The Permanent Way (and the Truth and the Life?)

‘The line to heaven by Christ was made,

With heavenly truth the Rails are laid,

From Earth to Heaven the line extends
To Life Eternal where it ends.’

On a tablet in the southern porch of Ely Cathedral is inscribed a poem called ‘The Spiritual Railway’, written in memory of William Pickering and Richard Edger, who lost their lives in a railway accident on Christmas Eve, 1845.  That year was only a decade and a half after the opening of the first modern railway between Liverpool and Manchester, but England had already gained two and a half thousand miles of track.  The ‘Railway Mania’ construction boom of the 1840s, gathering pace all the time, had reached Ely the previous July, when the Eastern Counties Railway opened the first route from London to Norwich.  The elegist saw a homiletic opportunity in the transport revolution, and the fruit of his labour has survived, even if, to us, it sometimes seems strained by his determination to make the analogy work and the verse scan:

‘God’s Word is the first Engineer

It points the way to Heaven so clear

Through tunnels dark and dreary here,

It does the way to Glory steer.’

This poem may sound ripe for a round of twenty-first century scoffing, and easy to dismiss as a rather contrived effort.  But the idea of a bond between religion and the railway is more compelling than it might seem.  For two bodies with such apparently different purposes there seem to be a surprising number of similarities, of all kinds, between them.  I find myself as determined as the poet to make something of it!

For instance, to set off on one track, there is the disproportion of railway enthusiasts among the clergy.  An obvious example is the Revd. W. V. Awdry, author of the ‘Thomas the Tank Engine’ books.  But there is also Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield from 1968 to 1976 and a prolific railway photographer, who incidentally died at Appleby station on the famous Settle-Carlisle line, having gone to photograph a steam-hauled excursion.   Then there is the Revd. H. D. E. Rokeby’s collection of photographs of British railway stations.  Others have noticed this phenomenon, especially with regard to model railways: Paul Roberts, himself a self-described ‘Restless Rector’ with a model railway in his garage, has written an interesting blog-post here, and there is an article by Christopher Howse here, with a nice reference to Canon Tony Chesterman’s ferroequinological reading of a verse from the prophet Isaiah: ‘I saw the Lord… and His train filled the temple… and the temple was filled with smoke…’ 

Both these authors consider the idea that the appeal to clergymen lies in order, without which no railway could be run properly.  One of Howse’s sources makes a suggestion (upon which Howse himself actually pours cold water) that the clergy seek in the model railway an ‘antidote to the often more nebulous realm of theology.’  The Restless Rector imagines that, for many, the antidote is rather to the ‘stress of parish life and… awkward people that one sometimes has to deal with.’  Railways appeal to him because of their ‘order and communication’, and he also wonders whether ‘building and running a model railway [might reflect] something of the creativeness of God, and his fatherly care.’  A model railway is an ideal world, built on a blank slate, cut off from the world’s chaos.  Even the real railway forms its own self-contained system, even its own world.  It is run from signalling centres as if its signals, track-circuits and points were isolated from the elements.  That world may be broken into by trees falling onto the line and lorries colliding with bridges, but, still, there is a sense that the railways, needing a higher level of order than other transport systems, give themselves a better chance of running as they ought by sealing themselves off from the outside world and having as little as possible to do with it.

I would agree with both writers that order is indeed the main link between railways and churches, but would go further.  My contention is that, far from being an antidote to parish life and still less to theology, the appeal of the railway is that it actually resembles the Church, in that the order of a railway is a mirror of the divine order of the Church.  Naturally I am not suggesting that we should all go on pilgrimage to Clapham Junction, or will all reach Heaven by way of Kensal Green.  But it seems that a railway — precisely by being reasonably cut off or set aside from the world — can be seen as a kind of model or proto-Church, or in which ideas unappealing to modern man, such as discipline, or self-sacrifice, or assent to a given doctrine, can be shown to be necessary, rewarding and ennobling.  

