THREE

THE CORNISH RIVIERA EXPRESS

THE MOST ROMANTIC TRAIN OF THE MOST ROMANTIC RAILWAY

The Cornish Riviera Express began running in 1904 and still exists, after a fashion. It was the flagship service of the Great Western Railway (GWR): the most romantic train of the most romantic railway. It was not a Pullman. The haughty Great Western did not need to borrow style from the Pullman company. That the train ran from Paddington to Penzance, in Cornwall, is fitting. A company called the Great Western ought to be famous for going west, rather than to Birmingham and Birkenhead (to which its tentacles also extended), which are more north than west.

The train began its journey with a great leap to Plymouth, travelling the first 225 miles of its 305-mile journey without stopping. It was the longest journey without stops that it was possible to make on British railways at the time. At present, the longest hop is 283 miles, the Newcastle-to-London stretch of the 5.40 a.m. from Edinburgh, a train that has inherited the mantle Flying Scotsman and is the subject of the next chapter. The present, depleted Riviera still goes to Penzance, but makes its first stop at Reading. Trains stop more often these days, as explained.

Part of the romance of the GWR lies in the fact that it was almost the personal train set of one man: its civil engineer, Isambard Kingdom Brunel. He surveyed the line from London to Bristol, and as far as Falmouth in Cornwall. He frequently designed the stations, and had a hand in designing the engines, all the while chain-smoking cigars and pursuing his two grand visions: first, the notion of the railway as the start of a further thrust west, aboard his giant Atlantic-crossing steamships; second, the 7-foot-track gauge – the broad gauge – which he rightly believed would offer greater stability and speed. He either hoped it would crush the standard gauge (4 foot 8½ inches), to which the majority of railways were committed, or he just didn’t care about the other railways.

There is a pub opposite Bristol Temple Meads station called The Reckless Engineer, and that was Brunel. It is speculated that he became this Alpha Male – determined to be ‘the first engineer’ – as a reaction against the character of his father, Marc Brunel, a refugee from Revolutionary France, who was an equally brilliant engineer, but easy-going, and prone to being exploited by his employers. When, in 1825–43, Marc Brunel was digging the world’s first under-river tunnel, to link the two sides of the London docks, the Thames would keep breaking in, flooding the tunnel. On one occasion when this happened, Marc Brunel said, ‘We have been honoured with a visitation of Father Thames’, which was particularly forbearing, given what the Thames was full of. Contrast Isambard, who – in a question designed to expose the inadequate signalling of the early Great Western – was asked what he would do if, when rattling along the track at 50 m.p.h. (because he would often drive GWR engines himself), he met a train coming head-on towards him. He replied, ‘In such a case I would have put on all the steam I could command with a view to driving off the opposite engine with the superior velocity of my own.’

Brunel’s railway continued in his image: headstrong, a combination of gravitas and silliness. To take the gravitas first, the GWR distributed the coal from the mines of south Wales. It brought ‘perishables’ by fast goods trains from the south-west to London. For much of its existence, the GWR was known to have the fastest engines in Britain. It ran, as noted, the longest non-stop journey, and for this probe into the terra incognita of Cornwall, time itself had to be amended. In 1840 Truro was twenty minutes behind London. So the GWR imposed ‘railway time’, establishing the precedent for another three-letter acronym: GMT. At Swindon the company established the largest railway works in Britain, and a railway colony run – eventually – on enlightened and paternalistic lines. It was the GWR that, from 1906, pioneered modern signalling by its adoption of Automatic Train Control, by which a train that passed a danger signal would be automatically stopped.

And yet there was a whimsical, antiquarian streak. In his diverting book Britain from the Rails, Benedict le Vay finds it in a horse trough at Reading marked ‘To Be Used By Great Western Horses Only’, as though horses ought to be able to read, and it was their fault if they could not. John Betjeman found it in the way that celery and radish were always served with cheese in the dining cars. Early engine drivers on the GWR were perversely kitted out in white corduroy suits, to prove their cleanliness in a dirty environment. The company persisted with the antiquated spelling of a ubiquitous notice, ‘Tickets will be Shewn’, and – a more expensive anachronism – maintained the broad gauge until 1892, when it was obviously a lost cause.

GWR signals were on the ‘lower quadrant’ principle: a down-pointing signal arm meant ‘line clear’. The other companies used an up-pointing signal arm for that, because a down-pointing one might result from the effect of gravity on a broken signal. But the Great Western solved this entirely self-inflicted problem by incorporating a counterweight, whereby the signal arm would be sent upward – meaning ‘danger’ – if the cable broke. The Great Western was also the most salubrious railway, famous for its many, intensively worked, country branch lines and its charmingly naive slogan (from 1923) ‘Go Great Western’, spelt out in trackside flower beds. It had a charming colour scheme for the rolling stock: Brunswick green for the locos, with a smart copper band around the chimney tops; chocolate and cream for the carriages.

It has generated numerous misty-eyed recollections. ‘Adlestrop’ – the title, and setting, of Edward Thomas’s poem encapsulating the slumberous beauty of rural England before the First World War – was a GWR station. R. P. Lister’s poem ‘Nostalgia’ is a catalogue of railway memories by a much-travelled man: ‘Awhile my tastes were fickle: but the seeds/Sown there have proved the stubbornest by far:/Upon my heart is graved G.W.R.’ (‘There’ refers to Bristol Temple Meads, where he changed trains as a boy.) The last edition of the Great Western Railway Magazine appeared in 1947, when the company was absorbed into BR. It concluded with a poem by N. Ross Murray:

Alas! The curtain falls, the lights are low:

Pride of Brunel, now it is time to go;

But when old days are dim, when we have gone,
May all thy grand traditions live on.

Many of them did. The company’s identity was almost indestructible among those who thought that GWR really denoted ‘God’s Wonderful Railway’. The less reverent had called it the ‘Great Way Round’, since trains to the West Country had originally all gone via Bristol.

It was the only railway to keep its name after the grouping of 1923. Even after nationalisation, when the territory was nominally BR Western Region, you would, according to John Betjeman, ‘still find officials who, out of their own pockets, buy the round pill-box hats of the GW and wear the company’s badge of twin shields bearing the arms of the cities of London and Bristol’. The old name re-emerged in slightly modified form after privatisation, in that the franchise is run by First Great Western, whose management is haunted by the old company whether they like it or not. It seems that at first they did not, because about ten years ago they dropped the train names associated with the old company – including that of the Cornish Riviera Express – before reviving them a couple of years later. Today Paddington bristles with the GWR logo of the 1930s, in which the three letters appear in a circle. (It is known as the ‘shirtbutton logo’.) The Didcot Railway Centre, a sprawling museum-cum-shrine to the GWR, stands slap bang in the middle of First Great Western territory. Many of those Great Western branch lines that Beeching tried to murder have been revived as GWR-themed steam railways, and the Cornish Rivera Express refuses to die …

The express began running in July 1904. At first, it was un-named, but in August the GWR organised a competition in conjunction with the Railway Magazine: ‘Three guineas for the name of a train’. The magazine, being pretty confident of the gender of the eventual winner, promised that ‘His name will become known, and will be handed down to future generations of railway officers and railwayacs, as the originator of the title …’ A ‘railwayac’ was a railway maniac, a perfectly respectable thing to be in Edwardian times.

There were 1,286 entries, and the prize was divided between … well I’m sure I need hardly mention the names of those two immortals: Mr F. Hynam of Hampstead and Mr J. R. Shelley of Hackney, who suggested The Riviera Limited, which is not what the train came to be called. It is irritating to have to unpick this complication, but let us try to do so. ‘Riviera Limited’ was a shrewd suggestion in the sense of being sycophantic towards the GWR, which, a few months beforehand, had published a book called The Cornish Riviera, the start of the company’s campaign to depict Cornwall as a glamorous and exotic destination. (‘If he [the traveller to Penzance] walks in the Morrab Gardens, where a good band lays amongst a wealth of sub-tropical vegetation which Nice or Monte Carlo might envy, he may without any great stretch of imagination find himself in Algiers.’) Part of the genius of calling Cornwall the Riviera was that the other Riviera was principally a winter resort for the British at the time. So Cornwall was made to seem attractive in winter as well as summer.

But even the Great Western Railway had to face the fact that, until such time as Cornwall was established as the Riviera, the clarifying prefix ‘Cornish’ would have to be added. Hence a revision of the Hynam and Shelley name. It became the Cornish Riviera Limited. The train was also known to staff as ‘the Limited’ or ‘The 10.30 Limited’, after what became its usual departure time, and a book of that name would be published by the GWR in 1924. The train was formally rechristened the Cornish Riviera Express in 1958, when it began to be pulled by diesels, but it had been informally known by that name since the start, and that’s what I’m calling it, even though the train is indicated on the current pocket timetables as ‘CR’, which, a footnote explains, stands for ‘The Cornish Riviera’.

The drama of the Riviera lay in the fact that Cornwall was like a foreign country to Edwardians. The Great Western had only reached Cornwall in the mid-1870s (by the acquisition of smaller railways), and Paris was a more familiar destination for the well-to-do traveller. The GWR targeted this market with its posited Cornwall–Riviera equivalence and, from 1908, the peremptory command, ‘See your own country first.’ Many people were responsive to the idea: the Cornish Riviera booklet sold – it wasn’t free – a quarter of a million copies, at 3d. each.

The middle classes began travelling to the West Country for holidays, but not the working classes. Paid, week-long holidays were not the norm for working people until the 1950s. The GWR promoted resorts in Somerset, Devon and Wales as well as Cornwall, but Cornwall was the plum, and by the time of the First World War the company was able to publish a picture of a wistful nymphette in a floaty dress standing on a rock and looking out to sea with the words ‘The Cornish Riviera’ and the suffix, ‘On the sunny shores of the Atlantic.’ There was no need to state the name of the railway company, so strong had the association become. It is fitting that, whereas the Southern Railway’s holiday brochures of the 1920s and 1930s would be called Holiday Hints, the Great Western’s series, initiated in 1906, were called Holiday Haunts, because the accent was on ‘a dash of adventure’: antiquarian lore, stone circles, granite crosses, ghosts, smugglers, white witches, the evil eye, a perpetuation of the myth-making seen in the works of authors such as Sabine Baring-Gould and Arthur Quiller-Couch.

