Shippea Hill: in pride of second place

It’s that time of year again!  The Office of Rail and Road has released its annual statistics of passenger numbers per railway station, and as usual I have headed immediately for the lower extremities of the league table with one particular, cherished name in mind.  How had everyone’s favourite bleak fenland outpost done: Shippea Hill, with its tenuous service to an almost totally uninhabited tract of Cambridgeshire farmland?

Second to last!  With 76 passengers, and in 2,585th place, Shippea Hill is this year’s second-least-used station, after Elton and Orton in Nottinghamshire with 68.  Shippea Hill is mentioned in the press release as one of the five most-neglected stations, but it should still attract less limelight than it did ten or so years ago, when, with 22 recorded passengers in 2014/15 and only 12 in 2015/16, it earned the crown of Britain’s most-non-used station two years running.  Alas, or perhaps fortunately, this made it a non-victim of its own non-success: the hordes (relatively speaking) of passengers who then descended on the station with the express aim of trying to boost its statistics (for there could be no other reason to do so) successfully knocked it off the top, or bottom spot, which it has been denied ever since by the likes of Stanlow and Thornton or Redcar British Steel.  This subtle competition does not escape the attention of the Office of Rail and Road, which acknowledges that ‘in previous years, usage at some of the least used stations presented as part of these statistics has increased the following year.  We understand that highlighting the least used stations within these statistics can encourage people to visit them.’

Well, that’s me rumbled.  I have written elsewhere at lengths which I concede must seem extraordinary to any reasonable person about this station with its oft-changed, perennially debatable name and the vague extremity of the Cambridgeshire-Suffolk border that it serves, essentially featureless as it is but for a few million root vegetables and a half-dozen-strong assortment of Portakabins.  Even the ‘hill’ in question meets the relevant criteria solely by virtue of rising to not quite below sea level, in contrast to the land around it — and in the absence of any other prominent feature or settlement whatsoever, ‘Shippea Hill’ is at least more helpful than the station’s former name of ‘Mildenhall Road’, as Mildenhall itself is fourteen miles away.

After all these years, the service at Shippea Hill still remains comically impractical: one weekday morning train towards Norwich at 0726 on Mondays to Fridays, but when it comes to getting back again, nothing.  Only on Saturdays does the 0747 to Norwich have a corresponding return journey (arriving at Shippea Hill at 1615).  There is nothing on Sundays.  There remains no direct service to the neighbouring station of Lakenheath, which, perversely, is served only at weekends and enjoys a lavish Sunday service.

Second-to-last is, I think, the place that suits Shippea Hill the best.  For this is actually the most obscure position: almost as unused as the actual least-used station, but also far less talked about — just avoiding the glare of publicity which would be fatal to its status.  And Shippea Hill by nature shuns celebrity, resisting by its wind-bitten austerity, its sheer remoteness, and the obtuse blankness of the surrounding fenland, as many attempts on conquest as it possibly can.  Of course, penultimate place is also a dangerous position, where its cost-benefit-analysis-scorning situation can be circled in the red pen of some Director of Finance.  But should such threats ever loom, legions (again, relatively speaking) of Shippea Hill revivalists would, I am sure, rally to the cause.  Long may this bare patch of Fenland revel in its almost entirely unusable service — a level of provision as bleak and inhospitable as the landscape that surrounds it — and congratulations to the 70 who made it there this year!

Ticket office closures — Beeching all over again

My friend M. down at the station thinks this has been in the offing for years, “We’re closing,” he said in a resigned way when the news first came out, though he has since become more defiant.  His impression was that the Government is moving to implement a long-held ambition (and it does seem to be the Government, the Department for Transport, which wants this change, rather than the railway companies).

And the scale of the proposed cuts is breath-taking: they want to leave only a handful of ticket offices in the larger stations.  It is Beeching all over again.  Only 12% of tickets are sold by ticket clerks, goes the claim, and so at my local station and thousands of others ‘it is proposed that all ticket office windows […] will close, with staff moving to other areas of the station, where there is customer demand’.  

This slippery language makes my blood boil.  Customer demand is directed precisely to the ticket office, the accepted place for buying tickets and obtaining information.  This is decline, but worse than decline; decline with a smirk on its face, the brazen cheek to speak of a ‘change’ to the ticket office when what is intended is its outright elimination.  So might Henry VIII have spoken of his ‘change’ to the monasteries, or Brutus of his ‘change’ to Caesar’s abdomen.  

