FIVE

THE CALEDONIAN SLEEPER

THE DARK LINE

The East Coast Main Line looks pretty skimpy in comparison with the West Coast Main Line, which is not so much a line as a network connecting London to the north-west, the west Midlands, north Wales and Scotland. After the grouping it was served by the London, Midland & Scottish Railway, which was the largest private company in the world. The LMS comprised, among others, the Midland Railway and the London & North Western Railway, which had been the biggest private company in its own time. The West Coast Main Line of today is essentially the heir of the LNWR. The core of the line – the main line of the main line – is the route from Euston to Glasgow via Watford, Rugby, Crewe, Preston and Carlisle … in which case, we have to think of the connections to Birmingham, Holyhead, Manchester and Liverpool as mere branches.

As the slogan of the LNWR had it, this is ‘The Premier Line’, serving a population of 25 million, but anyone seeking a detailed discussion of its routes will have to look elsewhere, and they won’t find it in those books called things like Britain’s Most Beautiful Railway Journeys. The line offers branches – if no longer through trains – to some pretty spots such as Southport, Morecambe and Windermere, and it traverses the moorland of Shap on the way to Carlisle, which is the great outdoors even if not so operatically magnificent as the approach over the Settle–Carlisle line.

But the WCML was a scruffy, industrial railway, a 400-mile tradesman’s entrance, and it is less secure in its identity now that so many of the line-side factories have been replaced by line-side Tescos, scrapyards or car parks. Many of its stations – Birmingham New Street, Manchester Piccadilly, Stafford, Coventry, Euston – were modernised when the line was electrified in the ’60s, and they have that motorway service station blankness. Travelling along the WCML can be akin to a motorway experience, and I am sometimes disinclined to look out of the window. When I do look out, I am seeking out the history.

The line grew in the 1830s out of the linkage at Birmingham of Britain’s first trunk railway, the London & Birmingham, with that the industrial line par excellence, the Grand Junction, which connected Liverpool, Manchester, Birmingham and Crewe. At one time, the interest for the windowgazer would have lain in what Orwell called the ‘sinister magnificence’ of industrial landscapes: chimneys, pitheads, smouldering slagheaps, infernal skies, corrupted sunsets and sunrises. In Hard Times Dickens evokes Coketown, essentially that midway point on the WCML, Preston: ‘It was a town of red brick, or of brick that would have been red if the smoke and ashes had allowed it; but as matters stood it was a town of unnatural red and black like the painted face of a savage.’ (Northern clays are more likely than southern clays to produce red bricks.)

In 1936 W. H. Auden, a great watcher from trains of industrial landscapes, wrote the poem Night Mail, evoking the journey of the West Coast Postal, the LMS Travelling Post Office train from Euston to Glasgow and Aberdeen, for a documentary by the GPO Film Unit. The poem describes ‘the fields of apparatus, the furnaces/Set on the dark plain like gigantic chessmen’. The commentary of the film, to which the recitation of the poem forms the climax, speaks of ‘the mines of Wigan … steelworks of Warrington … machine shops of Preston’. We are very far from the Cornish Riviera, and such natural beauty as is seen from the WCML cannot be enjoyed without guilt. Auden had written a line describing passing hills as being ‘heaped like slaughtered horses’. It was too strong for the GPO and was cut, but Auden didn’t mind.

He wrote the poem, stopwatch in hand to get the timings right (almost as if he were a railwayman himself), in a backroom of the GPO offices in Soho Square, surrounded by the comings and goings of young post office messengers, rough diamonds all. If a line was deemed not right, Auden just crumpled it up and wrote another. The film, like the poem, is compellingly austere and strange. At one point footage of the speeding train is accompanied by a man apparently bellowing from the bottom of a well: ‘Four million miles every year! Five hundred million letters every year!’ But for all its stylisation, the authentic tone of the mail sorters on the train is captured in many aggrieved remarks, like ‘Give us a chance’ or ‘Here, what’s your game?’, and the same tone is in a signalman’s peeved instruction to a colleague: ‘You’ll have to shunt the local, I’ve got the Postal on.’

Anyone needing to be reminded how good Night Mail was should watch the BFI documentary of 1954 about another train: the Elizabethan, an express that ran from King’s Cross to Edinburgh for ten years from 1952. It too has a versified commentary, but an embarrassingly patronising one. As the train crew clock in at King’s Cross’s Top Shed, it runs:

Bob Marable, top-link train driver
Who’s always a punctual arriver
Wears boots of footplate size
Has colour-light eyes
And engine oil in his saliva.

For that last line the narrator abandons ‘received pronunciation’ in favour of an excruciating attempt at cockney.

My edition of the Night Mail DVD comes with a companion piece, Night Mail 2, a documentary of 1986, with a poem by Blake Morrison. That’s about the mail being carried north by aeroplane from Gatwick. Morrison gracefully admitted that he was ‘on a hiding into nothing’ in being charged with capturing the much less pungent atmosphere of the north in the ’80s. His own poem speaks of ‘this grey milltown lying under a duvet,/Its shuttles stopped, its chimneys empty/A town sleeping in now there’s nothing to get up for’, the scene appearing ‘in the daze of morning … like a steamed-up windscreen slowly clearing’. Morrison used the opportunity to dust off Auden’s line about the slaughtered horses.

Post Offices no longer travel. Yes, there is today a big plastic Royal Mail crest stuck on the grey tin wall that forms the east side of the Euston station train shed, but that denotes a local delivery office. A man serving at the counter disclaimed any connection with the station: ‘It all goes by road these days.’

Most freight on Britain’s railways travelled by night. There are fewer passenger trains at night, and passengers have had priority for a long time. Anyone travelling late on the WCML forty years ago would have been sharing the tracks with those regular nocturnal trundlers: coal, milk, newspapers, letters. (In my boyhood the generic name for any late passenger train was ‘the milk train’, although a more accurate name, given the befuddled state of the passengers, would have been ‘the beer train’.) Of those commodities only coal will be seen today, or more likely not seen but heard coming down from Liverpool or Hunterston, or from the open-cast mines of East Ayrshire, to the Yorkshire power stations, or to Fiddlers Ferry power station at Warrington, or Rugeley, near Stafford. Coal is classed as ‘bulk heavy haul’ along with other minerals, such as limestone and cement. There is also ‘container traffic’: lighter stuff – say, Australian wine in bags in vans – perhaps brought up from Southampton docks and taken around the western edge of London, then to the northwest by Freightliner, one of our half-dozen freight operators, and the direct descendant of the BR freight operation.

I do think of the WCML as being dark, a stick of liquorice. Perhaps I am taking my cue subconsciously from a memory of industrial landscape, the blackness of atmosphere associated with the great junctions like Willesden, Rugby, Crewe; or it might be from the ‘blackberry black’ engines of the London & North Western Railway, or the blackness of the Black Fives, those rangy workhorses that were among the most famous engines built (between the ’30s and ’50s) at Crewe. The darkness might be metaphorical; the decay of that industrial landscape … or the five-train smash that occurred at in 1915 at Quintinshill, on the Scottish border. Two negligent signalmen were to blame for the deaths by incineration – in an antiquated, fifteen-carriage gaslit train – of more than 200 members of the seventh battalion of the Royal Scots. The precise number was never ascertained, but it was certainly the worst rail disaster in Britain.