‘From Earth to Heaven the line extends…’ 

This idea becomes especially interesting when compared with other forms of transport: for example, with the motorway.  Surely it is not a coincidence that, in a secular, self-centred and ungentle culture, this should be the foremost means of national transport.  In both construction and operation, motorways leave us languishing in chaos, whereas railways elevate everyone and everything they touch to the level of their order.  Here is an example.  Victorian engineers had to thread their railways through difficult terrain, obliged to avoid too sharp a curvature in the track and any gradient steeper than 1 in 100.  These rules made the work more difficult but the result more beautiful, just as the constraints of rhyme and metre, used properly, make poetry ring with beauty.  Railways fit into the landscape; often they even embellish it, exactly as churches do.  But since motor-cars can deal more readily with gradients and curves than can trains, the builders of the motorways could be much freer.  They simply planted their highways virtually unrestrained across the countryside, or carved straight through the landscape, as at Stokenchurch in Buckinghamshire, and they threw up concrete flyovers however they pleased.  My perhaps rather controversial theory is that, just as railways fitted in perfectly with the Victorian revival of church architecture and indeed church-going, so do motorways with the profane self-indulgence of modern Britain.  It is not a coincidence that the Victorian age, for all its flaws, produced such masterpieces as London’s St. Pancras station, while the motorways have nothing to match (the sole exceptions, to my mind, being the Humber Bridge and first Severn Crossing).

I think the same pattern applies to the way each mode of transport works, too.  For instance, a railway journey explicitly requires discipline, and rewards it.  Between railway passengers there is an unspoken contract: without realising it, they all agree to turn up at a given place, at a given time, in order to travel together more efficiently and reduce each other’s costs.  With this contract comes the risk of missing the train, as painful experience teaches us, but those who do catch it should enjoy relatively rapid, comfortable, spacious, relaxing and (importantly) safe transport.  Motorists face no such obligation and no such discipline.  No arrangement exists, even between those making similar journeys.  They have the freedom to set off whenever they like, with the result that a thousand individual cars, most containing only one or two people each, burn countless gallons of fuel in order to achieve the same result.  Moreover, the freedom of the motorway is selective.  The flexibility it offers the motorist comes at the cost of swathes of countryside, of further untold swathes of silence around it, the freedom of nearby residents to live in peace and quiet, the freedom to go freely across the land on foot, and so on.  Railways, by comparison, take up far less space and make far less noise.

Railways are formative; we are the better for them.  Passengers looking out at the landscape gain a geographical understanding of the journey.  They will pass the Chilterns, then Cannock Chase, then undulating Cheshire; they will see the Forest of Bowland to the east and Morecambe Bay to the west.  Their picture of the country will be built up by passing directly through its towns and cities: Peterborough, Grantham, Newark, Retford, Doncaster, York.  Road travel, however, is not really experienced as movement through a landscape that could be learned, recognised or loved.  It is not a journey but a process, and often a dull one at that.  Driver and passengers are strapped into their seats, and progress is less intuitively apparent, not sliding past sideways but flickering and enlarging in the windscreen.  Anonymous numbered junctions diverge and merge from left and right.  The landscape can barely be seen beyond the crash-barriers, the sheer breadth of the carriageway and the far rim of concrete.  It is possible to make a road journey without any reference to the points of the compass or any sensation of having travelled anywhere.  Motorways do not even fit the landscape.  The road-signs and furniture have no human scale.  No art there; only artifice.

A minor motorway sign is still perhaps eleven feet tall and wide: compare its scale to the footpath on the left!

Railways have dignity and majesty.  Whenever a train calls at a station, particularly on inter-city services, there is still ceremony and custom, even this long after the age of steam.  A familiar voice announces a platform, a litany of cities is read, the signal changes, the train draws solemnly in, passengers alight or board, the doors slam, the whistle is blown and the train heaves itself into motion again.  Procedures introduced solely for safety’s sake take on the vestures of ritual.  But roads have no time for ceremony; motorists are in no mood for custom.  Clutch in, accelerator down.

