Eleven Minutes Late Read online

  (1)

  IN CASE OF EMERGENCY . . .

  (Melin Argyfwng)

  (2)

  CAUTION: KEEP CLEAR OF THE DOORS

  (Rhybudd: cadwch yn glir o’r drysau)

  (3)

  EMERGENCY DOOR RELEASE

  (I Agor y Drws Mewn Argyfwng)

  (4)

  EMERGENCY ALARM

  [not available to monoglot Welsh-speakers]

  (5)

  FIRE EQUIPMENT

  (6)

  EMERGENCY EQUIPMENT AND FIRST AID BOX

  (7)

  SMILE! YOU’RE ON CAMERA

  (8)

  INCONSIDERATE BEHAVIOUR CAN GET PEOPLE HURT

  (9)

  CAUTION. PULL DOWN

  (10)

  DO NOT OBSTRUCT THIS DOOR

  (11)

  NO LUGGAGE TO BE LEFT IN THIS AREA

  (12)

  IF YOU DON’T TALK TO YOUR KIDS ABOUT DRUGS, WHO WILL?

  (13)

  NO SMOKING

  (14)

  LIGHT LUGGAGE ONLY ON OVERHEAD RACK

  This clearly had not covered all the possibilities: there was no mention of what to do if we made an emergency landing over water, and how to attract attention while on the life raft. Still, the familiar voice repeated a few of them, for the benefit of those passengers who had not been wandering the saloon taking notes, and added just one more:

  (15)

  PLEASE MIND THE GAP BETWEEN THE TRAIN AND THE PLATFORM

  She didn’t do this in Welsh, creating the possibility of a fearful death for any Welsh-language monoglots in Newport. This is a city where the residents are known to have difficulties with English, as shown by an infamous incident during one of the great British sexual-deviant panics a few years back when a mob vandalized a doctor’s house, having become understandably muddled between the words ‘paedophile’ and ‘paediatrician’.

  Then, just as we came out of Caerleon, we crossed what I now know to be St Julian’s Bridge over the Usk, glinting in the sunshine as it swerved its way down to the Severn. There was a view to the west, looking towards a wooded cliff above the river that might have been painted by a seventeenth-century master. I had never noticed this view before.

  Then we stopped dead twice on the way into Newport station, and all of us had to run like hell to get our connections. Including, in my case, a last-minute shift over the bridge from Platform 3 to 4.

  First-class, Second-class, 143rd class

  I did have a plan, of sorts. The aim was to go down to Penzance, the southern and western extremity of the system, and then to Thurso, the northern extremity, as fast as possible, and after that come back at leisure. So the immediate task was to get on to a First Great Western commuter train to catch a connection to Penzance. But I was content, enthused, suddenly wide-eyed about what I normally took for granted.

  Maybe my mood was infectious. More likely it was the glorious May morning, with the young women all in skimpy dresses. Yet somehow the crowd on the 0815 into Bristol Temple Meads seemed equally light-headed. By 2008 commuters on the very wispy network of lines into Bristol had become the most put-upon in the country, but the springtime had got to them.

  The train was a Class 143 Pacer, the second most notorious type of train currently used in Britain. The Pacers are all to a greater or lesser degree buses, adapted for use on rails. Only one of the originals, the Class 140, was ever built: it was last heard of in the Scottish Highlands, awaiting restoration, possibly for use as a poultry shed. The Class 141s were sold to Iran, a little-known instance of the lengths to which Britain was willing to go to support George W. Bush and undermine the Iranian government. The 142s still lurk, ready to pounce, in remote corners of the system.

  The 0815 was jammed-full at the start, though it became much fuller once we had gone through the Severn Tunnel and back into England. The windows were filthy, not in the normal way, but streaked, as though they had been cleaned with a rag specially greased for the purpose. The supports for standing passengers to hold looked new, painted bright green and hastily drilled into the ceiling, which was then never properly made good. The cowboys had ridden this range. When another train went by, the doors rattled alarmingly and the air whooshed from underneath, which on such a morning was rather welcome.