A stream of books was issued by the company, under the direction of the publicity officer, Felix Pole. While the Holiday Haunts titles were little more than lists of places to stay near the railway line, ranging from the company’s own opulent Treganna Hotel, near St Ives, to attractions commended for being ‘homely’ and ‘moderate’ (a farm in Gloucestershire offers ‘attendance, bath and piano’), there were also more high-minded publications, in which the name of the railway is hardly mentioned. In 1925 the ghost story writer, and provost of Eton, M. R. James, wrote a book called Abbeys, about the abbeys on the Great Western territory. There was no advertising matter except a folding map, with the note, ‘Readers desirous of further information write to Superintendent of the Line, Paddington W2. GWR.’ Two years before, the equally scholarly Cathedrals had appeared, written by G. E. Beer. It had been proofread by various deans and had a foreword by the Archbishop of Canterbury. The Great Western Railway also produced more jigsaws than any other railway company: more than eighty, as opposed to the three produced by the London & North Eastern. They included Exeter Cathedral, Swansea Docks, Cornish Riviera Express, Ann Hathaway’s Cottage, The Vikings Landing at St Ives, Sir Francis Drake at Plymouth, and Cornwall – Preparing for a Catch.

From the mid-1920s there began to be books about the Great Western’s own engines and train services. A similar curve was traced by the other railways’ publicity machines. As competition from road transport increased, so the accent came to be on the virtue of train travel per se rather than on the places to be seen by train. Today almost all railway publicity concerns the cheapness of fares and the comfort of the journey, rather than the attractiveness of the places served, but recently First Great Western has reverted to the old idea of Cornwall-as-enigma, with a posters showing a lonely-looking man on a beach, and the slogan ‘Sometimes, I just want nothing.’

PADDINGTON

The journey to those mysterious, yet definitely sunnier, places begins at Paddington station. In the second chapter of Howard’s End (1910) E. M. Forster writes, ‘In Paddington all Cornwall is latent and the remoter West’, which is perhaps not so much a metaphysical insight as a testament to the power of the GWR publicity machine. It is worth taking a look around Paddington before we board what remains of the Riviera Express, because the station itself is all too likely to be the high point of any journey starting from there.

Paddington was a collaboration between Brunel and his architect friend Matthew Digby Wyatt. They, like the builders of many Victorian stations, were inspired by Paxton’s Crystal Palace, which used an iron rib-cage to support glass. Each rib is prettily perforated with holes that are star-shaped, reminiscent of those cut-outs of snowflake patterns made by primary school children. The train shed at Paddington had an overall span of 238 feet, the widest in Britain until St Pancras, which was 2 feet wider. It has no side-walls, and no frontage except for the Great Western Royal Hotel, which is a very effective icing on the cake. In The Railway Station: A Social History, Jeffrey Richards and John M. Mackenzie describe it as

perhaps the earliest major building in Britain to show a marked French Renaissance influence … It is interesting to observe how frequently the French style prevails not just in the building of hotels but in the whole ‘architecture of pleasure’ in Britain. It is as if somehow the puritanical, work-obsessed British associated the idea of pleasure with the saucy, sinful continent.

9. Platform 1 at Paddington. The Cornish Riviera Express always left from there; the Night Riviera still does

Brunel wanted the station to be ‘an enormous conservatory in a cutting’. Why in a cutting? That seems uncharacteristically modest. It has been suggested that, having an inkling that the underground Metropolitan Railway was about to come to Paddington, he wanted to be close to its level. He also wanted to provide a flat grade for departing trains. As for conservatories, he ended up with a train shed made of three side by side, with soaring glass and iron roofs, and iron arabesques decorating the glass screens at the ends. A fourth arch would be added in 1916, because Paddington was deemed too small by then, as it still is.

These west–east arches would seem long and worm-like were they not twice intersected by north–south transepts. These correspond to, and are stared into by, vaguely Elizabethan arched bow windows and balconies placed high on the south wall of the station. The stationmaster used to occupy the office behind one of those arched windows, and it’s a good job he no longer does so, because his dignity would be undermined by the Ladbrokes and McDonalds that have been accommodated below. Today the stationmaster is located in Tournament House, an Art Deco block on the north-eastern corner of the station. It overlooks the ramp that used to correspond to the ‘departure’ side of the station. Another ramp, overlooked by another Art Deco block on the south-eastern corner, used to correspond to the arrival side. Now that most trains are reversible, stations no longer have arrival and departure sides, but the terminological distinction was still used at Paddington until the 1980s. Users of Paddington will know the departure ramp as the place where smokers are allowed to stand. The other ramp is, at the time of writing, closed off because Crossrail is coming to Paddington, and it will be fitted in along that south side, with no disruption to Brunel’s train shed.

Along the top of the block overlooking the smokers’ ramp is another testament to the obstinate persistence of the old company, in the words ‘GWR Paddington’. I have seen images – or perhaps dreamed – of those words blazing forth in the London night sky, and there are uplighters beneath them, concealed in concrete conch shells. The uplighters no longer work, but the interior of Paddington has an almost Christmassy glow at night, explained by the way the station lights illuminate the corrugated iron screens running halfway up the glass arches like venetian blinds. By day these look grubby and nondescript, but under electric light they become a warm, rusty red.

I particularly like Paddington on Friday nights, because of the band.

In the late 1990s, when I was writing a column about transport in London, I received a letter from a man who signed himself, ‘Reverend Gareth Edwards, The Vicar of Bayswater, and 1st Tuba BB Flat, Paddington Band’, which, he explained when I met him, was a contraction of ‘Great Western Railway Paddington Military Band’. The vicar wanted to publicise the shifting of the band from a prominent spot on the circulating area to an ignominious location between Burger King and the ticket gates of Platforms 8 and 9. The band played – and plays – every Friday night, ‘between 1930 and 2100’. In sympathy with the trains, it observes the twenty-four-hour clock. The band members had once all been railway workers, but that has long since ceased to be the case. It used to play next to a placard proudly announcing ‘GWR Paddington Band’. After nationalisation, the ‘G’ was grudgingly – and only partially – crossed out. The band is well known for playing ‘Plymouth Hoe’, which is geographically fitting. Tearful farewells at Paddington have been soundtracked by the band playing another of its specialities, ‘A Bunch of Roses’.

Having interviewed the Revd Edwards, I interviewed some of those standing and listening to the band. A man called Ron explained that his Friday night routine was to drive in from Stevenage, drop his wife at bingo in Edgware, then come to Paddington to hear the band. He said you often saw Bill Oddie doing the same (not the bingo part, but listening to the band); also ‘that tall man from Blue Peter’. He must have meant Simon Groom, who is a railway enthusiast, and recently produced and directed a Channel 4 documentary called The Flying Scotsman: A Rail Romance. Ron told me, in awed tones, that the trumpeter with the band had once played with Sid Millward and His Nitwits, a musical comedy act of the ’40s and ’50s. There was also Cathy, who taught nursing at Ealing and, as a girl, wanted to be ‘the person who plays the records at Waterloo’. (Martial music used to be played at Waterloo to speed up circulation in the circulating area; nobody seems to know when it stopped.)

I happened to be in Paddington one Friday in late 2013. It was about seven o’clock, and I collared a station official, and asked if the band would be playing. ‘Yes,’ he said, ‘but they’re all pretty angry.’ I asked why. ‘Because they’ve been moved to a part of the station they don’t like.’

‘But that happened years ago!’

It seemed that the band had been demoted again. Having been moved towards Platforms 8 and 9, they have now been moved on to those platforms, and must compete with the noise of trains arriving and then departing. As I walked in that direction, I saw the band in place, and they struck up with ‘Plymouth Hoe’ just as the tannoy blared, ‘This is a security announcement!’ Whatever emendation of signage was going on during BR days, the band has now somersaulted smartly back in time. The banners on the music stands say simply Great Western Railway Paddington Band. Who can blame them for evoking the days when they were in their rightful place: on the main concourse?

We have veered into nocturnal Paddington, but it is also attractive by day, when a sufficient amount of light filters through the glass arches. It might be that Paddington is the most upmarket terminus. The early Victorian village of Paddington was described by John Betjeman as ‘stucco Grecian and leafy’. The station itself was leafy, in that the eastern, or town, end was the stationmaster’s garden, and a child who picked a flower there in the early years was fined for stealing the company’s property. This area became a park for horse-drawn vehicles and steam lorries. In the early 1930s it became a sparse circulating area, still known as ‘The Lawn’. In the ’90s it was rebuilt, becoming a bright atrium, and a ‘retail revolution’ was implemented. Now it is host to T. M. Lewin, Accessorize, Caffe Ritazza, Yo! Sushi, Smith’s, Cards Galore, Boots, Monsoon, M&S Food, EE Mobile and Sainsbury’s, among others. This shopping centre is still called The Lawn on numerous signs pointing towards it, some with the suffix ‘cash machines’. ‘Lawn … cash machines’: it would be interesting to know what foreigners with limited English make of that.

I used to be against station retailing. I thought the shops clashed with the trains. In his novel The Information (1995), Martin Amis wrote: ‘The railway station had changed since he had last had call to use it. In the meantime its soot-coated, rentboy-haunted vault of tarry girders and toilet glass had become a flowing atrium of boutiques and croissant stalls and limitless cappuccino.’ The train sneaks in ‘apologetically’, upstaged by the garish shops. But the railways have always rented out retail space. W. H. Smith established his bookselling business in railway stations (starting at Euston in 1848) before branching out into the surrounding streets, and in the mid-1860s Felix Spiers and Christopher Pond went from running railway buffets at Victoria and Ludgate Hill stations to creating, in the West End, the first chain of mass-market restaurants. Surely a Sainsbury’s that is drawing people towards a railway station is more use than a Sainsbury’s drawing motorists to an out-of-town shopping centre. Shops have taken over many of the old ante-rooms of stations, and who wouldn’t rather have a Sainsbury’s than a First-Class Ladies Waiting Room?

The Lawn used to be a bleak space, a misty, deserted yard. Today it is full of light, and bustle and money, which suits the station. Paddington was always moneyed, in the sense that the GWR was keen to promote long-distance, first-class travel above all, and did little to encourage commuting west of London. It served Oxford University, and the public schools of Eton, Radley, Marlborough, Shrewsbury and Malvern; and the porters at Paddington were known to get the best tips.

In the early 1930s Clement Freud took the train from Paddington to Dartington Hall, for which the stop was Totnes. He and his classmates would travel down unaccompanied by adults, and, as he recalled in his autobiography, Freud Ego, ‘The pervs waited for us in the lavatories, which they did not lock, and one went in to find amiable men telling you not to be afraid. “Have some of you friends got big ones … like this?” one of them asked me.’ In Uncle Fred in the Springtime (1939) P. G. Wodehouse wrote, ‘The two-forty-five express – Paddington to Market Blandings, first stop Oxford – stood at its platform with that air of well-bred reserve which is characteristic of Paddington trains.’

The anonymous writer of a book about the route of the Riviera Express called Through the Window: The Great Western Railway from Paddington to Penzance (1924) introduces a more demotic aspect of the station scene: ‘The characteristic patois of Devon and Somerset mingles with the dialect of West Cornwall, which has at times a quaint, musical note and brings into play local words that only a Cornishman would understand.’ Paddington has usually been about Londoners going west rather than westerners coming east, but the story is told of one Victorian yokel who came up to London by train, and was so overwhelmed by the scale of Paddington that he concluded London was ‘all under glass’.