The line is nocturnal in that sleeper trains were pioneered on it, and two of our three remaining sleepers run on the WCML. We are about to board one of them, and we will be doing so from the subterranean platforms of Euston station, which has been described, by Richard Morrison in The Times, as apparently designed by someone ‘with a vampiric loathing for sunlight’.

FIFTY SHADES OF GREY

Euston, opened by the London & Birmingham Railway in 1837, was the first London terminus, and just as the line it served would become a network, so the station itself would become a complex.

Whereas trains from King’s Cross would go under the annoying Regent’s Canal (that old mode getting in the way of the new one), the trains from Euston would go over it, and in the early years they were required to be winched up the resulting incline by a machine housed in Camden. (Sprawling and messy Euston operated in conjunction with facilities in Camden and Willesden Junction.)

A year after the station opening, a sandstone arch or portico or – still more correctly – propylaeum was built in front of the station. It was 72 feet high, with four fluted columns 8 foot in diameter. It served no purpose except to celebrate the arrival of the London & Birmingham Railway, but the Euston Arch would grow on people over the next hundred or so years. Two stone lodges were built either side of it. Two further lodges were built at the south side of the Euston complex, almost on Euston Road, and these were inscribed with the names of northern towns – destinations easily reachable from Euston, supposedly, but some of the places named, like Peterborough, Leicester and Swansea, were, as Alan A. Jackson pointed out in London’s Termini, ‘to be reached much more expeditiously from other establishments up and down the road’.

14. The Euston Arch in 1919. It now lies in pieces in the River Lea. Dan Cruickshank leads a campaign to have it rebuilt.

Two railway hotels followed; then, in 1849, the Great Hall, a combined concourse and waiting-room that looks, from photographs, as though it ought to have been the centrepiece of something like the British Museum. Alan A. Jackson writes:

Few other English buildings could offer anything to match the deeply-coffered ceiling of the Great Hall, embellished with massive curved consoles and plaster bas-reliefs in each corner, the whole beautifully lit by attic windows. The bas-reliefs … were in pairs; with busty, long-thighed women and muscular men, they symbolised London, Birmingham, Northampton, Chester, Manchester, Carlisle, Lancaster and Liverpool.

Also inside the hall was a statue of Robert Stephenson, who had engineered the London & Birmingham, employing the ‘straight through’ doctrine: hence, for example, the deep cutting at Tring and the 1¼-mile Kilsby Tunnel south of Rugby, where the price of going straight through was twenty-six men’s lives. He also laid out Euston station, although the architect was Philip Hardwick.

For a while, the arch framed a view of Hampstead Heath, but that disappeared as the Euston clutter grew. The station itself had started with two platforms, but burgeoned eventually to fifteen. The train shed had a series of pitched roofs of glass and iron. There was no dramatic train shed canopy, as at King’s Cross or St Pancras, but the intricate lattice of steel that held up the glass was sufficiently interesting to grace the cover of Railway Station Architecture, by David Lloyd and Donald Insall. The book was published in 1968. The Euston train shed had perhaps made the cover by virtue of a sympathy vote, because it had just been knocked down.

The new station was opened in 1968. Of the features of Old Euston mentioned above, only the two mendacious lodges and the statue of Robert Stephenson survive. He is now on the piazza to the north of the station, immediately outside All Bar One.

The arch had been demolished in 1963, before the new station was built – all part of BR’s attempt to redefine itself as modern and therefore fit to compete with the motor car. Aesthetic people assumed that the arch and the Great Hall would somehow be accommodated within the new station, and if the reaction to their destruction was shock, this became something more steely when St Pancras was also threatened by the modernisers. It would be saved by the Victorian Society (which had been formed to campaign to save the Euston Arch), and in particular by John Betjeman, who described the new Euston station as ‘disastrous and inhumane’. The demolition contractor himself, a Mr Valori, disapproved of the demolition of the arch, and numbered all the pieces of stone so it could be rebuilt. Most of it lies on the bed of the River Lea. The campaign to resurrect it as ‘an anchor for the fragmented landscape around Euston’ is fronted by the broadcaster Dan Cruickshank. It can’t be put back where it was, because that site is taken by Platforms 8 and 11 of the current station … not unless the current station were itself to be knocked down, which is not inconceivable, as we will see in a moment. Either way, it could be put up on the patch of unhealthy grass and blighted trees south of the piazza, which is dignified with the name Euston Square Gardens. In 1962 a Canadian contractor had proposed to roll the arch on wheels south to this position, but BR objected, saying this would cost £190,000, whereas knocking it down would cost £12,000. BR also said there was no room, but there plainly was, and is. A restored arch would fit neatly into the space in Euston Square Gardens between the two lodges, and the double-decker buses serving Euston would fit beneath the arch, which they would have to do, since it would straddle their access road to the station.

The new station hall is a simple rectangle in concrete and black marble. Its coffered ceiling may be intended as an echo the Great Hall. On a very sunny day you notice the strip of windows around the top. Otherwise, you forget about natural light as soon as you enter the Euston box, which seems to be illuminated by the garish light of the fast food outlets lining the walls. The station is about as tasteful as Blackpool, to which I am glad to say it will once more to be sending direct trains when this book is published, after many years of having to change at Preston. But it is not bracing like Blackpool. It is a headache incarnate. Euston is all about grab-bags of crisps, two-for-one on outsize chocolate bars, and the Britannia pub on the concourse (‘Serving breakfast from 7.30 a.m.’); it is about risking a medium cappuccino – practically a bucket-full – and then not having 30 pence for the night-marishly fluorescent Gentlemen’s. The idea was always to combine the new station with retail, and in 1968 it accommodated such novelties as an off licence, a travel agents and betting shop. The shops seem to be in the station but not of it. A couple of years ago I was looking around the W. H. Smith’s in Euston station, trying to find the national railway timetable. I thought I must be looking in the wrong place, so I asked the man at the till, ‘Do you sell the timetable?’ ‘The timetable for what?’ he replied testily. (On 23 September 1993 a Mr David Kane of Hope, Derbyshire, wrote to the Daily Telegraph: ‘I spotted the new British Rail winter timetable, just published, in the “Puzzles and Comics” section of John Menzies bookshop at Manchester Piccadilly Railway Station.’)

