in the British Library at St Pancras in London.) Between the lines of Latin, in a neat Anglo-Saxon hand, is the translation made by Aldred, provost of Chester-le-Street, more than a millennium ago – the very first rendering of the Bible into English.

‘What we do in the booking office at the station now,' Alex Nelson says, ‘is exactly what the monks were doing back in the tenth century. Making complicated things accessible to ordinary people.'

FURTHER READING

One of the joys of travelling round the country on slow trains is the opportunity to browse in second-hand bookshops while waiting during sometimes-long gaps in the service. As a result I have bought far too many obscure books on old railways than are good for anyone with already-groaning bookshelves. So I will mention only the essential ones here.