Paddington has the most mellifluous name of any London station. ‘Names are very important’, Michael Bond, the creator of Paddington Bear, once told me. He said that he always knew he wanted to call a character Paddington, and before the bear was born, in 1958, he’d been limbering up by writing stories about ‘an eccentric uncle called Parkington’.

When the stories became successful, a stuffed Paddington was placed in a Perspex case on the Lawn. The case would occasionally be smashed by drunks and the bear carried off. ‘The police at Paddington Green became very good at finding him.’ More distressing to Mr Bond were those times when Paddington would slump within his display case, as though he himself had been on the booze. ‘I would phone BR about it,’ said Mr Bond, ‘but I could never get through to the right person.’ One day in the 1980s he carried his own toolkit on to the station, jemmied open the back of the case, set Paddington upright and re-sealed the case. ‘Nobody batted an eyelid.’ None of these problems can arise now, because Paddington is sculpted in bronze on the Lawn. Incidentally, Mr Bond – who was born in Newbury, and used to stand on Reading station as a boy to watch the Cornish Riviera Express go past – could not explain how Paddington Bear had got from his well-known point of origin, Darkest Peru, to Paddington station. I wonder whether the feature film about Paddington Bear – forthcoming at the time of writing – will resolve this back story. He perhaps came up from Plymouth on one of the Ocean Liner Specials, effectively the last of the tidal trains, in that they ran at variable times – this because they were meeting ocean liners arriving at Millbay Docks, which received ships of the P&O, Union, Royal Mail, Castle and Orient Lines. Some of those must have sailed from South America, if not Darkest Peru specifically.

ON PLATFORM 1

The above-mentioned book of 1924, Through the Window (from now on TTW), begins, ‘No need to enquire which platform for the Cornish Riviera Express – Number One every time!’ So I waited for the modern-day ‘CR’ on Platform 1. This would turn out to be a mistake, but one is irresistibly drawn to number 1 at Paddington. Here are the iconic (as people did not say in 1924) three-faceted clock, the statue of Brunel and the GWR’s war memorial. The sleeper to Cornwall, the Night Riviera leaves from Platform 1, usually coming in early, waiting in a thoughtful sort of way for its 23.45 departure time, and allowing people not intending to travel to walk along its length and peer into the cosy sleeping compartments.

Most of the ‘usual offices’ of the station have been located along the wall adjoining Platform 1. Gentlemen’s and ladies’ lavatories and waiting-rooms, book stalls and dining-rooms have shuffled up and down it, all indicated by signs that used to project from the wall like signal arms. You can hire a towel and have a shower in the Gents on Platform 1, and the last time I did so the towel was clean and warm, and the shower was hot. On the down side, there were mushrooms growing in the footwell. Today, besides the Ladbrokes and McDonalds, there is a Costa Coffee and a West Cornwall Pasty Company. The McDonald’s might be considered the heir of what the Railway Magazine called ‘the first ever “Quick Lunch and Snack Bar” on a station’, which came to Platform 1 in 1935, boasting its ‘twenty-seven bar stools’. It, like the West Cornwall Pasty Company, served Cornish pasties, approved of by the Railway Magazine because they ‘bespoke the destinations of the trains’. The presence of all these retail outlets explains the absence of barriers from Platform 1.

For its first few years, before it became a 10.30 fixture, the Cornish Riviera Express left Platform 1 at 10.10, and today’s version leaves at 10.06. I arrived at ten to ten, to find no passengers and no train. I decided to kill time by entering the room off Platform 1 that was formerly the Royal Waiting Room (the GWR regularly carried Queen Victoria to and from Windsor) and is now the FGW First-Class Lounge. A red carpet, slightly ruched and stained, protruded from the entrance. I entered by flashing my first-class ticket at the receptionist. My understanding is that the Cornish Riviera Express was first-class-only in its first couple of years, and I wanted to do the trip as stylishly as possible. A notice in the waiting-room assured me that First Great Western were attempting to facilitate this: ‘We are making it our aim to make your visit here today the best it can be.’ A TV was showing twenty-four-hour rolling news with the sound turned down, but subtitles meant you couldn’t escape various foreign traumas. There was bad smog in Singapore that it was very important we knew all about. A dozen people sat in the lounge, most with complimentary coffees going cold as they either watched this TV or looked at their electronic devices. In other words, not one of them was mentally on Platform 1 at Paddington, and nor was I, because I was wandering through some Golden Age GWR engine sheds …

The GWR had acquired a reputation for speed in 1840 with the Firefly locomotive of Brunel’s engine builder, Daniel Gooch, and its sister machines, which all had incendiary names, including the fate-tempting Fireball. That reputation then fell away, Gooch’s locomotives seeming increasingly antiquated, and the broad gauge not delivering the speed boost that Brunel had promised. In 1902 George Jackson Churchward became Locomotive Superintendent of the GWR. One of his engines, City of Truro, was reported as averaging a record 100 m.p.h. on a run from Plymouth to Bristol. His engines classed Saints and Stars were fast and elegant, made missile-like by tapering boilers. In his book Great Western Railway: A History Andrew Roden writes: ‘Stars and Saints were – and by a very wide margin – the finest express passenger locomotives in Britain, as well as quite possibly all of Europe.’ In 1922 Charles Benjamin Collett took over from Churchward, and he introduced the Castles, a bigger and more powerful version of the Stars, and the bigger still Kings. A three-word litany encapsulating the romance of steam runs ‘Stars, Castles, Kings’, and this was the high-point for the GWR, which would be eclipsed in the late ’30s by the streamlined engines and trains of the London & North Eastern Railway. (The patrician GWR regarded streamlining of steam locos as a gimmick.) I settled, so to speak, on a Star. I would have an Edwardian journey, my previous two having been inter-war affairs. And so, when I stepped back out on to Platform 1, the year was, say, 1910.

The platform is now wooden, and I am inhaling the sharp tang of the Welsh coal that powered the GWR. Over on the arrival side, a tank engine is backing some recently emptied coaches out of the station, its bark reverberating under the roof glass. As it fades from sight, and from earshot, its steam lingers in the station, and I watch it slowly dissolve under the footbridge. Now the station is full of the clattering of milk churns being rearranged at the ‘country’ end of Platform 1. Some goods spill over from the goods station – fuming away a quarter of a mile west of Paddington – and enter the passenger station, having been brought in on passenger trains: milk especially, but behind the coal tang there is also the fusty smell of fruit and flowers.

Behind me on Platform 1 stands the new Empire Fruit stall, overseen by a severe-looking woman in horn-rimmed glasses, under a banner ordering, ‘Eat Empire Fruit’. Some of it – not the bananas, obviously – has come up from Cornwall that very morning. The platform is now crowded, both with passengers and porters. The porters congregate in groups around their barrows laden with suitcases, trunks, parcels wrapped in string, golf bags and gun bags. (A common offer in the Holiday Haunts directories is ‘Rabbit shooting’.) The majority are at the ‘town’ end, where the brake van will pull in. They are surrounded by some of the less trusting passengers, who want to keep an eye on their luggage for as long as possible. Some of the porters are working with pots of paste, labelling the luggage to go into the van. The GWR labels are vivid orange and yellow, showing a train emerging from a giant sunset or sunrise.

In the open air beyond the ‘country’ end of the station a hot, early summer day is developing, and the light filtering in makes some of the ladies’ white dresses slightly transparent, I note with interest, as I walk past them, touching my brown bowler hat. Unfortunately, it is the porters who are eyeing me, rather than the ladies. They’re annoyed at my independence from them, betokened by the fact that I am fit enough to be carrying my own portmanteau. The first-class return to Penzance nestling in my pocket book cost nearly £3, twice their weekly wage before tips. Beyond the end of the station, I see that our train is approaching. With all the surliness of a scene-shifter, a pannier tank engine is dragging the giant Dreadnought coaches (named after a strain of battleship currently under construction) of the Cornish Riviera Express along Platform 1. Two middle-aged ‘railwayacs’ (one of them a vicar) are rushing up to the ‘country end’, to witness Act II of the drama: to see which green engine is going to back down on to the carriages. But of course, I know it’s going to be one of the new and still rare Stars …

THE HST

I was snapped out of my reverie by an announcement: ‘Platform 8 for the Cornish Riviera Express, the 10.06 First Great Western Service for Penzance.’ I was torn between delight at the use of ‘Cornish Riviera Express’ and indignation that it should be leaving from Platform 8. I bustled over there, joining a crowd flowing towards the train, most of whom, not having been told to wait on Platform 1 by a ninety-year-old book, had been standing about on the circulating area.

There were a couple of backpackers, but the school holidays had not yet begun, and this was not a holiday crowd. Most were ‘executives’ – obviously bound not for Penzance but for the more businesslike stops on the way. Then there were some older leisure travellers, likely candidates for connections to Newquay or Torquay.

The train was what a BR loyalist might call a 125, but which the modern-day operators who are stuck with this ageing stock call ‘HST’s, standing for High-Speed Trains, that being more generic and less evocative of the nationalised railway than ’125’, which was the fast and futuristic brand name of the trains, advertising their top speeds. HSTs are like the dogged family Volvo that the children hope will break, so that a more stylish – or at least new – car can be bought. Yes, the HSTs are old – introduced in 1976 – but this attests to their durability, for which they are admired by engineers. They are reliable and strong (‘crashworthy’).

HSTs are diesels. The overhead wires at Paddington cater to the whims of the electrical Heathrow Express, allowing it to pull in at a variety of platforms. By 2017 the lines from Paddington to Bristol, Cardiff, Swansea and Newbury will all be electrified, which isn’t much to celebrate – not when you think that the 5,500 mile Trans-Siberian Railway was fully electrified a couple of years ago. The trains running over those electrified lines will be the new Intercity Expresses. But nowhere west of Bristol will be electrified. The HSTs are ‘fixed formation’. The trains can’t be uncoupled, or not without difficulty. They don’t exactly have locomotives. Their aerodynamic-looking front ends (so exciting in 1976) are called power cars.

The colour scheme of the First Great Western HSTs is mainly purple-blue with bluey-pink doors, and a transfer showing white, pale blue and fluorescent pink running straight, then becoming wavy, like an oscilloscope connected to a person who was apparently dead but then revived. I once asked a senior First Group man why. ‘It’s the First livery,’ he blandly replied. ‘You see it on First Capital Connect, and TransPennine Express.’ This was not in itself a justification, nor is the need for a degree of colour contrast to help the visually impaired, which accounts for the fluorescent yellow strip on the handles of the pink doors.