At Euston, waiting passengers do not commune with the trains, cannot even see them, because they are screened off and on a lower level. This is also true of Grand Central station in New York, but the concourse there is a mellow and romantic space. Grand Central is a true ‘destination station’, frequented by New Yorkers, who meet under the four-faceted clock or order a bowl of clam chowder with crusty bread and a glass of Chablis in the Oyster Bar. Nobody visits Euston unless they have to. The concourse is dominated by the departure screen, and people stand in front of it, waiting for their cue to bolt towards the trains. If they shift their gaze slightly to the left, they will see adverts projected onto a giant screen. If they shift their gaze slightly to the right, they will see another. The idea is that, by watching the indicator board, they are not congesting the platform entrances. For years, anyone arriving early and wanting a seat had to go and buy themselves a burger because there were no seats on the concourse itself. In his book of 1980, Roaming the West Coast Rails, Derek Cross records asking a station official why not: ‘Well, sir, if we put seats here people would sit on them.’ Today there are a few seats, but the station is still full of people sitting on the floor, like refugees. When the platform number of your train is flagged up on the indicator board, you make for the appropriate ramp leading down to your platform, and I usually find that everyone in the station turns out to have been waiting for the train that I want, a somehow humiliating experience.

The lesson of the new Euston is that glass, however dirty, is the correct covering for a train shed. Photographs of the old station show slightly befogged platforms with sudden, diagonal shafts of light. In Roaming the West Coast Rails Derek Cross writes, ‘The old Euston was a fascinating place, dark, smoky and full of character … Occasionally outgoing sleeping car expresses took a bit of finding …’, this presumably because the atmosphere had been thickening all day. In Steam Up! (1939) Eric Treacy, the railway bishop, mentions with approval ‘the top-hatted stationmaster Turrill at Euston who likes to sing in his spare time’.

15. The Great Hall of the old Euston. The statue of Robert Stephenson now stands on the piazza north of the modern station, outside All Bar One.

Surely nobody has so much as whistled on those twenty below-deck platforms at Euston. Talk about fifty shades of grey. The track ballast, platforms, walls, roof … all grey. And the Virgin trains are grey, apart from a dash of red and yellow at the front, which may be meant to invoke the short-lived BR experiment with a ‘blood and custard’ livery, but somehow the tones are off, therefore reminiscent of a squeezed spot. In Euston I am always grateful for the green of the London Midland trains, which provide the suburban services on the WCML. A gateway for lorries on to Eversholt Street admits the only natural light to the undercroft, and this looks directly on to Euston Books (‘Videos and Magazines’).

The tracks lead into a great grey cutting, seen on their way by a great grey signal box, sited on the left immediately after the station and overlooked by the grey Euston Thistle Hotel. But while the platforms may be low down, the roadways beneath the station are lower still. (Betjeman spoke of the ‘fume-ridden taxi rank’.) There is something sinister about this, as if the cars are biding their time underground while plotting a takeover.

Even those who argue that Euston is an efficient station do not seem to love it – I have never read an encomium to Euston. When I read in 2003 that a railway station had been voted Britain’s second-biggest eyesore by readers of County Life, I assumed it would be Euston, but it was Euston’s sibling Birmingham New Street, another product of the belated ‘electric age’ of BR. Birmingham New Street, like Euston, is subterranean, dark and depressing. It replaced a station of 1854 that, according to Derek Cross, was the pièce de résistance of the LNWR, featuring ‘a remarkable iron arched roof with a maximum span of 211 feet, with a curving lattice framework under each of the ribs’. But Birmingham New Street is being rebuilt at the time of writing, and that precious – yet completely free – commodity, daylight, will be readmitted via a glass atrium. Euston may be in for a similar or, with luck, a worse fate. It is the favoured terminus for HS2, and, depending on which plan for the line comes to fruition, it might yet be flattened while the arch rises again.

THE GHOST OF BUCHAN

I started my journey in the Doric Arch pub on the piazza, which is a very good pub, easily the best thing on the Euston complex. It is full of railway memorabilia, including hardcore stuff, such as a signalling diagram for the Euston power box. I was introduced to it by Nicholas Whittaker, the author of Platform Souls, a very readable and eye-opening book about trainspotting. At 10 p.m. I drank a pint of stout in front of a poster showing the arch beneath a dark-blue starlit sky. The London & North Western Railway advertising copy ran: ‘Sleeping saloons fitted with every modern convenience are attached to the Night Trains from London Euston to Holy-head (for Ireland), Liverpool and Manchester’, a reminder that most night trains would have a combination of sleeper and non-sleeper carriages. There were also ‘half-sleeper’ carriages, combining sleeping berths and ordinary seats, and those in the latter presumably half-slept.

There were plenty of named sleepers and these were usually all-sleeper apart from the dining car. On the west coast, from 1895, there was the Night Scot, which became, with electrification, the Night Limited. There was the Night Caledonian in the ’70s and ’80s. It is strange, now, to think that King’s Cross once despatched sleepers, but it did, and there was the Night Scotsman from 1927 until the mid-’80s. There was the Night Capitals, which my father, who worked on sleeper costings, had a hand in terminating, cars and planes having eaten into the market, and trains undermining their own sleeper market by going faster. On the East and West Coast main lines in the ’80s there were the Nightrider services. The idea of a sort of hotel room on wheels was beginning to seem comically lumbering, so these offered first-class reclining seats. The Night Ferry we have already discussed, and we have mentioned the Night Riviera, a train of clouded late nineteenth-century origins that still runs from Paddington to Cornwall.

The Night Riviera is generally well patronised. It is always fully booked on Fridays and Sundays (like the Caledonian, it doesn’t run on Saturday nights; that’s when they work on the line), and when fog prevents flights taking off from Newquay airport. It never made any money for its operator, First Group, which also operates the Caledonian Sleeper. First did little to advertise the service, and in 2005 they proposed its discontinuation, but its regular users got up an 8,000-signature petition – the biggest ever railway protest. The Night Riviera was saved, and benefited greatly from the publicity, although I doubt it has gone into profit. At the time of the protest, I spoke to a man who worked in one of the West Country booking offices about the necessity of advertising sleeper services. He said, ‘For a time we displayed a model of the sleeper train and bookings went up 20 per cent. When it was taken away they fell by the same amount.’ This reminded me of a passage from Speak, Memory, the autobiography of Vladimir Nabokov, which was published in 1951:

In the early years of this century, a travel agency on Nevski Avenue displayed a three-foot-long model of an oak brown international sleeping car. In delicate verisimilitude it completely outranked the painted tin of my clockwork trains. Unfortunately it was not for sale. One could make out the blue upholstery inside, the embossed leather lining of the compartment walls, their polished panels, inset mirrors, tulip-shaped reading lamps, and other maddening details.

I usually book my First Great Western trains by calling the company, which means I book with a person in Bombay. Having made a booking to Cornwall with a young man who told me his name was Mahantesh, I asked him whether he had ever visited England. He had not. Did he want to see the territory over which the company whose tickets he sold ran? He said, ‘I will be very honest with you, Mr Martin, I would very much like to visit Ireland.’ ‘But that’s nothing to do with First Great Western!’ I expostulated. ‘No, but my favourite band is from Ireland. It is called The Script.’ I told him I had never heard of them. It was Mahantesh’s turn to be appalled. ‘You have never heard of their song, “If You Could See Me Now?”’ It might be that a measure of guilt about having disclaimed any interest in visiting First Great Western country now kicked in. ‘I have to tell you, Mr Martin, that another thing I would very much like to do is ride on the sleeper train from Paddington.’