The difficulties of financing the railways are not trivial.  Passenger numbers are currently somewhere between 94–100% of pre-pandemic figures, but, because the recovery has been stronger in cheaper off-peak leisure travel than in the traditional backbone of passenger railways’ finances, namely commuter traffic, overall revenue is not.  Even so, the answer is surely to grow that revenue, not, as here, to cut off streams of revenue merely because they seem to be less efficient.

But a broader point is to be made beyond the merely financial.  One of the great strengths of the railways is that they are able to say to the passenger, ‘We can look after you’.  The network is complicated; ticketing as presently arranged is confusing; plenty of people lack confidence in travelling.  The ticket clerk can offer passengers something intangible yet incredibly valuable — peace of mind.  And this extends to the atmosphere of the station — the sense of emptiness and alienation resulting from the decline, in recent decades and across all sorts of public realms, of staff ‘keeping a general eye on things’ should already have taught us this lesson.

The 0927 to Horsham draws into Ockley station in Surrey, 14th May 2018.

This development is poor reward for the sterling work M. and his colleagues have done over the years.  He told me yesterday that he isn’t interested in standing about in the wind and the rain; it isn’t worth risking his health and he will probably give up if the plans go ahead.  Another friendly face lost, and we will all be the poorer for it.

What does give me a degree of hope is that the response to the consultation — which which can be answered here until Friday 1st September  — seems to have been pretty robust.  Let’s hope it is enough to persuade the Department for Transport to change its mind.  Here is my own response:

Dear Sir / Madam,

I am writing in answer to the consultation on the proposed general closure of railway station ticket offices.  I am afraid I must express my strong opposition to these plans.  Of the many reasons for my opposition, I would like to emphasise three in particular.

The first is that this decision, if implemented, will result in discrimination against passengers unable to buy tickets via machine or online.  Not everybody owns a computer or smartphone; not everybody has Internet access; not everybody is able to use a ticket machine.  We would not withdraw assistance for disabled passengers on the grounds that only a minority uses a wheelchair; surely the same logic applies here.

The second is that the decision is simply impractical.  I cannot see how it would be easier, let alone more economical, to sell tickets in ‘other areas of the station’ as the consultation poster puts it — anywhere other than in a ticket office.  How would cash be handled?  How would tickets be printed?  How could anything work in bad weather?  Has the safety of railway staff been taken into account?  The current proposals leave the practicalities entirely unexplained.

The third reason has to do with the common good.  One tremendous advantage of the railways is that they can undertake to look after their passengers, including those less confident in travelling.  The railway can say, ‘We can look after you.’  The reassuring and knowledgeable presence of the ticket clerk, in an accepted location, is a vital part of this.  It seems unbelievable that this should be dismissed so lightly.  Removing ticket offices will make the station environment far less welcoming, lower the confidence of travellers, and ultimately harm the railway’s prospects.

I am a strong supporter of the railways and use them more or less daily both for work and leisure.  I understand that growth in revenue is an urgent priority and am sympathetic to the railways’ efforts to balance the books.  However, I am astonished and dismayed by the severity of these proposals, which risk doing deep and lasting damage.  Other measures, such as increasing ticket inspections, should be tried first (on the Sutton loop in south London, in spite of travelling more or less daily, I have had my ticket checked only once in the past two years).  Indeed, the railways should be making ticket offices more efficient by expanding the number of services they offer, such as by equipping them to sell advance fares, which are currently only available online.

I would be grateful if you would pass these points on to Govia Thameslink Railway and to urge them in the strongest terms to reconsider their plans.

Yours faithfully, &c.

Updated 26th July 2023 in the light of the extension of the consultation deadline from 26th July to 1st September. 

Finding Adlestrop

Yes.  I remember Adlestrop —

The name, because one afternoon

Of heat the express-train drew up there

Unwontedly.  It was late June.

In fact it was the twenty-fourth of June: today is the anniversary of the ‘afternoon of heat’ that inspired this much-loved poem.  On this day in 1914 Edward Thomas was aboard the London to Hereford express, climbing up over the north Cotswolds, on his way to the poets’ colony at Dymock in Gloucestershire.  It was, as he recorded in his journal —

[…] a glorious day from 4:20 am and at 10 tiers above tiers of white cloud with dirtied grey bars above the sea of slate and dull brick by Battersea Park — then at Oxford tiers of pure white with loose large masses above and gaps of dark clear blue above haymaking and elms.