There is nothing wrong with blue as a train or engine colour. The Blue Pullman, the direct predecessor of the 125s, was blue: ‘Nanking Blue’. Mallard was blue – garter blue. The Flying Scotsman loco was briefly blue under BR. Thomas the Tank Engine was blue. But the classic colour for engines was green: ‘all the forest tints’, as one railway poet had it. The famous steam locomotives of the Great Western were green before and after the grouping of 1923. To mention some other pre-grouping railways … the engines of the North Eastern, the London & South Western, the Great Northern and the Great Central were mainly green. ‘There is a reason for it,’ writes G. G. Chapman, in his pedagogic work All about Our British Railways,

a reason that shows our early railway engineers as folk with a thought for their men. It is that green, as you probably know, is the most restful colour for the eyes. The eyes of the driver must always be running along the boiler of his engine. From the ‘spectacles’ of the cab the boiler is the first thing seen – hence the engines were painted green.

The driver of a modern train sits as the very front, so is spared whatever colour scheme his bosses have imposed on the train.

As for the interior of the First Great Western HST carriages, which are BR Mark 3s tarted up … blue, pink and grey predominate in standard. The tops of the seats have hand-holds to grab on to while walking along the gangways, and these protrude absurdly like Mickey Mouse’s ears, except that they’re a pinky red. FGW is generally dedicated to colours you can’t describe. The plusher seats in first are a sort of blue-brown-beige, resembling the Mastermind chair. They’re comfortable enough, but the armrests are solid plastic. I once met a man who had worked on designing interiors for prisons and hospitals. He told me that elusive, pastel shades were favoured. Any strong colour was a ‘statement’ that might be considered provocative. When it came to trains, or any public interior, he suspected that designers just shrugged and went for the meekest option: ‘Let’s go hospital’, as he put it.

The guard welcomed us aboard the ‘Ten-oh-six First Great Western train for Penzance’. The words ‘Cornish’, ‘Riviera’ and ‘Express’ did not feature. He listed the stops: Reading, Exeter, Newton Abbot, Plymouth, Liskeard, Bodmin, Par, St Austell, Truro, Redruth, Hayle, St Erth, Penzance. (Seventeen GWR stations between Plymouth and Penzance have been closed, perhaps penalised for having the best names, since they included Defiance Platform, Doublebois, Respryn, Burngullow.)

As the boarding scrimmage intensified, I thought more about porters. On the eve of the First World War 625,000 people worked on the railways. About a fifth of those were designated ‘porters’, but they might also be selling tickets, oiling lamps, feeding horses, cleaning wagons, assisting with shunting. In 1948, when the workforce was a quarter of a million, BR rechristened the hard core of porters – the bag carriers – Railmen. Their numbers were thinned out in the ’60s by the decline of railways and rising wages elsewhere. They were all gone by the end of the ’80s, replaced by luggage trolleys that you pushed yourself.

Privatisation brought a small revival of portering. A dozen, smartly uniformed, appeared at King’s Cross. I remember seeing one of them riding down the escalator towards the Tube. He was accompanied by three middle-aged women, and their three big suitcases. He was chatting animatedly to the women, probably in hopes of a good tip. As they descended, I thought: ‘That guy’s going to have to get his act together with those bags, or there’ll be a pile-up.’ When they reached the bottom, the first suitcase toppled over and two of the women fell onto it; then the porter and the third woman fell on top of the first two. When the Heathrow Express came to Paddington in 1998, eight porters came with it. They wore red uniforms, and badges proclaiming ‘Porter £5’, which seemed a bit steep, but apparently they would be willing to assist with bags to any destination within half an hour of Paddington. They were what used to be called ‘outside porters’. A press release boasted, ‘The smartest rail porters ever, and the politest people in the UK’. But they didn’t last long, and if you travel on the Heathrow Express today, you carry your own bags.

I settled into my seat, glad I wasn’t in standard class. On First Great Western HSTs, standard carriages are as tightly packed with high-backed seats, as in economy class on an aeroplane, and this is indeed called ‘airline seating’. Trains ought not to be cravenly mimicking planes. Some operators provide sick bags, and ask you to ‘take a minute to familiarise yourself with the safety features of this carriage’ (as if anybody ever would). A friend of mine was on a First Great Western Train approaching Bristol when the guard announced, ‘We are now commencing our approach to Bristol Temple Meads.’ As on a plane, you can’t see over the seat backs unless you stand up. The effect is of people sitting invisibly in holes, only activated as human presences when their phones ring, and they pipe up.

THE BILLIARD TABLE

As we pulled away, I settled into my mental compartment. The Dreadnought coaches of the early Riviera were built by Mr Churchward, and they had compartments and corridors. They were roomy, taking advantage of the clearances allowed by the broad gauge, even though the broad-gauge tracks themselves had gone. On the Dreadnought I would have gone for the optimum spot: corner seat, facing. On the HST I tried to block out the phone conversation of the man behind. It wasn’t hard, since he spoke softly in Arabic.

In the old days the departing passenger would see on the right what looked like a factory with the words ‘Paddington Goods Stn.’ in dirty white lettering. The goods station closed in the early ’70s; a bland tower block called Sheldon Square stands on the site. We passed Royal Oak Underground station, which is not underground, and stands in the middle of wilderness of railway lines with the Westway rearing up behind. With its pretty, valanced canopy, Royal Oak looks like what it is: a station built in countryside, then overwhelmed by the city. It is on the Hammersmith & City line, a spin-off from the Metropolitan Railway. The GWR was happy to let the Underground soak up the growing demand for commuter services in west London, which is not as magnanimous as it sounds, since the GWR had a stake in the Metropolitan.

We approached Old Oak Common train depot, also on the right. The blue trains of First Great Western stood in orderly rows, because they are stored and maintained there just as the trains of the GWR were. The only structure readily apparent is a grey hangar. In BR days Old Oak Common was the place where HSTs were maintained, and the small fleet of trains that were the forerunners of the HST: the Blue Pullman. In 1960 car and plane use between Scotland and London was rising fast, and the Pullman company, recently acquired by BR, was pitched into the fight. It was a bit like reaching for a beautiful, bejewelled sword to combat an opponent with a machine gun. The Blue Pullmans anticipated the HSTs in that they were built for speed, had sloping fronts and were fixed-formation, meaning they were generally kept coupled together as single units. The interiors were plush with red or powder-blue seating, and Japanese motifs. In 1960 British Transport Films made a documentary promoting the new trains. Businessmen were shown doing all the things you couldn’t do in a car, like reading the Financial Times while eating lobster. There are many close-ups of the vast gins and tonics being served by the white-coated attendants. The Blue Pullmans were stylish but unreliable. By the early ’70s their white-coated attendants and supplementary charges seemed as quaint as those on the other Pullman services expiring at the time. They were mothballed in 1973.

Old Oak Common is about to become famous as a railway hub, junction of Crossrail and High Speed 2. At least, that is the plan at the time of writing. There is a mayoral scheme to create a mini-Manhattan (another one) on the site. In other words, something not nearly as interesting to look at from a passing train as the Old Oak Common of GWR days, with its green locos, its loco shed, coaling station, ash shelter, coppersmith’s shop, refuse destructor, all coming and going under a shifting cloud of smoke and steam.

To the right, I kept seeing small clusters of workmen in bright orange. They were plotting the arrival of Crossrail, which will come from Reading and go underground just before Royal Oak station. Soon they will be many more men, a moving sea of orange.

‘High-vis’ clothing originated on the railways. Some time in the early 1930s a young American called Robert C. Switzer suffered a head injury while working in a Californian railyard, and he was required to convalesce in a darkened room. Switzer, who was trained in chemistry, began experimenting with fluorescent materials in his gloomy confinement, which led on to his invention of a fluorescent paint that he called DayGlo. He covered his wife’s wedding dress in the stuff, and so the first high-visibility clothing was made.

It is likely that high-visibility clothing had its first industrial application on the railways of Britain. In July 1964, the Railway Magazine reported that fifteen platelayers working on the Pollokshields to Eglinton Street line in the Scottish Region of BR had been issued with ‘a new kind of luminous safety jacket which shines in half-light conditions’. In the absence of a photograph, the magazine strained to explain this bizarre phenomenon to its readers. The jackets, ‘made from a fluorescent orange plastic material’, were ‘similar in appearance to old fashioned ships’ lifejackets’. The writer speculated that these ‘human fire-fly jackets may be adopted throughout British Railways.’

High visibility clothing received its decisive boost with the Health and Safety at Work Act of 1974. Employers are required to remove hazards if possible or guard against them if not, and there’s no cheaper way of guarding against hazards than to dole out high-visibility vests, which can be bought for about £1 each wholesale.

Once adopted, the vests can’t be relinquished, because that would smack of irresponsibility. If you speak to sellers of high-visibility clothing, they will tell you, in a bored tone, as though the point were hardly worth making, that sales go up every year. Children on school trips wear them. My postman wears a high-visibility vest, as do police on the beat – and theirs are stab-proof, so they are garments designed both to attract and repel. Who could ever speak out against high-visibility clothing? You won’t catch me doing it. True, Edwardian track gangers, like all Edwardian men, wore dark suits and ties that gave them a dusky, cowboyish elegance; but they didn’t stand out. In The Country Railway David St John Thomas writes that track gangers ‘had the highest accident rate among all railwaymen, and on scarcely a mile of track in Britain has a ganger not been run down by an unexpected train, its approach often drowned by a gale’.

We were accelerating rapidly. The early stage of the main line from Paddington was known as ‘Brunel’s billiard table’ because it was flat, the line following the valley of the Thames. In effect, our HST was being driven by the ghost of the diminutive young man – because Brunel was always a young man – whose remains lie in Kensal Green cemetery somewhere not very far to the right of our speeding train. Among the interred, TTW name-checks ‘Thackeray, Leigh Hunt and other famous people’ – no mention of Brunel, the man who built the railway that forms the subject of the book. Perhaps the author did not want to admit Brunel’s mortality, but the book consistently ignores Brunel, as we will see. Perhaps, in 1924, the broad gauge was still unforgiven; or maybe Brunel was regarded as too embarrassingly primitive for the first-class passengers of the Riviera Express, with his dusty boots, comical stove-pipe hat and incessant cheroot. Brunel died at the age of fifty-three, on 15 September 1859. Steven Brindle’s book Paddington Station: Its History and Architecture includes a haunting photograph of his office at 18 Duke Street, taken a few days later. The office is beautifully wide and rangy. Everything is in the ‘broad gauge’. Framed photographs are propped on the wide mantelpiece. No time to hang them up, you see. It is sparsely furnished. A globe, a calendar, a clock are the salient objects.