  As more people joined, at Patchway and Filton Abbey Wood, the conductor asked us to move further down the car (no saloons now); my scalp began to itch, unaccountably. ‘Is it always like this?’ I asked a woman who had stood with me since Newport. ‘Oh, no,’ she replied. It’s usually much worse.’ ‘What’s a bad day, then?’ ‘When it doesn’t turn up and you have to wait an hour for the next one.’ ‘Or when the previous one hasn’t turned up and two lots have to pile on yours,’ someone chipped in.

  ‘You’re all lucky,’ said the conductor. ‘You should see the trains they have down at Exeter on the Exmouth line. These are Pacers built by British Rail. Those are the Pacers built by British Leyland on a bus body . . .’ Aha, the notorious 142s. ‘They don’t trust them to get this far. They have to take them to the depot and fix them every night.’ And so a cheery general conversation began. ‘Public transport is not run for the convenience of the public,’ said a jolly man with a beard. And we all ruminated on that for a moment. Then a man in a check suit said suddenly: ‘Something’s going to go wrong in a minute.’ And sure enough we squealed to a halt outside Temple Meads, and spent five minutes waiting for a platform.

  There had been the promise of a ‘brasserie’, First Great Western’s second-division form of catering, on the 0913 down to Penzance. ‘Regret no brasserie service,’ said the indicator board tersely. ‘Buffet only.’ The chef was on holiday, I was told. Who could plan for such an emergency?

  First Great Western trains are often characterized by this curious air of panic. It’s a combination of the company’s attempts to repair its dreadful reputation for punctuality, and the 1970s slam-door carriages. Staff fuss around as though the departure of the 0913 was like the lift-off of the space shuttle. The guards press the button to alert the driver with a huge effort, as if desperate to make a deaf man hear.1

  But we were heading for what has long been regarded as the most relaxed part of Britain – an image that First Great Western’s predecessor, the Great Western Railway, itself propagated more than a century ago. And after we had left Bristol with the customary FGW sound effects of squawks, rattles, clanks, rumbles and hisses (plus a strange buzzing, as from a swarm of bees) we settled into a gentle West Country kind of rhythm. And I got a ‘breakfast bap’ from the buffet: ‘Linconshire sausage with sweetcure bacon, boiled egg and tomato in a white bap.’ I don’t know what sweetcure is, but closer examination showed that the whole product had forty-seven different ingredients including E numbers 472(e), 471, 300, 450, 451, 300, 330, 331, 250, 415, 407, 202 and 160. Perhaps there was even a soupc¸on of Iranian Class 141.

  And the miles went by, until we reached the most spectacular stretch of main-line railway in Britain, from Exeter to Newton Abbot – first along the Exe estuary and then, thrillingly, along the sea wall at Dawlish before returning to the calm of the Teign estuary.

  Isambard Kingdom Brunel chose to build this southward extension of the Great Western hugging the sea, though it is not at all clear why. He was by temperament a showman and a gambler, and no doubt the route appealed to his sense of drama. It appeals to anyone with a sense of drama: YouTube has a selection of clips showing the waves crashing over the tracks.

  It took only five months from the line’s opening in 1846 for it to be severed by a storm. But at the time far more controversy attached to Brunel’s scheme of running it as an atmospheric railway, using a pneumatic tube to provide air pressure for power instead of locomotives. This enabled trains to touch 70mph, twice the speed at which Huskisson was rushed to Eccles. But the weather perished the leather flaps sealing the pipes and the leather had to be greased with tallow, which encouraged the rats, who then ate what was left. And it was unreliable and ex
pensive. The experiment lasted less than a year.

  Still, the trains have run for more than 160 years, minus interruptions for inundations. The other two rail links connecting Plymouth to the east were closed in the 1960s. Network Rail spends £400,000 a year to maintain the cliffs, the track and the sea wall. The government, in keeping with its general policy on climate change, hopes that rising sea levels are just a nasty rumour.

  The tide was high when we passed, and there was a serious hint of chop in the Channel. The spray leapt upwards and hurled itself towards the windows. I was enthralled. The man opposite me just kept doing his Sudoku puzzle.