Then we stopped at Adlestrop, through the willows could be heard a chain of blackbirds songs at 12:45 and one thrush and no man seen, only a hiss of engine letting off steam.

Stopping outside Campden by banks of long grass willowherb and meadowsweet, extraordinary silence between the two periods of travel — looking out on grey dry stones between metals and the shining metals and over it all the elms willows and long grass — one man clears his throat — greater than rustic silence.  No house in view.  Stop only for a minute till signal is up. 

Another stop like this outside Colwell [Colwall, just west of the Malverns?] on 27th with thrush singing on hillside above on road.

I hope I do Edward Thomas no disservice in observing that it is as much because of circumstance as the poem’s beauty in itself that this poem is so fondly and firmly remembered.  Within three months of that afternoon Britain was at war; three years later Thomas was dead, killed by a shell at Arras.  In March 1963 they came for the station as well: if you turn in your copy of Richard Beeching’s ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’ part 1, section 3, to page 109, the list for England of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ — a list which reads, Ian Hislop has observed, ‘like the names on a war memorial’ — there it is, the fifth item from the top, ‘Adlestrop’, in cold dispassionate print between Addingham and Ainsdale: so callously tin-eared, so ruthlessly bureaucratic and ignorant, so bone-headedly inevitable, that there is something actually poetic and tragic about its presence on this list.

The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.

No one left and no one came

On the bare platform. What I saw

Was Adlestrop — only the name

And willows, willow-herb, and grass,

And meadowsweet, and haycocks dry,

No whit less still and lonely fair

Than the high cloudlets in the sky.

And for that minute a blackbird sang

Close by, and round him, mistier,

Farther and farther, all the birds

Of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire.

Thomas recorded the event because he knew it was fleeting, one of those in-between moments that we so seldom remember to remember — but did he realise how fleeting how much of it was?  For it is not only the moment that is now lost, but the country, the world in which it was possible.  Not only ‘that minute’ but most of what was in it and around it: the locomotive, the station, the silence aboard stationary carriages; no doubt most of the birdsong too.  The Dymock colony, the whole reason for the journey — the whole set of circumstances upon which it was contingent.  The railway survives — Brunel’s ‘Cotswold line’ from Oxford to Worcester is still one of Britain’s loveliest —  but of the station, other than the stationmaster’s house, nothing is left but the sign, mounted on a bus stop in the village  — only the name.  

The poem itself seems in retrospect as fragile and precious as the moment it is describing: written just in time, in the last years when such a poem could be made, by Thomas or anyone else.  This one vignette of a single signal-check has been pressed and hardened by the tremendous historical forces around it into a tiny treasured gem, standing not only for itself, but for all those other unwonted moments of ‘extraordinary silence’ that were possible, and about which poems could have been written, in that old world before the war.  Almost by accident, then, we have this snapshot from a time, perhaps the last time, when Deep England could still make a riposte to the modern world, could conspire to bring a modern express train to a grinding halt and ambush its passengers with her shocking stillness.  Thomas’s sketch — which even in finished form retains the jotted-down freshness of his original journal entry — is now as strangely dizzying as one of those old autochrome photographs, so real we can scarcely believe it.

The site of Adlestrop station is between Kingham and Moreton-in-Marsh stations on the climb to Chipping Campden summit; the precise coordinates are 51.9360°N 1.6591°W, immediately north-west of the overbridge carrying the road from Adlestrop to Oddington.  On this cab-ride video of the journey from London Paddington to Hereford, the site can be seen just after the bridge at 1h 16m seconds.  (The former stationmaster’s house can just be glimpsed on the left).

Thomas was absolutely correct, by the way, to speak of ‘Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire’ — the county boundary crosses the railway less than a mile from the station in the up direction. (Its rough position is indicated by a caption on the cab-ride video at 1h 14m 40s; the line it takes is rather convoluted but it makes its final crossing of the railway at the end of the wall of tall trees on the right).  Thomas’s last line was as accurate as it was evocative.

What does it mean, I wonder, that at the poem’s centenary in 2014, a special train was organised to recreate the ‘unwonted stop’, slowing down at the old station so that the lines could be read over the loudspeaker?  Here is a video taken from aboard the train —

— and here is another from the overbridge itself, where the poem was also read as the train rounded the curve.