We thundered through Southall. A man sitting near me was saying, in a clipped voice, ‘I was speaking to the Admiral.’ TTW speaks of the ‘dash of naval uniform’ generally to be seen at Paddington – men coming from or going to Plymouth. So I hoped this man was in the Navy. He looked the part: trim, with short grey hair. He was not in uniform, but I had been told that forces personnel prefer not to go uniformed on trains, and certainly not in large numbers. It is a security risk.

We thundered through Hayes & Harlington station, junction – via a 4-mile tunnel – for Heathrow. Hayes & Harlington is served by Heathrow Connect, the slow shuttle to Heathrow, whose every train to Paddington is fated to be overtaken by the Heathrow Express.

Of Hayes & Harlington TTW notes: ‘the enormous buildings in which HMV gramophones are made stand close to the station.’ In 1931 the site was taken over and expanded by EMI. Soon afterwards, a man called Alan Blumlein climbed on to the roof of the factory, which incorporated a research laboratory. He began recording and filming the trains leaving Hayes station. The idea was to capture the sound of their puffing going away into the distance (‘barking’, the railway-acs call it). The resulting film and soundtrack, ‘Trains from Hayes Station’, is not publicly available as far as I know. If it was made in the late morning, then the Cornish Riviera Express would have been captured. All Beatles records were marked ‘Manufactured in Hayes’. Today the complex stands empty and half derelict, but it is about to redeveloped.

Between West Drayton and Iver the M25 is carried over the line by a bridge that seems negligible from a hundred-mile-an-hour train. TTW was more concerned with the crossing over the River Colne, ‘which marks the frontier between Middlesex and Buckinghamshire. We are well clear of London now.’ That is still more or less still true, thanks to the Green Belt.

We went through Slough, too fast to make out the station signs. Reading TTW, you can see the beginning of the process that would lead, in 1937, to John Betjeman’s poem beginning ‘Come, friendly bombs, and fall on Slough!’: ‘Slough is an old country town which has been modernised a good deal in recent years. On either side of the line is the Slough trading estate, occupying the site of the motor transport “dump” which was established during the latter part of the War.’ Later, real rather than rhetorical bombs fell on Slough, and Betjeman regretted writing the poem. He tried to emphasise that it was the new ‘trading estates’ he objected to rather than the town in particular, but Slough apparently doesn’t care, because the clearest indication of the town to passing trains is a giant sign reading ‘Slough Trading Estate’.

Before Maidenhead, 24 miles from London, a quick thrum indicated that we had passed over Maidenhead Railway Bridge, which was built by Brunel, and kept low so there should be no hump in the billiard table. It was typically audacious. Its low brick arches were the widest ever built at the time, and the directors of the GWR did not trust them. They thought they were too low, and would collapse, so Brunel built wooden supports in the Thames beneath. But the wooden supports were not needed, as he knew perfectly well, and as he was proved when they were washed away.

J. M. W. Turner stuck his head out of the window while going over the bridge, and found the experience exhilarating. In 1844 he painted Rain, Steam and Speed – the Great Western Railway, showing a loco of the Firefly class speeding over the bridge. The painting is in the National Gallery, and I was nearly ejected from there when I pointed out to my sons the tiny hare fleeing from the engine in the bottom right-hand corner. The security guard thought I was going to touch the painting. The symbolism of the hare is ambiguous. It might represent the threat to nature from the trains; or it might be a testament to the speed of the engine. It was feared that the overhead wires for the coming electrification of the Great Western main line – and for Crossrail – will spoil the elegance of the bridge but I am assured that Network Rail have liaised closely with English Heritage to design the most delicate and unobtrusive ‘overhead’. Maidenhead was lucky with its bridges. Pevsner called the adjacent road bridge, which has thirteen spans, ‘this beautiful piece of 1772’. From our fast train it appeared momentarily to the right: almost subliminal, like a single frame in a period film.

We raced through a high cutting: Sonning Cutting, by name. On Christmas Eve 1844 a train crashed into a landslip here; eight people ‘of the poorer class’ died when third-class carriages at the front of the train were crushed by goods wagons behind. The inquest found ‘great neglect’ on the part of the company, so there is no mention of it in TTW, only a sketch of an engine puffing peacefully through the cutting.

We were closing in on Reading. The big landmarks on the station approach were always the Huntley & Palmer biscuit factory and Reading Gaol. Only the latter survives, currently as a Young Offenders’ Institution but about to close. The prison is modelled on the Eastern State Penitentiary in Philadelphia, where Charles Tyson Yerkes, who built much of the London Underground, had been imprisoned for fraud. The prisoners used to know Reading Gaol as ‘the biscuit factory’ after the adjacent premises of Huntley & Palmer, which in the 1930s were served by 7½ miles of railway siding, and which were flattened between the mid-’70s and the mid-’90s. Huntley & Palmer liked to boast that it had supplied the biscuits to Captain Scott for his Antarctic expedition. Unfortunately, of course, he ran out towards the end. Until the late 1960s, the firm also supplied small tins of biscuits (‘Huntley & Palmer’s Railway Assortment’) to first-class diners on trains that would be running past their factory. The biscuits came with a promotional leaflet, telling passengers exactly where to look out for the factory.

We stopped at Reading, which the Cornish Riviera Express did not. Reading is a big interchange. Five routes come together there, and a reorganisation of the station is attempting to cease what had been a bottleneck. It will also be the western terminus of Crossrail. A suntanned, late middle-aged couple boarded our carriage. They evidently knew another, younger couple already in the carriage. The question came from the younger couple: ‘Oh hello, where’ve you two been?’ to which the female half of the older couple answered: ‘Mexico – just landed at Heathrow.’

‘What was it like?’

‘Really, really hot.’

I felt embarrassed on behalf of the Cornish Riviera, whose main meteorological advantage over the rest of Britain was that it was slightly milder in winter.

WHITE HORSES

After Reading we diverged left. Trains to the West Country used to bear right, heading for Bristol and the ‘Great Way Round’. A couple a day still go that way. The ‘new’ route, opened in 1906, cuts the corner to Taunton. It’s known as the Berks & Hants cut-off, but it’s nowhere near Hants.

An affable ‘customer host’ came up and presented me with the Travelling Chef menu. Yes, the Travelling Chef – an actual person – was on board, and, as a first-class passenger, I could have the food brought to my seat rather than having to walk up and order it from the counter of the Express Café. I looked at the menu. I was quite tempted by The Great Westerner: ‘Choice of fried, scrambled or poached egg with sweetcure smoked Wiltshire back bacon, Cumberland sausages, button mushrooms, tomato and Heinz baked beans with a choice of buttered white or malted bloomer toast.’ The man across the aisle from me was having a toasted bacon sandwich, brought without asking. It was his ‘usual’, and it smelt good. The trouble was the time. I had already had breakfast, and I put it to the customer host that it was a bit early for lunch.

‘It’s not a lunch menu, sir,’ he said. ‘It’s an all-day menu.’ Actually, it was more like a half-morning menu, since I’d only just heard about it, and the Travelling Chef would be ceasing operations at Exeter, where we were scheduled to arrive at mid-day. In other words, the Travelling Chef would be shutting up shop at lunchtime. But to give First Great Western credit, they do operate the last remaining dining cars or British trains. They are available on lunchtime (the correct time for lunch) and evening services between Paddington and Plymouth, although not on the Riviera Express. They are open to standard- or first-class passengers, but only first-class ticket-holders can book a seat in advance. The menu features a lot of fish, as was traditional on the railways. (Fish is quick to prepare, and the railways carried a lot of it.) I accepted a complimentary coffee from the customer host, as we began flashing through verdant Berkshire, Wiltshire and Somerset. ‘Talk about heat,’ the Mexico returnees were saying. ‘I mean, it was really hot.’

Pewsey – where the rolling Marlborough Downs give way to Wiltshire – came and went. Then came the bleaker, denuded Salisbury Plain, haunted by prehistoric ghosts: long barrows, few trees, no people to be seen … and sky momentarily darkening. This is not the cosy sort of landscape that railway modellers make out of papier mâché.

The strangely elongated Westbury white horse came into view to the left, It is the oldest of several white horses in Wiltshire, but it is not known how old. It might be a commemoration of King Alfred, who was born near Uffington in Oxfordshire, where there is another, definitely older, white horse, which gives its name to a locality with a railway resonance to some of us: the Vale of White Horse. The Vale’s pretty stations on the GWR main line between Didcot and Swindon were closed by Beeching in the ’60s, but they survive in 1/76 scale at the Pendon Museum in Long Wittenham, Oxfordshire …

The museum was founded by Roye England, who died in 1995, and who was the finest railway modeller the world has ever known. A model of Roye himself appears on the layout, the figure resembling a tiny Charles Hawtrey, or a superannuated boy scout. It was made by a woman, one of the team of crack modellers schooled by Roye, and when he saw the figure, he peevishly observed: ‘But the socks are wrong, aren’t they? They’re knee-length, and I only ever wear ankle-length.’ There spoke a man of such extreme fastidiousness that he once spent six years making a model of a country pub in the Vale, far longer than it took to build the seventy-six times larger original. But England had duplicated every quirk of brickwork and thatch. He would spend days modelling a single flower. Hollyhocks were made using a cat’s whisker, or the spine of a bird’s feather.

Roye England was born in Perth, Australia, in 1906. The focus of his young life was The Wonder Book of Railways. One day, ‘when everyone was out’, he built a Meccano model of the Forth Rail Bridge in the family sitting-room. It was sixteen feet long. In 1925 he sailed for the Mother Country, docking at Plymouth and travelling to Paddington in the chocolate and cream embrace of the Great Western, whose trains he found ‘more beautiful than I had ever dared picture’. On arriving in London, he began ‘really seeing the sights’: Victoria station, Waterloo station, Euston station. He went to stay with a curate friend in the Vale, and fell in love with the landscape and the railway. He began photographing and measuring, plotting the miniaturisation of this ‘pageant that went by in the high noon of steam’. As he tramped the Vale – or traversed it on his Triumph motor bike – he wore, aside from the ankle socks, hiking boots, shorts, raincoat and beret. He had a limited diet: boiled eggs, black bananas and Crunchie bars. Railway modelling, he believed, was ‘something for which I had been set apart. It was no mere hobby; it was a vocation.’ He conceded that he was better at the line-side scenes than the actual trains. ‘Card,’ he wrote, ‘that is my medium.’ By scratching away at the right sort of cardboard, he could create the texture of weathered brick or stone, and it became imperative that he get on with doing so as the old Vale changed. ‘One by one the chalk roads were being tarred over. Here and there a length of wire replaced a falling hedge … Concrete had come in as well.’