‘The Night Riviera?’

‘Exactly.’ He then considered the trains I was proposing to book. ‘You are intending to come back from Penzance at four. Why not hang on for the sleeper? This is a very big chance for you!’

At 22.40 I finished my pint of stout at Euston and, realising I still had an hour and ten minutes to go before train time, I ordered another. Part of the thrill of catching the Caledonian Sleeper is the lateness of the hour. It brings out the eight-year-old in me. I get to stay up late. Note, incidentally, my fluency in the twenty-four-hour clock, learned from train timetables. BR started to use it in the summer of 1965. Before that, ‘8.45’ meant ‘8.45 a.m.’, whereas ‘8/45’ meant ‘8.45 p.m.’; and before that Bradshaw had written ‘8.45mrn’ or ‘8.45aft’.

At 23.15 I crossed the concourse towards the train. The name Caledonian Sleeper was formally applied to the Euston–Scotland (and vice-versa) sleeper in 2004, although it had been used informally since BR days. At the time of writing, the train is operated by First Scotrail, which operates all the trains in Scotland, but the new franchise has just been awarded to the ‘outsourcing’ giant, Serco. Here is how the Guardian, which is not keen on outsourcing, reported the exciting news: ‘Serco, the company dogged by scandals from overcharging for prisoner tagging to allegations of sexual assault at an immigration detention centre, is to run sleeper trains between London and Scotland.’ Serco, which runs luxury trains in Australia (as well as having a share in Northern Rail), will be given a fifty million pound subsidy to build new trains for the service. The expectation is of an Orient Express-type experience, with the en suite bathrooms for sleeper cabins and other five star trappings long hankered after by a clientele that includes MPs, peers, royalty (apparently) and business people who want to finish the working day later or start earlier than the times permitted by airlines. But the new trains will not come until 2018.

The northbound Caledonian Sleeper is – and will remain – two trains. There is the Highland Train, departing at 21.15, calling at Crewe and Preston, then Edinburgh, where it divides into three for Aberdeen, Fort William and Inverness. But I was heading towards the Lowland Train. This departs at 23.50, calls at Watford to pick up, Carlisle to set down, and divides at Carstairs, the rear going to Edinburgh, the front to Motherwell and Glasgow. In its Encyclopaedia of Named Trains the Railway Magazine agonises over whether the Caledonian Sleeper is a named train … or is it a brand, there being more than one train, like Eurostar, or the above-mentioned Nightrider … or the Brighton Belle? And there’s the rub. You can’t start banishing such a great train as the Brighton Belle from the lexicon of named trains on some technicality. The same goes for the Caledonian Sleeper, which is one of the last remaining outposts of British railway charisma.

Certainly, I was excited walking towards it – not as excited as I had been approaching the couchette carriages at the Gare de Lyon (along those platforms lined with palm trees planted in tubs) while jaunting with my father and the British Rail Touring Club, but very keen to board. The Sleeper offers first- and second-class berths and seated accommodation on reclining seats. I had paid £147.90 for a first-class oneway ticket to Glasgow. The First Group blue we have already bemoaned. But the train waiting on Platform 14 was thrillingly long: sixteen carriages, eight for Edinburgh, eight for Glasgow. That’s why it has to leave from either Platform 14 or Platform 1, the longest ones at Euston. ‘Mr Lockwood?’ a great-coated and gratifyingly Scottish attendant was saying to a tweed-coated chap, and when he saw me he brought me into the fold, ‘… And Mr Martin, is it? Let me show you to your berths gentlemen.’ I had the feeling of stepping into a John Buchan novel, and indeed I wore my own tweed coat, together with a scarf or – as Buchan would have said – a muffler, and stout boots, as being about right for a trip to Scotland on the brink of spring. ‘It’s a very long train,’ I gushed gauchely. ‘Aye, sir,’ the attendant said, ‘the second-longest sleeper train in Europe. The longest one, I think, runs from Paris to Madrid.’

We boarded a first-class berth carriage, which had been made from a BR Mark 3 carriage of late 1970s’ vintage, and the attendant unlocked my berth. The pleasure lay in being reacquainted with all those railway amenities I’d been denied for forty years. We had a proper loco on the front – a twenty-five-year-old electric Class 90, more usually associated with freight trains – and I now stepped from a corridor into what was in effect a compartment. I beheld a dimmer switch! A window blind! A decent-sized sink with proper taps! A complimentary washbag! About ten years ago, I took my eldest son, then aged nine, on the Night Riviera, and the free washbag is what he took away – literally and metaphorically – from the experience. He is now at university, and when I told him I would be travelling on the Caledonian Sleeper, he said, ‘You’ll be getting a washbag!’ But just as the football manager’s dug-out is now the ‘technical area’, so the sleeper-train washbag is a ‘passenger comfort kit’. As the attendant reassured me that he would be available throughout the night (‘I’ve a wee pantry in the next carriage along’), I greedily inspected my haul: razor and shaving cream, body lotion (didn’t see quite where that came in, given that there are no showers on the train), a flannel, a pair of earplugs, a pair of socks, collapsible toothbrush and an inch-long tube of toothpaste. I once interviewed a man who knew about train WCs. I had been regretting the demise of those small but pungent cakes of green soap: just the smell of them made you feel clean. ‘But people used to steal them,’ he said. ‘So the modern mode became liquid soap. But now thieves take empty bottles into the lavatories and decant the liquid soap into them.’

Only in first-class do you get a comfort kit, but the main benefit of first is that you have a berth to yourself guaranteed. The first-class berths are the same as standard-class berths, but with the upper bed folded against the wall. If you were travelling as a married couple and you wanted to sleep with your wife (because it doesn’t necessarily follow), there would be no point paying for first. If you did travel in first as a couple, you would be put in two adjacent berths, and the attendant would offer to unlock the connecting doors that are fitted between all berths except the end ones. Again, it doesn’t necessarily follow that you would agree.

My berth was predominantly light grey and pale blue, the least cosy colours. I recalled a description, in the Railway Magazine in the early ’30s, of some nineteenth-century sleeping-car stock that had scandalously persisted on the ECML into the early 1920s: ‘… old gas-lighted clerestory cars of the nineties with their heavy red velvet upholstery and gloomy batswing burners in the corridors.’ The side with the locked connecting door was some sort of grey laminate. On the bed side, the carpet continued up the wall. The Newsnight presenter Kirsty Wark is a regular on the Caledonian Sleeper and often writes about it. (She is, to quote the title of a famous spy novel with sleeping-car scenes by Maurice Dekobra, La Madone des Sleepings.) She’s keen on the service, but in an article in the New Statesman she said it was ‘pretty gross to have carpets up the walls’. From old photographs I’d say that carpets or cloth panelling against the wall on the bed side has been a consistent feature of British sleeper carriages. The duvet in my berth looked very well laundered, and there was an attractive purple and red travelling blanket, but there were patches of sand in the hard-to-clean corners of the floor carpet.