  Then it was on to the South Hams and towards Cornwall. The train seemed happier down here, and the sound effects became less alarming. The slower pace of life seems to suit First Great Western, especially in Cornwall where the curves and gradients mean their trains don’t have to cope with the endless pressure of trying to be high-speed ones. The timetable allows more than two hours for the trains to do the eighty miles from Plymouth to Penzance. Even the noxious taste of the breakfast bap had begun to fade. But you couldn’t forget Brunel.

  There are moments to be really grateful that these ancient High-Speed Trains are not wholly enclosed like the new Virgin ones. It is still possible to disobey the traditional injunction of railway companies and lean out of the window to get the perfect view as you approach the Royal Albert Bridge that links Devon and Cornwall. Recent restoration works to coincide with Brunel’s bicentenary cleared the view of the entrance to the bridge. And the words I.K. BRUNEL, ENGINEER, 1859 shine out in white above the iron-grey arch. Just in case you didn’t know.

  The Slow Train North

  In Cornwall the fine weather had been and gone. Penzance is a grey, granite town which would not look out of place in the north of Scotland, and that evening we could have been there already.

  In 1898 there was a serious plan to run light railways further west both to Sennen, just short of Lands End, and to St Just. The commissioners who adjudicated on these matters approved the ideas in theory but rejected the particular schemes on offer. By the time the Great Western had instituted new fast trains from Paddington to Penzance in 1904 (seven hours then, just over five now), there were motor buses to meet them. And the light railways were never required.

  There is something about this notion of the end of the line that set my mind racing. The train stops in a large but rather gloomy trainshed before a very solid set of buffers, an information board, a prefabricated buffet (which looked as though it served prefabricated food) and an even more solid granite wall. What if the railway had gone on? Bursting through all that, and then through Branwell’s Mill family restaurant, the 2K Nite Club, the Ultimate Goals Fitness Centre, the Baltic Deli and DV8 Body Piercing, some of which might not have been there in quite that form in 1898.

  The 1A bus to Land’s End leaves from over the road. So does the National Express bus to Edinburgh (dep. 1300, arr. 0730, £93 return). I was terrified of forgetting myself and somehow ending up inside DV8 Body Piercing, so I stayed sober and had an early night.

  What was then the longest daytime train journey in Britain began in Penzance at 0830 the next day. The scheduled run for the 680-odd miles to Dundee was 11 hours and 55 minutes. But I was getting off lightly. Between the wars there was a direct Aberdeen to Penzance service that took 22 hours. It still ran, a touch more speedily, in the early 1990s, when Paul Bigland of Rail magazine discovered a couple of scallop fishermen who lived north of Aberdeen, worked two-weeks-on, two-weeks-off a boat in Penzance, and really did use this train to commute. This service was restored, but only going south, in December 2008, presumably to cater for the growing total-madman market. It takes 13 hours and 44 minutes,2 though you can arrive in Penzance at the same time if you leave Aberdeen 22 minutes later and change three times. There are actually quicker trains if you change four times. Dundee in one dollop was far enough for me, thank you.

  In any other country, they would make a fuss of such a train. But this is Britain, and the Penzance to Dundee is now run by a company called Arriva, which specializes in buses but, under the mysterious processes which now govern the railway, had recently gained the contract for Cross Country Trains from Virgin. The 0830 is not called the Granite Express, or Palm and Pine, the Cornish Scot, the Pasty‘n’Haggis, nor even the Cattle Truck Special. After more than a decade of privatized trains, these companies can’t be bothered to make even the most basic gesture towards making passengers feel special. It is called XC3170, although the numbering of trains for public consumption is an alien concept in Britain.

  The train was a Voyager: the seats are hard; the luggage space is niggardly; and the toilets are notoriously unreliable and smelly. It was also grotesquely inadequate. That was not immediately obvious leaving Penzance, but there were another thirty-four stations to go before Dundee. And even then we whistled contemptuously without stopping through boroughs as substantial as Gloucester, Burton, Chesterfield and Berwick. Apparently, the Voyager is better at the stopstart stuff than the diesel high-speed trains because it has decent acceleration.