But this mission conflicted with another possible vocation: for the priesthood. Roye England was a devout Christian, who took Communion every day. He eventually tried to reconcile the two by forming the Guild of St Aidan, whose members would practise railway modelling in a somehow Christian way while corresponding in Esperanto (‘a beautiful language, logical, efficient, easy to learn’). The Guild was inaugurated with a specially written collect, read by Roye to the small congregation of a church at Coalpit Heath, Gloucestershire, on 31 August 1939, St Aidan’s Day. The next day Hitler invaded Poland. Roye could immediately see the terrible implication: supplies of decent cardboard would be jeopardised. He took the train to Bristol, where he bought a vast amount of good cardboard for £10.

During the war he couldn’t get much modelling done. As a conscientious objector, he was put to agricultural labouring. There were many vicissitudes over the next forty years. He employed a female secretary for the Guild correspondence, but ‘Without the least warning, she became amorous. I had to terminate her services.’ He built what would become the museum in Long Wittenham, but was swindled out of ownership of some neighbouring land. He acquired a 38-foot-high old Great Western semaphore signal (the Up Main Distant from Culham) and erected it outside the museum. But he had to take it down again when planning permission was refused. As his private income dwindled, he attempted to fund the museum and its slowly expanding layout by running a youth hostel in Long Wittenham. The Silverwing Cycling Club were loyal clients, but the venture didn’t pay. He also worked for a stint at the Morris factory in Oxford, even though he hated cars just as much as Charles Dickens had hated trains. And just as Dickens’s enmity was confirmed when he was involved in a near-fatal train crash, so Roye England was badly injured when, cycling back from church in 1986, he was knocked off his bike by a car. He never fully recovered, but the Pendon Museum accumulated followers and co-modellers, determined to go forward with Roye into the past. It is now established as a charitable foundation, and is open on Saturday and Sunday afternoons, and some Wednesdays. The highlight of any visit is when the lights are dimmed and an illuminated night train comes through the Vale.

The career of Roye England is a reminder that religion and railways go together. The connections have often been plotted: the stations are cathedrals, and for a long time the smaller ones tended to close down, like churches. The timetable is the Bible, and the steam was incense. A disproportionate number of the early ‘railwayacs’ were clergymen, partly because they had time.

Among the number of devout railwaymen is Cecil J. Allen, who declined a chance to travel behind Mallard on its record-breaking run in 1938, because it was scheduled for a Sunday. The man who built Mallard, Sir Nigel Gresley, came from four generations of rectors. Bishop Eric Treacy was ‘the railway bishop’, and he died at Appleby station while photographing the last steam locomotive built for BR, Evening Star. Treacy’s see was that of Wakefield, but the railway–church connection was particularly strong in the territory of God’s Own Railway. Aside from Roye England, there was William Temple, Christian socialist and Archbishop of Canterbury in the Second World War, who apparently knew Bradshaw off by heart. He was born in Exeter. Canon Victor Lorenzo White-church, author of railway detective stories, was chaplain to the bishop of Oxford. The Revd Wilbert Awdry, creator of Thomas the Tank Engine, grew up in a house called Journey’s End, near the west end of Box Hill Tunnel, on the Great Western main line. Only the GWR was confident, and camp, enough to put a model of a bishop’s mitre on the front of an engine and call the train – in letters suggesting the involvement of a medieval monk – the Cathedrals Express because it connected (not very quickly) the cathedral cities of London, Oxford, Worcester and Hereford.

One morning in the late ’70s, David Maidment, a lifelong Methodist, and employee of British Rail Western Region, was waiting for a train to Paddington at Maidenhead. He was on his way to work. Normally, he commuted from Beaconsfield, but he had gone to Maidenhead because ‘it had a railway model shop that sold Crownline paints for detailing models’. He was reading the theological novel Mr God, This is Anna, and he had come to a passage where the precocious six-year-old Anna stresses the importance of not being ‘afraid of life’. In terms of his own life, the message seemed to be that Mr Maidment should stop worrying about dogma and ‘get on with life working to the humanitarian and compassionate demands of the person of Jesus as recorded in the Gospels’. He was confirmed in this thought by an epiphany that occurred on the platform. Whereas Mr Maidment had been expecting a humble diesel multiple unit, the train that pulled in for him was loco-hauled, pulled by a Class 50 diesel engine named, like the carriages of our Edwardian Riviera, Dreadnought. (Dread nothing, you see.) David Maidment OBE would go on to found the Railway Children charity, which has raised millions to help street children around the world, who tend to congregate around big railway termini.

‘Iguanas just wandering around in the jungle,’ the Mexico people were saying. ‘Well, why not? It’s their jungle.’ The naval man was saying, ‘I’m in Switzerland next Tuesday’, which rather suggested he wasn’t a naval man after all.

We went fast through Westbury. The Edwardian Riviera would have done the same, but this is the first of the places where it would have slipped a coach. That is, a coach would have been uncoupled while the train was in motion. It is self-evident, I hope, that the first coach to be slipped would be the one at the back. There was no gangway connection between one slip coach and another, or between any slip coach and the rest of the train. That way, a person who just happened to be walking the length of the train would not find themselves slipped. Slip coaches would be composite, a little world of their own, or a train within a train, with first and other classes, a lavatory and a control unit, where a special slip guard, who was something between a guard and a driver, presided. The slip coach was connected to the rest of the train by a special hinged coupling retained by a wedge. At the right moment, the slip guard pulled a lever to withdraw this wedge. He then applied the brakes of the slipped coach. He also had at his command a bull horn, to warn anyone who might have strayed on to the tracks, because a slipped coach would move silently on the inherited momentum of the train.

The slipped coach would usually be collected by a shunting engine, like a bone thrown to a dog, and taken to the right platform or carried forward along a branch line. The driver of the actual train had to remember not to make an emergency or unscheduled stop immediately after the slipping, because in that case the slipped carriage would smash into the carriage from which it had just been slipped. Slip coaches have been a gift to thriller writers (who usually haven’t made much of it). See The Slip Coach Mystery, by Canon Whitechurch (1898), or then again The Mystery of the Slip Coach, by Sapper (1933). Bradshaw did not go out of its way to finesse the matter. There was the word ‘slip’, followed by a not very reassuring footnote: ‘The carriage is detached. The train does not stop.’

According to Cecil Allen, slipping is ‘confined entirely to the British Isles’, and ‘far and away ahead of all other lines’ for slipping was the GWR … ‘on which no less than 67 slips are detached daily’. (Next came the Great Eastern, with twenty-six slips.) The challenge, for anyone being slipped for the first time, would be to remain blasé about it. In The Railway Journeys of My Childhood (1963), Brigadier John Faviell describes being slipped from a GWR train before the First World War. Faviell was a schoolboy at the time, heading, on the Worcester express, from Paddington to his school at Cheltenham:

I knew we were to be slipped at Kingham; so to other passengers’ disgust and discomfort, I insisted on struggling to the window as we approached the station. The brakes of our carriage were put on very hard; and the rest of the train accelerated briskly. Then after this initial breaking our carriage continued slowly and gently into Kingham station while the express rocketed away in the distance. The carriage was collected by a tank engine which then crossed the main grain of the Cotswolds, sweating and puffing … Stow-on-the-Wold, Bourton-onthe-Water, Notgrove, Andoversford, Charlton Kings, Cheltenham.

Slipping wasn’t done in reverse. No train ever collected a carriage while on the move, although I bet Brunel could have thought of a way. Slipping faded after the war, and the last carriage was slipped on the Western Region of BR, at Bicester North on 10 September 1960.

We passed through Frome – low hills, copses, broken barns, lonely horses, all under a sunny but slightly milky sky. Between Castle Cary and Taunton is Somerton Tunnel, and we now went through it. This took only forty-five seconds, but a murder occurred on the Cornish Riviera Express while it was in this tunnel. A fictional murder, I mean – in The Cornish Riviera Mystery (1939), by John Rowland. We will be returning to this work. We came to Taunton, where the Express would have slipped another coach. From Taunton the West Somerset Railway extends 20 miles to Minehead along a branch that Dr Beeching thought he’d closed. It is the longest preserved railway in Britain. Beeching seemed to have it in for Somerset, and today none of its main attractions – Wells, Glastonbury, Burnham-on-Sea – is on the railway.

The train guard came up to inspect my ticket. I asked him why he didn’t refer to ‘the Cornish Riviera Express’ in his announcements, and he produced what he called his ‘working diagram, my worksheet if you like. There’s no mention here of the Cornish Riviera. To be quite honest with you, ninety-nine per cent of people want the train to run on time, and they don’t give a monkey’s what it’s called.’ Also, he had been told to cut back on announcements: ‘People have a low attention span … less is more.’ I learned from a typically well-informed column by that railway sage Christian Wolmar that reminders about ‘personal belongings’ and ‘take a moment to familiarise yourself with the safety features’ are required by Transec, the government’s transport security committee, and can’t be dispensed with. So it is the lighter stuff that must go. In Transec’s climate of fear, it would seem frivolous to suggest something along the lines of ‘A warm welcome to the Cornish Riviera Express.’

We were now climbing Wellington Bank, coming down which Churchward’s engine City of Truro may have touched 102 m.p.h. on 9 May 1904 while pulling the Ocean Mails Special from Plymouth to Paddington, in which case it would have been the first steam locomotive to reach 100 m.p.h. It was unofficially timed at that speed by a Railway Magazine journalist. The GWR did not claim the record, for fear of seeming reckless. The feat was brushed further under the carpet in 1906, when a Plymouth–Waterloo boat train of the LSWR crashed at Salisbury, probably because the driver was trying to match the faster timings between the West Country and London that had become available to the GWR by the opening of the Berks & Hants cut-off. Twenty-eight people were killed. In 1922 the company admitted the alleged speed, but an experimental electrical railcar had reached 126 m.p.h. near Berlin in 1903.

THE SEA WALL

We entered Devon or, as TTW calls it, ‘Glorious Devon’ through the Whiteball Tunnel, and at 12.08 we stopped at Exeter St David’s, where we exchanged executives (including the man who was probably not a naval officer) for passengers who were either older or younger, and not so prosperous-looking. Exeter St David’s is a pretty station: airily blue and white, the balustrades of the staircases shaped like locomotive connecting rods.

The London & South Western Railway tried to compete with the GWR in the West Country, and the LSWR trains from Waterloo used Exeter Central, which still serves Waterloo trains. But LSWR trains also called at St David’s on their way to the company’s West Country strongholds. The layout at Exeter St David’s was such that LSWR trains heading west and away from London pulled out of the station in the same direction as those of the GWR heading east and towards London. As a volunteer at the GWR Museum at the Didcot Railway Centre took great satisfaction in explaining to me: ‘If the engines of the LSWR and the GWR were facing the same way, you knew they were going in opposite directions.’