I last travelled on the Caledonian Sleeper in 2005, when it was on the brink of an earlier refurbishment. One feature promised at the time was ‘more control over light levels’, which I think meant ‘blinds that worked’, because on that journey my window blind didn’t go all the way up. This one did, and I meant to keep it open throughout the night.

THE LOUNGE CAR

We moved away from Euston with the gentlest of lurches, and no whistle, perhaps out of consideration for anybody already asleep (because you can board the sleeper an hour before departure).

We swayed into the arc-lit grey cutting, which for all its greyness I would like to overlook from a big, stucco-fronted house on Mornington Terrace. We rattled over the iron bridge that takes the line over the Regent’s Canal. The bridge seems very low. When I cycle along the towpath of the canal, I always duck my head when I come to it. Nonetheless it is the cause of the first stage of the climb of the tracks out of Euston, a climb that continues until Tring. The reverberation of the bridge allows the Caledonian Sleeper to be heard even where I live, in Highgate. You can recognise the bridge from the train by a blob of mauve graffiti to your right, but even though the sleeper is marshalled with the window berths facing right (away from such as one can make out of the sea on the WCML), I could not see anything at this late hour, and there was no moon to help.

The bridge is parallel to Gloucester Road NW1, and there’s a pub near by called The Engineer. The sign shows a top-hatted cigar-smoking man who looks suspiciously like Brunel, which would be wrong. But it might be Robert Stephenson (which would be right), because he smoked cigars too. He built the next feature of the line, the Primrose Hill Tunnel, which has a handsome, castellated entrance, insisted on by Eton College, who own the land hereabouts. So began the entire genre of castellated tunnels. You can see the tunnel mouth if you prop your bike against the north wall of the footbridge running over the WCML between Primrose Hill and Chalk Farm, and stand on the pedal crank to see over. You can’t see it from the Caledonian Sleeper at midnight.

We rolled through Willesden Junction. It has not had a platform on the WCML since 1962, but there is still the local station, the junction with the West London Line, and a sprawling traction maintenance depot. There is indeed a ‘rough loveliness’ about the place, as claimed by the artist Leon Kossoff, whose garden overlooks the Junction, and who has often painted it. We rattled through Harrow & Wealdstone, and past the famous Kodak factory, which still looks a big concern, although Kodak is now in the mysterious, miniaturised digital realm, which means they have relinquished part of the site, and I have no hope of understanding what goes on there.

We called at Watford – the station preceded by a giant illuminated Tesco sign – to pick up passengers only, although I don’t suppose anyone could stop you from getting off. Watford is umbilically tied to Euston, being the main target of the electric suburban services that began in the 1920s.

We passed through Bletchley, where the WCML used to be crossed by the London Midland & Scottish Oxford-to-Cambridge line, which was known as the ‘Varsity Line’ or the ‘Brain Line’. Passenger services were withdrawn west of Bletchley to Oxford in 1967, the year Milton Keynes, just 3½ miles north of Bletchley was arising and being designated a New Town. How’s that for joined-up planning? Trains continue to run east from Bletchley to Bedford, but not beyond there to Cambridge. It seems likely that the line from Bletchley to Oxford at least will be re-opened before 2019.

A couple of years ago I asked a ticket clerk at Oxford station if I could get a train to Cambridge, knowing perfectly well I couldn’t but wanting him to apologise for the fact. ‘You certainly can!’ he said. ‘You change at London.’ (He seemed to have forgotten that you can get from anywhere to anywhere if you change at London.) We passed Milton Keynes, which of course does not appear in S. N. Pike’s chronicling of the WCML of 1947. He denotes the spot with the words ‘footbridges’, ‘deep cutting’, ‘Denbigh Hall signal box’.

I walked through to the lounge car, the next carriage along. On the way, I stepped into the lavatory. One of the modern types of WC, with a wide, electronically controlled door for wheelchair access, had been jemmied into Mark 3 carriage. Once inside, I pressed the button to close the door. I then pressed the button to lock the door. It did not illuminate as it is supposed to do. Therefore I did not know whether the door was locked or not. I got rid of my two pints of stout, but would not have risked a more comprehensive ablution. When I turned to the sink, I saw that the words ‘No Water’ had been handwritten on white tape placed over the button I would have pressed to obtain the usual niggardly trickle if that tape had not been there.

To move from the berths to the lounge car is to step even further back in time, because the lounge car is a converted BR buffet car of Mark 2 stock (late ’60s–early ’70s). The main hatch of the serving kiosk is kept shut, and food and drink are doled out from the side door – lending an improvised feel. The colour scheme was grey and burnt orange, and here too the carpeting ran up the wall at one end. The lounge car features unsecured seats – very unusual, as noted in the case of the Brighton Belle. The individual seats are upholstered, with steel frames, like 1970s’ office chairs. (As one blogger wrote of the Caledonian Sleeper, ‘You almost expect to go to sleep and wake up in the Winter of Discontent.’) There are also black leather sofas. These had been in the offing when I last travelled on the Sleeper, and I had been assured they were to be ‘as used in the Big Brother House’. I can’t verify this, never having watched Big Brother. The individual seats were transverse, facing tables; the sofas were longitudinal. There were three menus: one for food, one for drinks and one for whiskies exclusively. When she travels, Kirsty Wark chooses her ‘malt of the night … I used to be loyal to Bruichladdich, but for some reason the Islay distillery no longer supplies miniatures.’ She also has a Macsween’s haggis and red wine. The food on the Sleeper is generally well reviewed. It is microwaved snack food or sandwiches, but there is a wide selection, and most of it costs less than a tenner. There’s also a better choice of wine than is normal on a train. I considered a half-bottle of Chablis, but in the end I went for a quarter-bottle of generic Chardonnay (which turned into two of them).

There were half a dozen customers in the lounge car, which is open to holders of first-class berth ticket-holders at all times, and standard-class berth ticket-holders if the train is not crowded. It was not crowded tonight. There were eight customers in the lounge car – all men, mostly prodding away at their mobile devices. One man was sipping a whisky with a bottle of pills next to it. Everybody had a nightcap quietly on the go: nobody was eating, it was too late in the day.

I got talking to the two men on the sofa opposite. They were in the transport business. One of them introduced himself as ‘car park attendant’, but that was a joke because he then mentioned private equity. They had something to do with building car parks for airports. In short, they were the enemy. But the car park attendant – I’ll call him Nick – liked trains, whereas the other man hated them, and would far rather have flown from London to Scotland (‘It’s so tedious this way’). But as Nick explained, ‘We couldn’t have had our business dinner in Mayfair this evening without this service.’ He was not without his criticisms, however. ‘Do you think you’re getting a real first-class service?’ He paused, and we all listened to the train, which sounded like some clumsy people having sex on a very old bed. At that very moment a warning flashed up on my laptop to the effect that no wi-fi networks had been detected.