I cannot help feeling that something deep and beautiful is happening here.  These people have come to a particular place at a particular time — in other words, come on pilgrimage — for the sake of a much-loved, long-remembered poem.  Poetry often seems to be at its strongest when it works through the memory, and this poem, in touching not only our minds and hearts but the English landscape and time itself, has become a kind of memorial — one not of marble or granite, but made up of all four of those elements: minds, hearts, landscape, time.  Thus, just as the poem has come to stand for a whole vanished world, so this remembrance of the poem was a remembrance of that world.  To remember Adlestrop is to remember England.  And, even though it has been blotted out of the landscape and is no more than a memory, Adlestrop station still persists; it still somehow belongs to the English landscape, and the poem keeps it there. 

So for that minute a lost world lived again, proven still to abide in many minds and hearts; and poetry sustained it, poetry summoned it into sight.  Poetry is deeper than we know; it is as deep as England, as history, as life itself.

Farewell to the 455s

Through Mitcham Eastfields on a Horsham train, 10 August 2011

This coming Saturday, 14th May, sees the withdrawal from the suburban routes of the South Central Division — the tangle of railways running out of Victoria and London Bridge into south London — of the class 455 electric multiple units that have held sway in these parts for nearly forty years.  Their siblings on the South Western lines out of Waterloo will apparently follow in the next few months.

Basking in the sun at Victoria, 28 August 2013

Few ordinary passengers are likely to mourn them.  They are not glamorous, nor were they built to be, though I think better care could still have been taken of their interiors in recent years.  They were designed for mass short-distance transport, to lug commuters around the Hills and Commons of the southern boroughs; to venture to climes no more exotic than Crystal Palace, Epsom Downs, Caterham or Dorking.  I doubt they have averaged more than around twenty miles per hour over the course of their working lives.  But they have worked solidly, clocking up thousands upon thousands of rush-hours since the early 1980s.

Rumbling across the South Circular overbridge into Tulse Hill, bound for the Wimbledon loop, 11 April 2019

I am among those who will miss them.  It was against the backdrop of these faithful workhorses, plying their way up to London or down to Dorking, their acceleration distantly, enticingly audible over the suburban rooftops, that my rail enthusiasm was first contracted and swiftly found to be incurable.  The aforementioned South Western sister-class ran right past my grandmother’s garden, and I used a 455 as my subject for the centre-piece of a school art project (because I knew I could draw trains and buildings, but not people!).  More recently — until the pandemic in fact — my train into work was reliably formed by one of these units.

A Victoria-bound semi-fast accelerating through Mitcham Eastfields, 4 January 2011

Like the slightly younger 319s (themselves a familiar sight around South London until a few years ago) and their cousins the recently-scrapped two-car 456s, the 455s were built at York by British Rail Engineering Limited, as lettering on the step-plates proudly declared.  However, in contrast to the 319s — which were more souped-up trains, designed for Luton and Gatwick routes, for people with flights to catch, always seeming cramped by the chords and spurs of suburban south London, itching for the open stretches of the Brighton or Midland main lines — the 455s seemed gentler and more sedate, more suited to the way we do things here, south of the river, in the land of the electrified third rail.  To a 455, with its seldom-attained top speed of 75 mph, it did not seem to matter if we got to Ewell East now or some time next week.  They trundled their way around, taking their time about everything.  No point rushing this curve or that junction; there’ll only be something else to brake for around the next bend.  

Through the window onto dawn-lit commuterland, 1 October 2018

Adding to the dreamy aura of these trains were the various reassuring sounds they made: the chirruping of the brakes and the soft sigh on their release, the warble-piping of the original door alarms, the clunk of the camshaft on departure, and the leisurely thrumming of the brake compressors, this last being the sound I will miss the most.  Then there were the motors, matching the register of a cello, rising from a growl from a standstill to the very top of the tenor range if given the chance to stretch their legs.  The only alarming sound was the occasional crunch of electricity arcing from the third rail. 