Did the LSWR have an equivalent to the Cornish Riviera Express on its route west? Yes. It was called the Atlantic Coast Express – ACE for short – and it lasted between 1926 and 1964. The ACE ran from Waterloo, and constantly subdivided as it approached north Cornwall. It was the brainchild of that pioneer of PR John Elliot, of the Southern Railway. He sought a name by running a competition in the Southern Railway Magazine.

In An Illustrated History of the Atlantic Coast Express, John Scott-Morgan recounts how the competition was won by Frederick Rowland, who worked for the Southern at Waterloo. His prize was 3 guineas. ‘The runners up, from Nine Elms and Richmond, were each consoled with a paperweight in the form of a model King Arthur 4–6-0.’ Frederick Rowland was a guard based at Waterloo, but he was originally from Devon, and he may have regarded his success in naming a Devon-bound train as an affirmation of his Devonian identity. A year later he moved back there, becoming based at a little station called Torrington. On Friday 9 September 1932 he slipped on to the track at the next station along the line, Marland, while supervising the shunting of a goods train. A wagon ran over his legs and, as he lay dying, he heroically called up to the driver, ‘It was no fault of yours, Jack!’ The name Atlantic Coast Express lives on, designating some First Great Western services to Newquay, and it is the name used by First Group for its X9 bus route from Exeter to Bude. ‘These,’ says John Scott-Morgan, form ‘a fitting memorial to Frederick Rowland.’

Incidentally, the LSWR trains running west of Exeter went to Plymouth via Okehampton and Tavistock; there were also branches to Bude and Padstow. These lines were nicknamed ‘the withered arm’, and would be lopped off by Beeching, so trains from Waterloo now go no further west than Exeter St David’s.

On our HST, a crew change occurred at Exeter, and the new people all had strong West Country accents. (‘All right, honey?’ ‘You look really well, chick.’) On the Riviera Express the restaurant car would come into play after Exeter, and there was no shortage of these. Andrew Roden writes of whole trains of restaurant cars being taken west from London in the inter-war summers to be attached to the ‘up’ services. After Exeter the steward from the luncheon car would walk the length of the train, opening compartment doors and perhaps tinkling a bell to announce the service of lunch. In The Cornish Riviera Mystery (1939) the two principals are asked by the waiter on reaching the luncheon car, ‘Usual lunch, gentlemen?’

‘What is the usual lunch?’

‘Tomato soup, sole and fried potatoes, apple tart and cream.’

‘I think that will do, don’t you?’

In 1928 the Great Western boasted that lunch on the Riviera cost 3s., while pointing out that the lunch on the Canadian Pacific Railway cost 7s. 11d., as if it was a toss-up for most punters whether to travel on the one railway or the other. In his memoir Gone with Regret (1961) George Behrend writes of the same Riviera, ‘Do not ask why the luncheon fish was invariably a nice piece of turbot. It always was …’ He speaks of white napery and ‘silverine cutlery, all emblazoned with the company crest’. In 2013 I took out my prawn sandwiches, crisps and fruit smoothie, bought from Marks and Spencer’s at Paddington.

Pulling away from Exeter, we embarked on the most scenic part of the route: the sea wall (two words probably more familiar to the public than when I made my trip; see below). The sea wall proper is at Dawlish, but the term is also used to describe the whole stretch from Exeter to Newton Abbot. TTW recommended that passengers sit on the left, so I moved to that side, waking a late middle-aged man in the process. We began running south along the edge of the Exe estuary, so close that we seemed to be on top of the mild blue water. Then came Dawlish Warren, and we began to skirt the actual sea. Brunel’s fast, flat line is deemed too close to the water. A diversion inland was pencilled in for 1939, but the war intervened. The Railway Magazine seemed relieved: ‘A journey from Exeter to Teignmouth at high tide during a severe gale can still provide an impressive spectacle of raging waters and windblown rain clouds that it is still worth coming miles to see.’ It reported that the GWR had set up a machine on the low red cliffs above Dawlish to monitor the speed of the wind eroding the dunes protecting the sea wall. I wonder if it’s still there, a few rusted shards of metal, most of it blown away.

10. The Cornish Riviera Express running along the Dawlish sea wall in September 1928. It is said the passengers hoped for delays on this stretch so they could savour the view.

At Dawlish the train is almost on the beach. Instead of signals by the side of the track, there are the masts of boats. This is the Number One photo opportunity on the railways of Britain. The cover of TTW itself shows a King class locomotive on this stretch. The late middle-aged man was grinning. ‘I grew up in the Midlands, and we used to come here for our holidays in the Fifties. I would be sitting there,’ and he indicated the sea wall just as we went into the first of the five quick tunnels in the cliff that follow, ‘and so I’d be facing the trains, while my parents would be sitting on the beach facing the sea. Some of the trains would be delayed there, and it was the one delay that people used to love. But if the sea was rough, and the windows were open, you could get soaked.’

The sea was very rough in early February 2014, and an 80-metre stretch of the sea wall, corresponding perfectly to the photo-opportunity stretch, was destroyed. Reading about this, I learned that the wind machine on the cliff has been superseded by sensors on Network Rail buoys floating offshore, which had predicted trouble, and which must be among the few remnants of our railways’ involvement with the sea. The storm left the track hanging in a void, like a hammock. The hanging track was bowed, like my Hornby double-O track when, aged nine or so, I would try to make a bridge by using two books placed a foot apart. The whole of the country west of Dawlish was cut off from the railway network. Journalists discovered the plans for the inland diversion, and demanded to know why it hadn’t been built, or why the ‘withered arm’ had been cut off, denying the West Country an alternative route. At the time of writing the sea wall has been fixed, and if there are plans to replace it, they are proceeding very quietly behind the scenes.

After our progress through the five cliff tunnels of the Dawlish Warren, beautifully described by Benedict Le Vay as being like ‘a needle heading through gathered cloth’, we came to Teignmouth, described in TTW as ‘a highly picturesque seaside resort as well as a seaport in a small way of business’. (The latter claim no longer stands.) We continued by the water, skirting the River Teign, in complete harmony with the small sailing boats, and then we came to Newton Abbot, where we stopped, and our HST emptied out considerably. Those alighting were mainly retirees. Nothing against Newton Abbot, but I assumed they would be changing for the branch (‘The Riviera Line’) to the railway-made resort, and retirement town, of Torquay.

We passed through Totnes, from where the preserved South Devon Railway goes through the Dart Valley to Buck-fastleigh. The SDR station is visible to the right from the main line. It is beautifully kept, and painted in the intriguingly unambitious Great Western station colours of ‘light stone and dark stone’, two shades of greyish brown. We rolled through undulating country, in cuttings for much of the time, but we would periodically surface to see sundappled small fields. At five past one we came to Plymouth, where, writes the author of TTW, ‘we actually stop!’, whereas our HST had already stopped four times.

For most of the life of the Cornish Riviera Express this, the main station at Plymouth, was called Plymouth North Road. It was rebuilt, and opened as plain Plymouth in 1962. It is a long, grey tin-roofed shack. An equally grey seagull was flying lazily through it. No Castle or King locomotive ever stood next to the famously nondescript Intercity House which abuts the station, but we must cut Plymouth some slack, the town having been so badly bombed in the war. An article on the railways of Plymouth in British Railways Illustrated, from September 1995, begins despairingly: ‘the subject is far too vast to deal with in a single article.’ There were a multiplicity of stations in Plymouth, mainly because both the LSWR and the GWR went there. Also it was a naval base, a civilian port and a shipbuilding centre, so branches were needed for the docks, and it should be remembered that what is now Plymouth was three towns until 1914, the largest two being Plymouth itself and Devonport. Even today there are six stations in Plymouth.

We went through Devonport, Dockyard and Keyham, after which a picturesque branch skirting the Tamar and heading to Gunnislake diverges. This is a Community Rail line, one of half a dozen under the auspices of the Devon and Cornwall Rail Partnership.

The Community Rail movement was founded in the early 1990s by Professor Paul Salveson, that namer of trains mentioned in the Introduction. A Community Railway line is formed of contracts between the train operator, the local authority and other stakeholders. It’s not meant to be a way of getting lay people to do the train operator’s job, since the operator is supposed to match funding that comes from outside. Under the auspices of Community Rail, stations might be publicised, repainted, their gardens tended and litter picked. Shops or other businesses might be opened along the line, and what were once called excursions might be mounted, often in the form of ‘ale trails’. Community Rail saved the branch lines of Cornwall, and traffic on those lines has doubled in the past ten years. Apart from the Tamar line, there is the Liskeard–Looe, the Par–Newquay (‘The Atlantic Coast Line’), Truro–Falmouth (‘The Maritime Line’), and Penzance–St Ives. The partnership also covers one line in Devon: the Tarka Line, from Exeter to Barnstaple.

Professor Salveson once spoke to me of stations on a rural branch being happily interdependent, ‘like pearls on a string’, and of the importance as a community hub of the station itself, in tandem with the nearby railway inn. The country station has been romanticised in films such as Oh Mr Porter, The Titfield Thunderbolt and The Railway Children. It was a place not just to catch a train but also to collect or despatch a parcel or a basket of racing pigeons, to check the time, send a telegram, meet an incoming guest or see one off. As David St John Thomas writes in his book The Country Railway, ‘In most areas for at least two full generations all important comings and goings were by train … The pair of rails disappearing over the horizon stood for progress, disaster, the major changes in life: the route to Covent Garden and Ypres.’

The country station was more like a farm than a factory. Horses and cattle were frequently penned near by; the stationmaster tended his garden; there’d be nesting boxes and perhaps a horseshoe (for luck) on the signal box. It is a romantic vision that cannot be entirely dispelled by the introduction of hard fact. Yes, the railway was a focus for a community. But it also brought cheaper commodities, the possibility of shopping further afield or by mail order; and so the coming of the railway meant death to some local businesses.

The smaller Cornish stations on the route of Riviera, including those now closed, might have amused the first-class passenger. They had an ambivalent status: country stations on a main line. The Riviera ambled through so slowly that the lad porters wouldn’t have bothered to tell passengers to stand back. But the stationmaster probably would have put his gold braided cap on and watched it go by – like the opposite of a funeral. The traveller would have seen the local territory summed up in that station, from the nature of produce in the goods yard, the names painted on the private-owner wagons being shunted in the background, the flora of the stationmaster’s garden. At those small stations where the Riviera did stop, there’d have been an interesting assortment of vehicles waiting in the station yard, reflecting a cross-section of the populace: a chauffeur in a Bentley; respectable carriages, donkey carts, perhaps a charabanc for some club or association, or, scanning the third-class carriages, a young man who’d arrived at the station on a bike while pushing another alongside, to be ridden by the friend he was meeting. In 1906, there might have been a young man who’d done the same with two horses.