‘I’d say what you’re getting was a premium economy service,’ Nick continued (and keep in mind that he was speaking before the new franchisee had been announced). He thought there should be a ‘genuine first-class option’, with queen-sized beds and en suites. (Kirsty Wark too wants en suites.) The next class down would offer very comfortable recliners with top-notch at-seat service. ‘Have you ever travelled Virgin Upper Class?’ asked Nick, ‘I mean, like that.’ (By a strange coincidence, I had travelled on Virgin Upper Class accommodation, as a result of my first ever journalistic freebie. It was in the early ’90s. I recall flying to Miami while lying almost horizontally, slurping champagne and listening to Bon Jovi on earphones.) Nick thought people wouldn’t mind travelling in open accommodation if the service were sufficiently good, and he cited the new Anglo-Scottish Megabus sleeper bus service being offered by ‘my good friend’ the transport entrepreneur Brian Souter.

I thought (wrongly, as it turned out) that Nick and his friend might be interested in a little sleeping car history …

In 1838 the London & Birmingham Railway provided oneor more bed carriages, in which two facing seats could be connected by a pull-out board. But the first genuine sleeping cars were introduced in 1873, on the Anglo-Scottish services. The beds were in berths, and they were longitudinal. In other words, you did not sleep at right-angles to the direction of the train. The toilet facilities varied, but some of these berths did have what we would call today en suite lavatories and sinks. The London & North Western built the fanciest sleepers. According to Denis Jenkinson in LNWR Carriages, A Concise History:

Windows had old gold figured tapestry blinds on sprung rollers … Upholstery was in crimson and brown saladin moquette with matching crimson silk laces. Floors were double thickness (and filled with hair felt for sound insulation) and covered with linoleum and Wilton carpets. Ceilings were finished with flock paper to a floral pattern, picked out in cream and gold. Outside the compartments, corridors were panelled in polished oak mahogany in a walnut framing above a dado of dark oak. The corridor ceiling was finished in polished sycamore panels while the central cross-vestibule, used as a smoking saloon, had a set of four revolving chairs and a set of flap tables. Lighting was electrical.

There were also open sleeper carriages (beds but no berths). This was the American Pullman model, and it was adopted in 1874 by the Midland Railway, going its own way as usual. Passengers gained a degree of privacy by closing the velvet curtains surrounding each of the bunks, which were arranged in two tiers. The topmost ones seem to have been suspended from – and were close to – the ceiling. I would have gone for one of the lower ones, aligned to the windows, and I would have lain on my side to watch, by the light of a convenient full moon, the passing moorland of the Settle–Carlisle stretch.

In 1877 that equally maverick outfit, the Great Western, introduced ‘dormitory cars’: essentially two rooms with a transverse corridor dividing. One held four beds for ladies, the other seven beds for gents. Here too the beds were longitudinal. But in the 1890s the Great Western introduced transverse beds in single or double berths with a side corridor, and this became the standard format in Britain, ‘… hence the layout of the Caledonian Sleeper,’ I concluded, at which point Nick said, ‘Well, I’m off to bed,’ and his anti-rail friend followed, but not before showing me an email he was about to send his wife. Attached was a picture of his berth, which did look prison cell-like. ‘This’ll teach me to misbehave’, ran the message.

The lounge car was now empty apart from me and the man with the whisky and pills. The darkness was so complete beyond the windows that I suspected we might be in the notorious Kilsby Tunnel, south of Rugby. It is illuminated by two giant light wells open to the sky, one of them 120 feet deep, but they’re no use to the traveller going through the tunnel at night.

We came to Rugby, where a sign reading ‘Alstom’ stood out. Alstom is the French-owned heavy engineering firm that made and maintains the Virgin Pendolino trains. Most of them were built in Italy, and Pendolino is Italian for ‘pendulum’. The trains can go fast over the many bends of the WCML by tilting with the curve, and the tilting technology used on the Pendolino was originally developed by Fiat. The Pendolinos fulfil the tilting dream of the British Rail Advanced Passenger Train, which was aborted in the 1980s. The Pendolino fleet is served by half a dozen Alstom train care depots along the WCML (including Crewe, Preston and Carlisle), but the Alstom business at Rugby is to do with thermal engineering.

In the early days of railways almost all northbound trains from London went through Rugby, hence the high-handedness of that tea lady towards Charles Dickens. The Great Central railway – which ran from Marylebone to Chester in the north-west and Grimsby in the north-east – was carried over Rugby by the ‘Birdcage Bridge’, which queered a train driver’s view of a huge signalling gantry; therefore all the signals on the gantry were duplicated at a higher level. The gantry was called the ‘Rugby bedstead’. The bridge and the bedstead have gone, as has the Great Central, the only trunk route closed by Beeching. Some say it should re-opened instead of building HS2 … trouble is, all the houses in the way. But Rugby station itself survives in its graceful Victorian form.

We next passed through the brutalist glorified bus shelter that is Stafford railway station, which was built in 1962, and makes me ashamed for 1962, even though it was the year of my birth. Twenty-three miles later, at about 1.30 a.m., we were approaching Crewe.

CREWE AND BEYOND

Of the approach to Crewe from the south, S. N. Pike writes:

For more than two miles this side of Crewe, enormous marshalling yards dominate the landscape on the left. Miles and miles of railway track lie in serried rows as far as the eye can reach. Thousands of wagons are here assembled in the process of being sorted out and shunted to their different tracks, and 400 goods trains are dealt with daily. Certainly this must be the busiest yard in the world. Crewe station itself covers 25 acres, handling as many as 500 passenger trains in 24 hours. Leaving the station we see on the left the enormous engine and carriage works covering nearly 200 acres.

Crewe remains an important junction – for Liverpool, Manchester, north Wales, the Midlands. It has also been granted an HS2 connection. You still see a lot of carriages and wagons on the approach. Freightliner have a distribution centre in Crewe, and trains are ‘cared for’ there, but, as of the past ten years, trains are no longer built at Crewe. The works at Crewe had a primal force: both engines and carriages were built, and the works made its own steel. The Class 90 pulling our sleeper was built at Crewe, as were the power cars for the HSTs and those for the electric trains on the ECML.

The platforms we trundled through were apparently empty, but they must have been crowded with ghosts. Crewe was akin to a kind of purgatory or limbo. Passengers changed at Crewe, crews changed at Crewe, engines changed at Crewe, perhaps an electric loco being exchanged for steam or vice versa. And there were always dozens, if not hundreds, of train watchers … who became trainspotters.

