READING BETWEEN THE LINES

Andrew Martin tracks down the best railway titles in the Library’s collection.

I was once browsing in S. Railways &c. when another reader came up to me and said, ‘I’ve seen you up here before. Lovely and quiet, isn’t it?’ His remark implied that anyone browsing those shelves must be doing so for extra-curricular reasons – in order to unwind and get away from it all – but I’ve made a good part of my living from writing fiction and non-fiction about railways.

That, I admit, may appear perverse. The modern, de-glamorised network might have been designed to divert mainstream writers away from the subject of railways. It’s as if signal boxes, dining cars, buffet cars, porters, named locomotives (as opposed to anonymous ‘power cars’ , at the head of worm-like ‘multiple units’), manned country stations, marshalling yards and compartments were all too interesting to be allowed to continue. Yes, rail use is rising, but only because of the increasing numbers of people commuting in garish, overcrowded multiple units into our big cities. The train operators claim the credit for these rising numbers, and it is difficult to argue with them, given the complicated accounting of the modern, fractured railway.

One author who takes the privatised railway of 2016 as easily in his stride as that of 1900 is Christian Wolmar. In the introduction to his book Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain (2007), he writes, ‘I set out to put the history of the railways encompassing both their construction and their social impact in one easy-to-read volume’ , and I’d say he succeeded. Wolmar – author of half a dozen titles in S. Railways &c. – once confided to me that when it came to surveying source material, he ignored ‘all the really boring stuff’ .

The trouble with bad railway writing is simply stated: there are too many numbers. But I confess to finding a morbid fascination in such as the following, from The History of the Midland Railway by C.E. Stretton (1901): ‘On March 17th 1874, an officials’ special express to test the running of the cars at very high speed was worked between Derby and St Pancras with engine “No. 906” and two cars. The time allowed for the journey was only two and a half hours and included two stops of three minutes each, and a speed of 75mph was attained on parts of the journey; and four days later, on March 21st a special express of four cars conveyed about eighty visitors … .’

In spite of their glamorous potential, locomotives are problematic here, in that they generate a lot of numbers (wheel formations, steam pressures, top speeds, tractive effort) in addition to the serial number by which they are designated, and I was impressed by Simon Bradley’s nerve in almost completely ignoring them in his huge, recently published The Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015, two copies in S. Railways &c.). But when locomotives do appear they are memorably described in what is a beautifully written book: ‘To British eyes, the trains of North America seem especially gigantic. Thanks to interwar publicity stunts that sent the latest express locomotives from Stephenson’s homeland to tour the New World, it was possible to compare them side-by-side: photographed next to American locos, the visitors look like dapper little earls in the company of hulking lumberjacks. ’

One of the first railway books in the Bradley mould – a colourful social history as opposed to a technical manual – was published in 1852: Our Iron Roads: Their History, Construction, and Social Influences, by F.S. Williams. It is highly detailed and vivid on operational matters. Here is Williams on the operation of an emergency breakdown train: ‘A telegram flashes into the passenger station that there has been an accident. Two copies are immediately sent, one to the locomotive superintendent … the other to the traffic inspector of the district. A list of the names and addresses of the skilled men, twelve in all, who form the brake-down staff hangs up, framed and glazed, on the wall of the office; these are at once summoned. ’

Even though Williams’s main concentration is on Britain, he often goes abroad for comic material. So we have the story of a woman in New Zealand who stood on the tracks and flagged down a train in order to find out whether any passenger could give her change for a £1 note. Williams also relates how an ‘old and wellknown citizen of Chicago, of eccentric and jocular disposition’ , sought to confound the demarcation between passenger traffic and goods, by sending himself to Philadelphia in a wooden box. When the train stopped at Van Wert, Ohio, he was discovered by a railway guard who was passing through the baggage wagon, whereupon the stowaway was nearly shot for being a train robber, and taken to prison. It is reported in a similarly entertaining work, The Railway Station: A Social History, by Jeffrey Richards and John M. Mackenzie (1986), that sometime during the 1930s, the actor George Arliss booked himself into the Left Luggage Office at Charing Cross as a parcel, in order to escape marauding autograph hunters.