Railways leaven our communal lives, too.  Passengers on a railway journey often fall into conversation, discover common interests and keep common courtesy alive.  They are encouraged to have consideration for others in order to share a common space.  They must stand clear, move aside, open doors, lift down luggage, move down inside the carriage and mind the gap.  These are all things in which far too many fail, but they are more likely to learn from these social encounters, in which people actually meet face-to-face, than they are on the road, where we are all shielded from each other by walls of metal which must be made ever thicker and Darwinian as the manners for which they are substitutes decline.  Cars offer us two temptations: to intoxicate ourselves with power, and to blind ourselves to others.  So many people give into these temptations so habitually, and to the point of such callous selfishness, that a road journey in modern Britain is now nearly impossible without at least one near-accident.

I think my theory stands even in the realm of law and obedience.  Many motorists tend to react to the rules of the road by pushing them as far as they will go: speed limits are regarded as a target to be hit; vehicles push in against right of way; traffic lights are just squeezed past at amber.  The Highway Code becomes surprisingly elastic when there are a few extra seconds to gain: I think I will go so far as to say that this is moral relativism in full operation.  Meanwhile, safety on the railway is quite a different affair.  The rules are absolutes; nobody is above them.  Every action made by a modern train driver is recorded electronically and the records downloaded for inspection at any point.  If the line speed (speed limit) is exceeded by even three miles an hour, a formal warning can be issued.  The rules must never be disobeyed.  A train must never enter a section of single track without a token.  A signal must never be passed at danger without permission.  Everything must be done to prevent any accident.  Many of these rules seem over-zealous and fussy at first, but there is often a death or serious injury behind them.  All railway staff have to do something that is very unfashionable these days: to profess their obedience to an authority higher than themselves.  The overall result, on British railways and elsewhere, has been an excellent safety record.

Lincoln Central station and 11th-century church of St Mary le Wigford.

My refrain, then, often repeated to long-suffering friends, is that rail travel is the most civilised means of transport known to man.   Whereas railways have an improving and uplifting effect upon those who run them and use them, even on those most in need of redemption, such as London commuters, car culture seems to corrupt drivers by the tens of thousands.  And what better evidence of the fundamental benevolence of this invention of the railways than the instinctive delight taken by children — who have a perceptive, if imperfect, grasp of good and evil — in railways and the trains they carry, even the nondescript electric trains of suburban south London?  Children love railways; they do not love motorways.

Fundamentally benevolent

Just as the railways dignify and uplift us, so does the Church.  Just as motorways wear us down with false freedom, so do many aspects of secular society.  The Church, like the railway, has its illogical aspects, and the failures of both are used by their opponents to call for their abolition in their entireties.  Motorways, like secular society, make too much sense: that is because they are seen only from one perspective, that of the Self.  Motorways and secularism promise cheap freedom, but turn out to deaden the spirit.  Railways and the Church ask for self-sacrifice, self-restraint and self-discipline, and give in return beauty, order, ceremony and majesty.  (The railway cannot quite manage the forgiveness of sins, the resurrection of the body or the life everlasting, of course).

I don’t know whether any of this enormous tract sounds at all convincing to any reader patient enough to have trawled through it…?  To me the comparison seems to work consistently enough for there to be something in it.  If nothing else, I can appeal to the story told by Michael Flanders about the lady who said, ‘If God had intended us to fly, he would never have given us the railways’!  (If only she had made that remark in reaction to the development of motorways).  Incidentally, I do not really think that modern British car culture can easily be defeated, nor that the railways will again come to be seen as the country’s principal means of transport, even though passenger numbers at the time of writing are at their highest for about fifty years.  Perhaps all that can be done is to persuade some poet to write a verse, perhaps entitled ‘The Spiritual Motorway’, describing souls hurtling around the M25 of secularism until they all end up snarled up in a traffic-jam.

Ely Cathedral, with station in the foreground, seen across the river Great Ouse.