Some time in the 1930s Eric Treacy spent an hour at Crewe on his way to ‘preach at a very important service somewhere in the Midlands’. It was fifty-nine minutes before he looked at his watch, and then he had to run for his connection. How had the time fled by? He gives the answer in Steam Up! He watched some porters loading a van with live pigeons; then he ‘tried to console three frightened looking calves’, apparently abandoned on a platform, their heads sticking out of sacking. He observed ‘a wheeltapper progressing wheel to wheel on a Plymouth-bound train. [Tapping the wheels to make sure they were sound; the note would not ring clear in the case of a crack.] Then I stood near one of the station’s policemen and listened to some of the daft questions asked by the British public on the move.’ He went to the refreshment room where ‘I fell into conversation with a driver of the old school, complete with walrus moustache and a nose which might have been coloured by exposure to the elements – and perhaps by something else.’ The driver complained about young firemen. All they thought of was girls and dancing. Sitting in the corner of the refreshment room were a young, recently married couple, ‘still with confetti sticking to them, en route to their honeymoon’. The woman was in floods of tears …

In August 1951 The Guardian published an article entitled ‘The Allure of Train-Spotting: Search for an Explanation among the Addicts at Crewe’. In that year Ian Allan’s Locospotters Club had a quarter of a million members. Ian Allan, a sometime publicity officer with the Southern Railway, formalised trainspotting by publishing lists of locos or carriages that could be ticked off. Essentially these were lists of numbers, looking rather like logarithm tables. The arithmomania that had been latent in the more dilettantish ‘train watching’ thus came to the fore, and trainspotters came to be seen as anal retentives.

Here, from Platform Souls, is the young Nicholas Whittaker, being vouchsafed his first glimpse of Crewe in 1964, while passing through on a train from Burton to Rhyl with his mum:

Ambling in from the Derby line, the tracks suddenly came at us from all sides, switching, meshing … weaving a tangled magic carpet. Here was absolute railwayness on all sides, rails below us, electric wires above. A sprawling soot-clouded depot slipped away to the left before I even had a chance to gasp.

He would go on to spend many Saturdays on Crewe station.

Sometimes we’d take our own sandwiches, but we often visited the buffet for a packet of crisps or a Cornish pasty. There were the machines too, of course. It’s a truism that all drinks from machines are foul, but I rather liked the chicken soup. It looked like steaming urine with green tinsel floating in it …

Ten years ago I was commissioned to write an article on the theme ‘whither trainspotting?’ Whereas the spotters used to be schoolboys, they are now men of a certain age (those schoolboys grown up). I tracked down a couple of them, Paul and David, both in their sixties, visiting London from Manchester and staying in West Hampstead, which they found convenient for Willesden Junction. They were members of the Lancashire Locomotive Society. ‘As late as the ’80s,’ Paul told me, ‘club trips to London required a fiftytwo-seater coach. Now it’s a minibus with twelve at most.’

They would also be going to King’s Cross. ‘In my head,’ said Paul, ‘it’s still full of Atlantics. It’s like it was in The Ladykillers.’ They expected to have to put up with abuse. The worst place to spot trains, they told me, was any location where men in white vans might be driving past. ‘“Get a life, mate”,’ Paul said, ‘I’ve had that lots of times.’ Station officials were not necessarily on their side. Who’s to say that the sixty-year-old man with a flask of tea and an Ian Allan ABC guide might not be a member of Al-Qaeda? David had been questioned recently by an official at Manchester station: ‘Nothing came of it, but it was, you know, close questioning.’

Then again, trainspotters had always had their run-ins with authority. They may have been obsessives, but they were seldom wimps. In Forget the Anorak (What Trainspotting Was Really Like) Michael G. Harvey relates his trainspotting adventures of the ’50s. On an expedition to Ebbw Junction at Newport he and his mates threw stones to distract the gateman’s attention, then dashed in. Their reward: 126 steam locomotives ‘on shed’.

I used to be a member of The Railway Club, described in The Oxford Companion to British Railway History as ‘the oldest society of railway enthusiasts in the world’. The definite article marks it out as early, and it had been founded in 1899. A booklet, free to members, chronicled the history, recording the discontinuation in 1927 of musical entertainments at meetings; the installation, in 1932, of a cigarette machine dispensing Wills Gold Flake in the club premises at Victoria; a brake van trip of 1954 ‘along the Shipston-on-Stour branch (as far as Tiptree)’. In 2007 the club had eighty-five members, of whom I was the youngest at forty-five. Every year a Christmas dinner was held at a hotel near King’s Cross. Grace was said, and the queen was toasted. The chairman would then give his review of the year. One new member might have joined, but two would have died and one resigned. The club was wound up in 2009.

Today ‘ghost walks’ are conducted at Crewe station, and I believe they make reference to Walter de la Mare’s ghost story of the 1920s, Crewe. The narrator begins:

When murky dust begins to settle over the railway station at Crewe its first class waiting room grows steadily more stagnant. Particularly if one is alone in it. The long grimed windows do little more than sift the failing light that slopes in on them from the glass roof outside and is too feeble to penetrate into the recesses beyond. And the grained massive black-leather furniture becomes less and less inviting.

The narrator is about to leave for the ‘lights and joys of coloured bottles’ of the refreshment room when a voice calls to him. ‘It was an unusual voice, rapid, incoherent and internal, like that of a man in a dream or under the influence of a drug.’ This man tells the narrator a ghost story, set in the countryside in high summer. The waiting-room is employed as a banal counterpoint to the events of the ghost story, but it is the waiting-room that sticks in the mind. At one point the storyteller is interrupted by the arrival of a

thickset vigorous young porter carrying a bucket of coals in one hand, and a stumpy torch of smouldering brown paper in the other. He mounted one of our chairs and with a tug of finger and thumb instantly flooded our dingy quarters with an almost intolerable glare. That done he raked out the ash-grey fire with a lump of iron that may once have been a poker, and flung all but the complete contents of his bucket of coal on it.

If ours had been a steam train, the crew might have changed at Preston because it’s half-way to Glasgow. The Caledonian Sleeper stopped there to take on the breakfasts. I like Preston station, which is prettily lined out in red and green. As we pulled away, I fell into a doze, and so I am sorry to fans of Warrington Bank Quay station and Wigan stations, although I can’t believe there are many of those. On the platform at Warrington a signs says ‘Welcome to Warrington’, accompanied by a picture of splendid country house open to the public and advertised as being only half an hour away. Meanwhile the Unilever chemical works tower over the station.

Even if I had been awake, the sea – theoretically in view between Lancaster and Oxenholme – would have been invisible, given the lateness of the hour. Even on a sunny day you have to keep a careful eye out. You are alerted to its presence by an outbreak of caravans around Carnforth, which is where Brief Encounter was filmed, in the days when the station was on the main line, which it is no longer.

When we stopped at Carlisle, I woke up and looked out at the empty, monastery-like station. It serves Edinburgh, Glasgow, the Cumbrian coast and Leeds via the Settle–Carlisle Line. Such is the altitude on that line that you feel you are flying, especially in low cloud, when your ears pop. It is said that the wind on the Ribblehead viaduct could stop a steam engine. The purpose of the Settle–Carlisle was to enable the Midland railway to get to Scotland by the only route left available, so it is a trunk route, but the Midland put some stops on the way, as though absent-mindedly, for decoration, naming them after the nearest village, which was usually not very near at all but sheltering sensibly in the valley below. The station house at – or named after the village of – Dent is available to rent, and I stayed there alone once. It was a ghostly experience. Dent station is just south of the Moorcock Tunnel, the highest point on the Settle–Carlisle. Beyond the North End of Moorcock Tunnel a famous train crash occurred on Christmas Eve 1910. An overworked signalman made an error resulting in a Scotland-bound express smashing into two locomotives ‘running light’ (without carriages). The signalman responsible, a man called Sutton, famously turned to a colleague in the signal box and said, ‘Go to Bunce [the stationmaster at nearby Aisgill] and tell him I’m afraid I have wrecked the Scotch express.’