Our Iron Roads chronicles a protean, rapidly expanding network that reached its peak density in 1910. This is why, in 1968, the railway publishing firm of David & Charles published Bradshaw’s April 1910 Railway Guide, a reprint of the Bradshaw (i.e. the railway timetable) of April 1910. The Guardian predicted this would prove a waste of time, ‘like painting Union Jacks on chamber pots’ , but the resulting volume was a bestseller. I often dip into it, but am not like the man in the Victorian joke who stayed up all night reading Bradshaw ‘because he wanted to see how it ended’ . The sheer proliferation of trains and stations listed is fascinating, but it is hard to trace any particular journey, because of the way that main-line services are entangled with those on branch lines. Any traveller who did find the right service might be stymied by a treacherous footnote: ‘Not on Tuesdays’ , ‘Market days only’ . Punch used to print spoof Bradshaw pages, with footnotes such as ‘Ignore this – it is only here to confuse you’ .

Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits dining car no.1651 on the Orient Express in 1912, with the Chef de brigade in full CIWL uniform. © Archives CIWL/ Wagons-Lits Diffusion Paris.

The firm of David & Charles was founded by David St John Thomas, who is namechecked by Simon Bradley in The Railways: Nation, Network and People (2015). Of his trainspotting boyhood in the 1970s, Bradley writes: ‘Every public library then had a shelf-load of books by post-war authors such as C. Hamilton Ellis, L.T.C. Rolt and David St John Thomas, lively and engaging writers who leavened technical description with human interest and historical understanding. ’ As their careers progressed, these authors – all represented in S. Railways &c. – found themselves in the nostalgia business, simply by virtue of being interested in trains when they were being eclipsed by other transport modes. In his preface to The Trains We Loved (1947), C. Hamilton Ellis writes: ‘while to an onlooker the aeroplane seems perpetually angry, a cross, buzzing, busy thing, the train is decent, even benevolent. She rushes smiling through the summer meadows, laughs in austere mountain places, defies the lugubrious tunnel with a shriek of delight. ’

George Behrend, a sybaritic Francophile who specialised in trains de luxe. In particular, he is the best English-language source on the Compagnie Internationale des Wagons-Lits, whose elegant blue trains, comprising sleeping and dining cars, traversed Europe for most of the twentieth century. Here he is in Grand European Expresses: The Story of the ‘Wagons-Lits’ (1962), heading from Paris to Stockholm on the Nord Express in the 1960s, making the best of that period of supposed decline in Wagons-Lits standards, when buffet cars were replacing dining cars: ‘Two menus are available in the buffet car, the small one omitting either cheese or sweet. Both begin with Julienne d’Arblay soup served in those familiar big blue cups. The entrée is Timbale Milanaise … After this the chef de brigade comes round with slices of mouth-watering veal on a silver platter. The Cote de Veau fines herbes is accompanied by Pommes Cocottes (cooked in butter) and creamed spinach. For this is not one of the most expensive menus; it is ordinary, adequately bourgeois, which means it is elegantly served, carefully prepared and subtly tasteful. ’

You’d think that would be the end of the matter. But there is then a paragraph about the cheese board (Camembert, Port Salut and Gervais cream cheese), followed by another on the coffee and liqueurs, in which Behrend laments the lack of appreciation of Wagons-Lits ‘gastrology’ among his fellow countrymen, who find the price of their dinners ‘so much more interesting than how they taste’ and fail to show any imagination when it comes to those liqueurs: ‘For our Englishman it is invariably Cointreau, and he has extremely odd ideas about how the flavour is improved by a smut from the engine. ’ (The English, apparently, liked to open the windows in the dining or buffet cars.)

The Railway Workers 1840–1970, by Frank McKenna (1980), is an altogether grittier work. But what emerges is that, for all the tyrannies imposed upon them (and they were classed as ‘servants’ until 1947), railway employees enjoyed the job, especially those on the footplate: ‘A young fireman, sleep nagging at his eyeballs, could still thrill to the descent from The Peak into Derby station. ’ The book includes a glossary of railwaymen’s slang, invaluable to any writer of historical railway fiction. The London, Midland & Scottish (the LMS for short) was either ‘Let me sleep’ , ‘Lord, my shepherd’ , or ‘Elleva Mess’ . A fog might be ‘thick as a bag’ , while an engine steaming badly was, with charming simplicity, ‘running out of puff’ .