  ‘This isn’t a long-distance train, it’s a commuter train,’ said the first conductor. We had many miles to go before I would grasp the reality of what he said. He had never previously met anyone doing the whole journey and looked at me with an awestuck expression, as if he had suddenly just recognized a celebrity. Preening myself rather, I wandered down to what was described in the timetable as a buffet, but was still billed here – in Virginspeak – as The Shop.

  The staff said Arriva was planning to remove this, and replace it with a bike rack. It was already a dark and dingy affair, like a corner store in a demolition area: it had cans of lager, Cup-a-Soup and Kitkat. There were six sandwiches to feed the entire train. Virgin used to sell headphones and a pointlessly abbreviated range of paperbacks – even less choice than for the sandwiches – aimed at people who wanted to read not just something but anything. Already the staff were staring at a blank wall where the paperbacks used to be, and contemplating the notion of being relegated to pushing a trolley round the curves of the disabled toilets and through the piled-up bodies and luggage, which they assured me would be there soon enough. ‘They haven’t made much difference yet, Arriva,’ said one of them. ‘But you were proud to work for Virgin. They’ve got a reputation. But Arriva?’ He almost spat. ‘Morale’s very low.’

  Elsewhere, the mood was still very jolly as we trundled through Cornwall. A group of lads were on their way to a stag party: six of them already laying into industrial quantities of Stella and Strongbow. ‘We’re all going to Bristol,’ said one of them cheerily. ‘Except for the stag,’ he said, pointing to a bulky bloke with a copy of the Daily Star. ‘He’s going to Dundee. He just doesn’t know it yet.’

  It took us two hours and eight stops to get out of Cornwall, and I began to be rather grateful we weren’t starting from Land’s End. The Cornish main line is characterized by a huge number of viaducts, which are more easily appreciated from off the train than on it; it hardly touches the coast until Plymouth, and the countryside is rather bland. By St Austell I fancied a drink myself, which was possible but did not seem, at 0922, very sensible. At Bodmin Parkway I felt an overwhelming urge for a smoke, which was at least ten and a half hours away.

  But out there was Britain, and soon enough it looked amazing. Going east, you approach Brunel’s bridge at right angles, so you can see it clearly without leaning out of the window, which is lucky because the Voyagers are sealed boxes. You can’t miss the inscription, and down below you can clearly see The Union Pub, which has its front painted up as a Union Jack and its side turned into a Belfast-style mural. The sun peeked through the cloud and danced on the Tamar.

  After a while, the whole journey began to seem like a sampler of the best of Britain, like a tourist board video or the latest gimmick from the BBC presentation department: we passed almost everything except London. The great Dawlish stretch was a disappointment compared
to the previous day: the tide was out, and the sea had gone back to sleep. This may have been lucky: one of the Voyager’s original quirks was that the computer wiring was in the roof and malfunctioned if it was pummelled by salt spray, which made it a great choice for this stretch of line. By Taunton the train was filling, and there were bodies and bags all over the vestibules as the buffet attendant had predicted. One toilet now stank and the next had a pool of liquid heading steadily towards the door like a trail of blood.

  At Bristol, we got a fresh crew, and I regarded them the way an old lag looks at a new screw. I’d been going for four hours now, a third of the way. Who did they think they were, coming in and taking charge? I’m a lifer, me. This is also the way railway staff regard each new franchisee. One guard I met in the north, who had been in the same job for twenty-five years, tried to list all the different companies that had ordered him around, and the different-coloured uniforms he had worn. He gave up in despair.

  I resented each new passenger even more. At Cheltenham, a man of about eighty plonked himself opposite me: he had an East Midlands accent and a ticket for Derby, and a large computer on which he began playing muzak. ‘I hope you’re not going to be playing that all the way to Derby,’ I said.

  ‘No,’ he said firmly. ‘I’m going to play a DVD.’

  ‘With headphones, I trust.’

  ‘No, I didn’t bring them.’