OVER THE BRIDGE

We rolled through St Budeaux Ferry Road, another of those halts immediately after Plymouth station that seem designed to increased anticipation of the coming thrill: the crossing of the Tamar on Brunel’s Royal Albert Bridge. The railway – just one line – is carried on brick piers over the river. The train then passes through a wrought-iron cradle that is lenticular (eye-shaped); then comes the diminuendo of the piers on the other side. The iron tubes forming the tops of the cradles, or the tops of the ‘eyes’, serve two purposes. The trusses holding up the track-bed hang from them. They also brace the bridge, stop it collapsing in on itself. Its economical structure makes the bridge seem elegant and airily poised, soaring a hundred feet above the small sailing boats moored below, which seems like overkill, but the great height was insisted on by the Navy, to accommodate the taller masts of the time.

As we rumbled over the bridge at the maximum speed allowed (15 m.p.h.), the water was sparkling, and the day had become unequivocally sunny. We seemed to be doing nothing less than slowly flying on a train. The executive who was the only other remaining occupant of the carriage was shouting into his mobile phone: ‘But I do need to see your plan for this twelve month process.’ The stone arches are inscribed with the words ‘IK Brunel Engineer, 1859’, and the curvature of the bridge allows you to read them from the train. When Brunel designed this bridge, he was a dying man. He was drawn over it recumbent in a wagon soon after its official opening, and he ‘saw that it was good’, so to speak. The bridge merits a name-check for Brunel – the only one – in TTW: ‘one of the finest achievements of I. K. Brunel, who constructed the Great Western Railway’.

To the right of the Royal Albert Bridge is the Tamar Road Bridge, opened in 1961. But the actual roadway looks suspiciously new. Whereas the railway bridge has remained single-track, in 2001 the road bridge became the first suspension bridge to be widened. It went from three to five lanes, and there, in essence, is the story of post-war transport to Cornwall. Many more people visit Cornwall than in the inter-war heyday of the Riviera Express, but while the trains are jam-packed in summer, 90 per cent of visitors come by car. And they stay for a shorter time. As recently as 1993, 74 per cent of visitors to Cornwall were on their main holiday. Today the figure is 30 per cent.

The tourist industry in Cornwall was founded by those campaigns of the GWR. They were well timed in that the ‘heavy’ industry of Cornwall was dying even as the Riviera Express began operations. It is unlikely that the copper caps of Churchward’s engines were made from Cornish copper; tin-mining was also fading in the early twentieth century. China clay-mining continued, although most of that was transported by sea. The main job of the railway was to bring in trippers and take out agricultural produce, particularly milk, potatoes, broccoli and flowers …

… Of which there were many (rhododendrons and agapanthus especially) growing along with palms on the passing platforms: Saltash, St Germans, Menheniot, Liskeard. The Cornish flora make up for the cold colour of the stone-rendered houses. You can’t make bricks with china clay. The line-side was also made decorative by the presence, after Liskeard, of old-fashioned semaphore signals, permitted to survive because of the slowness of the trains.

After creating his billiard table, and building a very low bridge, a line on the very edge of the sea, then a very high bridge, the First Engineer found a new amusement in Cornwall. Viaducts! There are twenty-six traversing gorges between Plymouth and St Austell, and they dictate a slow speed. Perhaps this is why the operator doesn’t have the nerve to call the Cornish Riviera the Cornish Rivera Express. I am reminded of a continental service Evelyn Waugh once travelled on: ‘My train was a rapide, and God it was slow.’

We stopped at Bodmin, or rather a station 5 miles outside. In 1859 Bodmin spurned the railway, thereby forfeiting its position as the county town of Cornwall to a town that embraced it: Truro. The station at Bodmin was originally called Bodmin Road. Today it is Bodmin Parkway, but the names mean the same thing: it is not in Bodmin. In 1958 John Betjeman wrote to a friend called Peggy Thomas, who lived in Trebetherick: ‘Perhaps we could all set up at Bodmin Road station by arrangement with the Great Western – you in the refreshment room because of drink, Lynam in the signal box because of administrative ability, me in the booking office because I’m literary, Edward to do the lamps and odd jobs because he’s so clever with his hands … We won’t have a station master as we’ll be one glorious Soviet.’ Betjeman liked Bodmin Road/Parkway, which dreams its life away in a wooded valley made by the River Fowey.

We passed Lostwithiel station, the town hidden somewhere to the left. The name means ‘Lost within the hill’, but it was detectable in winter to passengers on the Cornish Riviera Express by the smoke rising from its chimneys. We stopped at Par, and those silver surfers who had not got off at Newton Abbot for Torquay now alighted here for the connecting train to Newquay. But Par is also china clay country, even today. The last surviving china clay company is a French-owned outfit called Imerys. It sends clay trains – white-dusted and fit to be mistaken for a ghost train in some rackety farce – to the small port of Fowey, using a branch line that used to carry people as well, but which is now freight only. Some of the clay also heads east along the Cornish main line. And so here is a modern-day correspondence with an industrial scene as described in TTW, which speaks of ‘a district devoted to clay mining’, great ‘cone-shaped dumps of clay’, and all the streams running white.

After St Austell – a biggish, blanched-looking town – we approached Truro, where we, like the Cornish Riviera Express, were booked to stop. We viewed Truro from the two viaducts preceding the station, the tallest structures in the town after the spire of the cathedral. I am made slightly nervous by these Cornish viaducts. I read that one of the few with two tracks running over it was deemed, immediately post-war, not capable of taking the weight of two freight trains. So the two tracks were singled. It now happened that our HST came to a stop on the second of the two Truro viaducts and remained at a standstill for twenty minutes. We were certainly occupying the only line on the viaduct. Was this the vulnerable one? I began looking to the right, away from the town, where the view is less vertiginous.

In December 1909 the Railway Magazine profiled Truro under the heading ‘Truro as a Railway Centre’. The article paints a picture of an industrialised town: carpets, paper and iron. Truro was also important in 1910 as the head of the railway branch to the port of Falmouth. The branch survives (Community Rail) and is booming, as indicated by the large number waiting to board our HST. The branch is much used by students at Falmouth University, There is ship-repairing and superyacht-building at Falmouth. As for Truro, it is an ‘administrative centre’.

In Cornwall’s industrial days china clay gave way beyond Truro to mineral mining, and Cornwall’s mines were an Aladdin’s cave of minerals – iron, copper, lead, arsenic. I saw a couple of crumbling wheelhouses and chimneys, whereas TTW writes of the approach to Redruth: ‘the surrounding countryside is heavily scored with tin and copper mines.’ That could have meant they were still working or had already closed.

We stopped at St Erth, as did the Cornish Riviera Express. A mantra of the time was ‘St George for England, St Pancras for Scotland, St Erth for St Ives’. Palm trees on the platform reminded the author of TTW that he was finally on the Cornish Riviera, as they did me. As our HST pulled away, a pleasant young man, ‘a customer host’, came along with a bin-liner collecting rubbish. ‘This is the Cornish Riviera Express,’ I said, ‘You know that, obviously?’ He cleverly sidestepped the question by giving a half-nod and saying, ‘I was just thinking – this is a really scenic route.’

‘How long have you been on the railway?’ I asked.

‘Six months. I worked at Waitrose before.’

‘Do you want to be a driver?’

‘Hopefully, yes. My dad’s a driver – he works units out of Exeter. But I’ve got to keep my nose clean in this job first.’

Looking at the kid, I assessed his chances. He seemed bright and competent, but he’d have to wait a while. You can become a train driver at twenty-one, but that’s rare. Maturity is what’s required, and many train drivers have come from another profession, often the services, where the right sort of vigilance and orderliness is inculcated. The job was always high-status. In steam days the drivers outranked even quite senior railway clerks. Back then, the challenge was to be taken on as an engine cleaner, because that was the start of the route to driving, via the grades of ‘passed cleaner’ (meaning you could fire an engine under close supervision), then fireman. The fireman did all the hard work, which is why he ended up the dirtier of the two. But the driver took all the credit, and he would stand on the footplate, narcissistically straightening his neckerchief and wiping clean his not very dirty hands while he received the adulation of the ‘railwayacs’. The driver had earned his privileges because he himself had spent twenty-five years firing engines. Today it is even harder to be a train driver. I know a man who drives for First Great Western. He was an engineer with BT when he answered a local newspaper advertisement. He was one of seven thousand applicants for eight places – testament, he believes, to the continuing romantic appeal of railways. A hundred applicants were interviewed. He was selected for training, which took a year with an exam every week. He then did 250 hours of in-cab learning.

‘You might be driving the Cornish Riviera one day,’ I said to the young man.

‘I might be driving you on it.’

Yes, I thought, if we’re both very lucky.

Rising to our left from the milky sea was St Michael’s Mount, much compared to Mont St Michel in Brittany by the GWR. A couple of minutes later we arrived at Penzance. We were scheduled to do so at 15.11, but we had been made slightly late on the Truro viaduct. When the Cornish Riviera Express had settled down to its 10.30 departure time, it reached Penzance at 5.30. So it took seven hours, whereas ours took a little over six with more stops.

There is a Sunday-ish feeling about modern Penzance, a sense of many of its people having been suddenly called away. TTW speaks of ‘the picturesque shipping of its harbour’. Today that harbour, as seen from an arriving train, usually holds nothing but sea. The area between the engine shed of Penzance station and the sea was once all railway territory, with a goods shed and a goods yard. It’s now of course a car park. The passenger arriving on the Cornish Riviera Express might have been just in time to see the departure of the mail train for Paddington, which might also carry flowers brought over on the ferry from the Scilly Isles, which still docks near the station. If he was a railwayac, he might want to wait and watch this loading, asking the friend meeting him if the driver with his pony and trap wouldn’t mind waiting a few more minutes in the station yard. His companion, if not a railwayac, might ask, ‘Haven’t you had enough of trains for one day?’

On a balmy summer’s evening the Morrab Gardens of Penzance remain far more vivid and exotically scented than most public gardens in Britain. The heart of the town retains many fine Georgian and Regency buildings, but there are too many charity shops on the high street. In 1963 John Betjeman wrote: ‘The older houses in the narrow centre round the market hall have been pulled down and third-rate commercial “contemporary”, of which the Pearl Assurance building is a nasty example, are turning it into Slough.’ That building is now a Wetherspoon’s (i.e., cheap) pub, where I spent some of my evening. I spoke to the young barman, who said that tourism was ‘by far the main thing’ in the town, and the tourists often had plenty of money, ‘but they were too old’, and he would rather they were younger. Then they might spend more, and the place would be livelier. In other words, Penzance remains exasperatingly genteel, as it was in 1879, when Gilbert and Sullivan decided it was about the least likely seaside place in which pirates would be found. The barman told me that a marina might be created in the harbour, and that could be the tonic the town needs. Either way, he said he ‘wouldn’t live anywhere else,’ and looking at my notebook, he commanded, ‘Write that down.’