Most current writers on railways don’t want to appear at all romantic lest they be shunted into the ‘trainspotter’ siding. But Michael Williams is unafraid to state the obvious fact about Britain’s railways, which is that they were far more attractive in the past:
It is sometimes tempting to wonder if, deep in every railway operations HQ, there is a department whose sole job is to think up ways of corroding the experience of passengers. Here are seats that don’t line up with windows, garish plasticky train interiors, an incomprehensible fares system, a cacophony of endless announcements….
In The Trains Now Departed Williams celebrates ‘the best of what is gone from our railways’ in 16 vivid, highly readable chapters. One concerns Verney Junction, formerly the furthest outpost of the Metropolitan Railway. Nominally part of London Underground, Verney was located — as Williams puts it — ‘in a field’ in rural Bucks. In Edwardian days, the Met used to send luxury Pullman carriages with green silk blinds and ormolu baggage racks between Verney and the City, and Williams imagines himself leaving Farringdon after a day’s work, and being asked by a white-jacketed attendant, ‘Touch more angostura in your gin, sir?’
‘Maybe,’ he writes, ‘Verney was just a dream, like Alice’s train from Through the Looking-Glass. ‘Dreamlike’ is the word for many of Williams’s skilful evocations. Take the night ferry train that, from 1936 to 1980, ran from Victoria to what was then known as ‘the Continent’. It didn’t take a sudden leap into the air, like Alice’s train, but it was loaded onto a boat every night, and there were lifejackets in all compartments.
Williams conjures up the Somerset & Dorset Railway, whose engines were Prussian blue lined out in gold, with scarlet buffer blocks, and whose staff wore ‘snazzy green corduroy’.
Comments
Join the debate for just £1 a month
Be part of the conversation with other Spectator readers by getting your first three months for £3.
UNLOCK ACCESS Just £1 a monthAlready a subscriber? Log in