Arriving at Streatham Hill on the 1617 to London Bridge, the once-daily parliamentary service via the Leigham Spur and Tulse Hill, 25 April 2019

The motors themselves are worth remarking on, for they are actually recycled.  Incredible as it may sound, they are over eighty years old, and more than twice the age the trains they have been powering.  The early Eighties, when these units were built, were not an easy time for British Rail, which, struggling under persistent inadequacies in government subsidy, had constantly to make do and mend with their scarce resources.  Their solution in this case was to fit the new trains with not only second- but third-hand motors built originally by the Southern Railway for its electric units in the 1930s.  Though now into their ninth decade and effectively dating from the electrification itself, the motors still seem perfectly sound to my ear.  Whatever the reason is for the withdrawal of these trains, I doubt it has anything to do with the traction equipment.

A down train draws into Wandsworth Common, 9 December 2018

I am not the only one sad to see them go.  ‘South London is [going to] feel weird without them,’ said one contributor to the ever-perusable Rail Forums.  Another chap, a driver who also films the modern railway scene and has a presence on YouTube, told me in an exchange in the comments, ‘These were the trains I grew up on, the trains that took me on all sorts of adventures and when I passed out [i.e. qualified] as a driver became my core traction.’

Epsom train rounding the curve south of Mitcham Junction, 4 February 2022

There is always a pang to see the clearing out of the furniture of our beginnings, however ordinary these things may be.  Perhaps, in fact, the more ordinary and the more constant they have seemed, the sharper the pang.  Bit by bit, the railscape of my childhood is disappearing (the analogue signals, the bell at Eastfields level crossing, the late Phil Sayer’s voice over the speakers…), and by the end of this weekend another major part of it will have crumbled completely away.  I will certainly miss the familiar presence of these old units, with the many associations they hold for me.

A final farewell, Mitcham Common, 4 February 2022

But let us end with the nearest a 455 ever came to attaining railway glory.  Under the pre-2018 timetable, one single passenger service each weekday was booked to run non-stop down the fourteen-mile line from Dorking to Horsham, and this was generally allocated to a 455 unit.  So, just before that timetable was abolished, I took one of the last opportunities to experience this run, and filmed the journey from just beyond Betchworth Tunnel to just short of Horsham.  As I have said, 455s hardly ever had the chance of a clear non-stop flat-out run like this, and certainly in their latter years Horsham was the furthest south they ever ventured in regular service.  So it was a rare treat to see this humble suburban unit reliving the glory days of the old Bognor expresses, accelerating to the full line speed of 75 mph along probably my favourite stretch of railway in south-east England.  (We really begin to pick up speed after Holmwood, five minutes in, and after Ockley, at six minutes, there is the added bonus of some jointed track, which we hammer over at full tilt.)  The date was the 14th May, 2018 — four years to the day, as it turns out, before the final withdrawal of the class.

The ‘Portsmouth Lines’ Once More

Passengers resigned to the sedate progress of trains running out from London via Streatham, Mitcham or Carshalton towards Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking might be surprised to discover that, in railway parlance, these are referred to as the ‘Portsmouth lines’.  A strange name, because none of the suburban trains trundling down this way are bound for anywhere nearly as exotic.  Most are content to fizzle out at Epsom or Dorking; the furthest south any direct passenger trains get is the hourly service to Horsham in Sussex.  But this name, hidden away in the technicalities of railway operation, is a clue to the line’s past glories.

Detail (click image to enlarge) of the current railway network of south London, Surrey and West Sussex.  Most of these lines were built by the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway.  The so-called ‘Portsmouth lines’ run south from Peckham Rye via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom and Dorking to Horsham.  London expresses from the south coast formerly used this route between Horsham and the connection at Streatham with the main line into Victoria, but since 1978 have run via Three Bridges and East Croydon.

Because communication on the railway must always be clear and unambiguous, almost every piece of infrastructure — junctions, bridges, tunnels, signals — has an accepted name or number by which drivers, track workers, signallers and engineers alike can be sure they are discussing the right thing.  This goes for every running line on the network, too: every individual track that carries trains has a particular name.  This is usually of two or three words, and generally giving some indication of the line’s route and its direction.  On a four-track main line, for example, there is usually an ‘Up Fast’ or ‘Up Main’, the track carrying expresses towards the railway’s main centre (traditionally either London or Derby), then a ‘Down Fast’ for those coming the other way, and Up and Down ‘Slows’ or ‘Reliefs’ for stopping trains.  All over the place there are ‘Loops’ and ‘Spurs’ or sometimes ‘Reversible’ lines for stretches of bi-directional track.   All this means that tracks and routes can be recognised and distinguished from each other immediately, even at complex junctions.  It allows a driver to communicate a train’s exact position to a signalling centre miles away, or a track worker knows where to aim his pick-axe, and so on.