Looking from the station house, I became very conscious of the blackened railway sleepers placed upright in the ground a hundred years earlier to protect the track from snowdrifts. As the evening wore on, they seemed to be closing in on me, and I had to keep them at bay with a bottle of red wine. I wouldn’t rent Dent station house on Christmas Eve.

After Carlisle I continued my dreams (to paraphrase Night Mail), and so missed our climb up the Shap Bank. In steam days I might have been jolted awake because a banker engine would have been attached to the rear to give us a push. I awoke again to watch the passing of Scottish border hills in a grey and queasy dawn.

Our train divided at Carstairs, 30 miles south of Glasgow, but there was no pronounced shunt, our front eight carriages simply being freed from the rear eight, which would be taken to Edinburgh by another Class 90 loco, brought south from Mossend Depot.

My breakfast was delivered to me by a friendly female attendant as we were going through Motherwell. No bread rolls had been put on at Preston, so I was given a ‘croissant’, although I don’t think anyone French would have recognised it as such. This accompanied a microwaved package labelled ‘Meat Breakfast’ (and, sure enough, I had selected the non-vegetarian option the night before) with various scientific footnotes – including ‘Frozen product store below –18° C’ – that increased my sense of being on some sort of survival exercise rather than travelling in de-luxe comfort. The package contained a small sausage, approximately nineteen baked beans, a sliver of mushroom and a lump of scrambled egg. It was perfectly tasty, but it was only a nod in the direction of breakfast. The coffee was instant, but OK. I drank it as we rumbled through Motherwell in gentle rain. Graffiti on a wall near the station urged ‘Save Scottish Steel’. Motherwell was once Scotland’s ‘Steelopolis’, but the Ravenscraig steel works closed in 1992.

We pulled into Glasgow Central dead on time, at 7.20. In his amusing book Eleven Minutes Late Matthew Engel describes Glasgow Central as ‘My favourite station in Britain. It is full of rich old wood and rounded corners, and an air of familiarity: the windows on the bridge over Argyle Street are almost Parisian in their jollity … the flower stall is in the middle of the concourse, and the smell of lilies filled the air.’ It is a very handsome station, built by the Caledonian Railway in 1879 and rebuilt in Edwardian times. The old wood and rounded corners belong to the booking office and station retail outlets, which resemble big boats that have moored on the concourse. Even the fast food outlets have been elegantly accommodated within these structures, and the words ‘Burger King’ look almost dignified when written in brass capitals on old wood.

I had never been to Glasgow before, but I have been to Chicago and I was reminded of that city by the scruffy barrenness of some of the outskirts, the wide, grid-pattern streets, the architectural riches of the busy centre with the frequent outbreaks of Art Nouveau … and the entirely different way with the English language. Many ships and even more locomotives used to be built in Glasgow. Today no locomotives and few ships are built, but the city does not have the timeworn air of the Caledonian Sleeper.

TERMINATION

I returned to London on a Virgin Pendolino. I used not to like these trains, which were introduced in 2002. You feel as though you’ve been swallowed by a very narrow snake. The carriages taper towards the roof. This is because they are designed to tilt at speed, and at least they do tilt, unlike the Class 4 carriages on the ECML. It’s depressing nonetheless to see one passenger after another trying to stow their bag on the luggage rack, only to realise there’s room for nothing bigger than the smallest handbag. To compensate, floorto-ceiling luggage stands are fitted into the carriages, and these always seem to have windows to themselves, whereas the seat I’d been allocated – B61 – was next to a wall of solid plastic.

There is a persistent flippancy in the ‘customer-facing’ language of Virgin Trains that I do not think sits well with the dark satanic gravitas of the WCML. Richard Branson apparently loves it ‘when signs or announcements show a little sense of humour’. So the coffee is served in cups inscribed, ‘Hey there hot stuff fancy a brew?’ A notice in the lavatories reads: ‘Please do not flush sanitary towels, napkins, old mobile phones, unpaid bills, your ex’s jumper, hopes dreams or goldfish down this toilet.’ The toilet walls are decorated with pictures of one of Richard Branson’s hotair balloons. I don’t know why he doesn’t decorate his trains with a wraparound transfer of himself lying on a beach on the Virgin Islands, which is where he lives, thereby disqualifying himself, I suggest, from promoting any increase in aircraft movements over the homes of Londoners.

The doors on his trains beep for a long time before they close, and the trains are generally plagued by electronic noise nuisance. I have never once travelled on a Pendolino without hearing what sounds like the chirping of a demented cuckoo, followed by the words, ‘Attention train crew. Passenger emergency alarm operated.’ This occurs because the passenger emergency alarm is located where you expect the toilet flush button to be, whereas the flush button itself is well hidden.

But on my journey back from Glasgow I began to warm to the train. I had complained to the guard about my seat, and he said, ‘Tell you what sir, head along to carriage “U”. You’ll probably find yourself the only one in it.’ I thought he was making a surreal joke, but sure enough, the standard carriages on a Pendolino go from A to F, then U. There was one other person in carriage U. I sat down at a window seat, and I was impressed by the way the hurtling train leaned into the curves of the track through the sunlit Scottish borders, like a fast motorcyclist. The motion was especially graceful when the track curve matched the curvature of a hill or river. The other man in the carriage then began watching a recording of a football match on his iPhone without using headphones, and I had to go over and tell him to turn the damn thing down. He acquiesced, but I was out of sorts for the next couple of hundred miles. Beyond Rugby, I was back in the groove. It was the best time to be going north–south on one of the main lines: late afternoon, when the low sun makes the fields bright green. I re-tuned into the electric note of the train, which would intensify as it accelerated, which it seemed to want to do at every opportunity. We were veritably bounding towards Euston.

I closed my eyes against the low sun. I was tired in a pleasant way, and railway dreams may well have been in store: the Royal Scot pounding past on the ‘down’ line; a menu presented at my table, featuring mock turtle soup, halibut with sauce fines herbes, roast beef, fruit tart, cheese and coffee; the glittering sea appearing unexpectedly after Milton Keynes, bringing the smell of ozone through the open window; then a compartment suddenly enclosing me; a man in an astrakhan coat, sitting opposite, the clack of jointed rails, like the ticking of a clock as the gaslight guttered … but he is merely offering a packet of Aspros, since it appears from the motion of the carriage that we are now actually on the sea.

Instead there came a deafening electronic chime, and an over-amplified voice: ‘Ladies and gentlemen, this is Tony in the shop, just letting you know that we are now closing the shop for stock-taking prior to our arrival at London Euston. Please await further announcements regarding arrival at Euston from your train manager.’ There followed some crackling over the intercom, and it appeared that Tony had finished, but he had one more peroration in store: ‘And now, ladies and gentlemen, please sit back, relax and enjoy the rest of your journey.’