The best book I have read on rail enthusiasm is Platform Souls: The Trainspotter as 20th-Century Hero by Nicholas Whittaker, which first appeared in 1995. (Full disclosure: I wrote the introduction to the revised edition published last year, a copy of which I donated to the Library.) As a young man, Whittaker was a living disavowal of many preconceptions about trainspotters. He was rather glamorous, he liked young women (he attempted to convert one to trainspotting) and he was clearly just as interested in words as numbers. He did have the trainspotter’s terrible diet though. Here he is, a teenager at Crewe junction in the 1970s: ‘Sometimes we took sandwiches and flasks with us, but we would also visit the buffet for extras: packets of crisps or a slice of Dundee cake in cellophane. There were machines for chocolate bars and Paynes Poppets [note the ferocious specificity here – Whittaker also once wrote a book about sweets], and a variety of drinks. It’s a truism that machine drinks are dubious, but I rather liked the chicken soup. It looked like steaming urine with specks of green tinsel floating on top. ’

Rail enthusiasts, whether spotters in the strict sense or not, will occasionally want to stray from S. Railways &c. – perhaps to S. Railways &c., 4to., for example. Here they will find The Railway Journey: Trains and Travel in the 19th Century by Wolfgang Schivelbusch, translated from the German by Anselm Hollo, which was published in 1980 and is possibly the finest study of the experiential aspects of train travel, with chapter headings like ‘Railroad Space and Railroad Time’ , ‘The Compartment’ , ‘The History of Shock’ . Nobody has thought harder about train travel than Schivelbusch. For example: ‘The region that can be reached by train from Paris realizes itself for the Parisians by means of the train. It then appears as a product or appendage of the railroad, as in a phrase of Mallarmé’s: “Normandy, which, like Brittany, is part of the Western Railway.” ’ Sometimes Schivelbusch thinks too hard, and his prose becomes clogged, but the amusing illustrations and cartoons provide light relief, and justify the large format.

For pure visual pleasure, S. Railways &c., 4to. also offers a book about the most famous Wagons-Lits service: The Orient Express: The History of the Orient- Express Service from 1883 to 1950 by Anthony Burton (2001). This is the best photographic record that I’ve seen of the OE, and when it comes to a train on which the waiters dressed like Regency bucks, a photographic record is what you need, otherwise you might not believe it. There is also The Underground Stations of Leslie Green by David Leboff (2002). Green designed the Tube stations built by the American mogul (and fraudster) Charles Tyson Yerkes. They are to be found on the West End branch of the Northern Line, and the central parts of the Piccadilly and Bakerloo lines. Most have a surface building clad in tiles the colour – apparently – of oxblood (think Mornington Crescent) and the vari-coloured tiling on the platform walls is different in every case, so that illiterate travellers would be able to recognise their ‘home’ stations. Green died in 1908 aged 33, of overwork, and Leboff’s book is very moving, simply presenting colour pictures of every station with a clear commentary.

Of course not all the railway writing in the Library is in either of the S. Railways &c. Matthew Engel’s amusing book, Eleven Minutes Late: A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain (2009), which chronicles the ‘two centuries of fiasco that comprise our railway history’ , is for some – no doubt very good – reason in T. England (Gen.). The enjoyable railway-journey accounts of Paul Theroux (‘I sought trains, I found passengers’) are also in Topography.

Perhaps the very best railway writing is in fiction, especially under ‘D’ because nobody has written better about railways than Charles Dickens. His short story, Mugby Junction – which first appeared in 1866 in the Christmas number of All the Year Round (Periodicals), and is also included in Dickens’s Christmas Stories in various editions from 1876 (Fiction) – speaks of ‘Mysterious goods trains, covered with palls and gliding on like vast weird funerals’ . Of the lines themselves, Dickens writes that some of them ‘appeared to start with the fixed intention of going five hundred miles, and all of a sudden gave it up at an insignificant barrier, or turned off into a workshop. And then others, like intoxicated men, went a little way very straight, and surprisingly slued round and came back again. ’

In my wanderings about the Library, I am like those lines, regularly slewing around and going back to S. Railways &c., in the grip of an attraction that endures despite the best efforts of the modern-day train operators. .

Mornington Crescent Underground Station, designed by Leslie Green. Photograph © Ewan Munro.