A diagram of Streatham South Junction from an old version of the Sectional Appendix for Kent and Sussex.  See p. 511 onwards for the entirety of the ‘Portsmouth’ lines.

As with so much on the railways, these names have often been established for decades, even surviving changes in the use of the track itself.  So it is with the ‘Up and Down Portsmouth’, which begin at Peckham Rye in south London of all places, where the lines branch off to the south-west from the South London line out of London Bridge.  The tracks keep their Portsmouth name as far as Leatherhead, the last junction on the line.  Between there and Horsham, since there is no diverging route from which they need to be distinguished, the two tracks are known simply as the ‘Up and Down Main’.

Nowadays this line is seldom thought of as a through route at all; no direct trains travel its whole length in ordinary service.  But its builders, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway, really did have their sights set on a far prize when they completed it in 1868.  Via Tulse Hill, Streatham, Mitcham Junction, Sutton, Epsom, Leatherhead and Dorking they established a new route to Horsham, and, by running thence onto the Arun Valley line southwards to Arundel and the junction at Ford, to the south coast: Bognor, Littlehampton and the line along the coast to Chichester and Portsmouth.  (On the approach to Portsmouth the L.B.S.C.R. ran afoul of its competitor, the London and South Western, whose rival Portsmouth Direct line offered another, quicker route from London Waterloo via Guildford and Haslemere.  Competition between the two companies had ignited into outright conflict and actual blockades in the so-called Battle of Havant in 1859.)

The L.B.S.C.R. and its successors’ expresses to Portsmouth and Bognor went via Sutton and Dorking for many years.  They generally ran to and from London Victoria, joining and leaving the original route via the spurs and junctions at Streatham where it crosses the Brighton Main Line. (This remains the principal route for trains on this line).  The highest honour in the line’s history was surely on the 2nd February 1901, when Queen Victoria’s funeral train came this way.  She had died at Osborne House on the Isle of Wight on the 22nd January; her body was carried from Portsmouth to London at speeds reported to have reached 80mph.

A video uploaded to Youtube by ‘Bogglesham’ of trains at Dorking (North) station in 1972, including some serving the south coast.  Update: this film can be seen in higher quality here: https://player.bfi.org.uk/free/film/watch-last-years-of-victoria-to-portsmouth-expresses-1977-online

Those days are almost forgotten now.  Regular expresses via Sutton and Dorking came to an end in 1978, when they were almost all re-routed, at least in part in order to serve the rapidly-expanding airport at Gatwick.  Trains coming up the Arun Valley now take the longer but faster-timed route via the Brighton Main Line, running east to Crawley, joining the main line at Three Bridges, and heading for London via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon.  Meanwhile the old line has been relegated to a back route, the service along its southern section especially being cut back to a pretty sparse offering until the improvements of the new timetable of 2018.  Yet even down here the past was not quite buried: at the junction immediately north of Horsham station, the lines to and from Dorking are still referred to as the ‘Up and Down Main’ and the busier lines to Three Bridges merely as the ‘Up and Down Horsham’.

A video by ‘thetransporthub’ on Youtube including a diverted London Victoria – Gatwick train racing through Ockley station earlier this year with that now-rare sound, the glorious percussion of wheels over traditional jointed track at nearly 75 mph.  Sadly for railway romantics, the track is likely to be replaced in August 2021.

Not altogether forgotten, then.  Memories are long on the railways, and about once a year the old route is used for diversions during engineering works, sometimes for trains serving Gatwick but at other times, as at November half-term this year, from distant, far-flung Portsmouth itself (a place whose existence is unimaginable in this pandemic year).  The normal route being closed at Crawley for the installation of a new footbridge, the Portsmouth and Bognor expresses were once again sent the old way.  Running non-stop from Horsham to Clapham Junction apart from an unadvertised call at Epsom (perhaps to pick up or set down a guard, or for a crew change) they offered the unusual sight of twelve coach trains sweeping, if not exactly at high speed, up and down to London from the south coast along a line that is now effectively a suburban branch.  After ten months without any of my usual railway adventures, it was nice to see the ‘Portsmouth lines’ regain, however briefly, a glimmer of their former glory.

Update, 30th December 2020: A shame that a landslip on the embankment near Ockley has scuppered the reprise of this arrangement that had been due this week.

A diverted up express slows for the curves at Mitcham Junction, 21st November 2020.  Ordinarily it would run via Gatwick Airport and East Croydon; today it has been sent via the scenic route.

Farewell to a Quirk

The 0927 to Horsham draws into Ockley station, 14 May 2018.

The new timetable that descended on most of the railways of south-eastern England in late May has, alas, been in the headlines more or less ever since, not really because of any fault in the plan itself, but mainly because one of the largest railway companies involved arrived at D-day without having trained enough drivers for the new regime.  So no sooner had the bright new age dawned than it disintegrated impressively into a cascade of chaos which has only gradually been stemmed.

Of course any railway timetable, which must count among man’s most audacious attempts to impose order on this universe of turmoil, can always be scuppered by the slightest hitch.  Even at the theoretical stage, the task of designing one is tremendously complicated, especially in Britain, whose network is still among the densest in the world.  The idea of imposing upon the tangle of lines and chords and junctions a pattern of regular and reasonably frequent movement, in which no train ever conflicts with another, is enough to turn a grown man weak at the knees.  For, notwithstanding the brilliance and solidity of Victorian engineering and workmanship, a tangle really is what they are.  Our railways were never built to a central coherent plan, but by a multiplicity of companies all after slices of a multiplicity of pies, and willing to create any number of awkward layouts to that end. 

And then there is the catalogue of practical difficulties that reality itself will let loose upon the timetable the moment it is implemented.  On the one hand is the formidable traffic to be handled: in volumes far higher than a hundred and fifty years ago, covering greater distances, and with different flows and peaks.  And on the other hand are, in no particular order, damage to the permanent way, damage to rolling stock, signal failures, track circuit failures, floods, subsidence, frozen points in winter, buckled rails in summer, debris on the line, vandals on the line, leaves on the line and the wrong kind of snow (for all that the press scoffs at these last two, they are both genuine problems), lorries bashing bridges, guards left on platforms, missing drivers…  And what chaos these cannot cause may be provided in abundance, as it turns out, by the directors’ board of the railway company itself.

So the timetable planners are noble souls, going forth to solve a giant puzzle to which the Victorians, who set it, never guaranteed an answer.  The railway map spreads out like a chess-board and the trains like pieces, with their differing routes and differing calling patterns.  All-stations stoppers, outer suburban semi-fasts and inter-city expresses must all move harmoniously and regularly.  Thus a timetable becomes a daring sustained utterance of ideal order against all the forces of chaos ranged against it.  It is both a meticulous work of arithmetic and a courageous act of faith.  Dare I even call the planners poets?  After all, as the character Syme explains in this passage I have seen quoted from G. K. Chesterton’s The Man who was Thursday (a novel which I must get round to reading):

Chaos is dull; because in chaos the train might indeed go anywhere, to Baker Street or to Baghdad. But man is a magician, and his whole magic is in this, that he does say Victoria, and lo! it is Victoria.  No, take your books of mere poetry and prose; let me read a time table, with tears of pride.  Take your Byron, who commemorates the defeats of man; give me Bradshaw, who commemorates his victories.  Give me Bradshaw, I say!

The nearest equivalent to Bradshaw’s famous volume is now a 41-megabyte download from the Network Rail website, though limited editions of the print version are still published.  Some might expect such a tome to be resoundingly dull.  But I wonder whether a majority of passengers would be with Chesterton: the idea that ‘chaos is dull’ must resonate with many who have endured long waits and dwindling hopes these past few months.  Even in ordinary circumstances, any working regular timetable often masks a great deal of complexity.  Perhaps we should marvel not at the scale of disruption that sometimes occurs, but that any timetable should ever have reasonable success.  For instance, to a passenger it might seem the natural order of things that trains from a given station should depart in a given direction at the same number of minutes past each hour throughout the day — 0812, 0912, 1012 and so on — according to a ‘clock-face’ timetable.  But this is more difficult to achieve than it might seem.  Enough time must be left at each terminus to turn around to recover from any delays, for instance.  Also, the circumstances behind the scenes are not the same throughout the day: everything must be in the right place in the morning, and be left in the right place at night, and the preparations to be made on the eve of Sunday are different from those for the eve of Monday.  The timetable also has to shoulder the burden of rush-hour, in its two opposite directions, at each end of the day.  So no wonder the order is not quite universal.

Yet once the timetablers have suppressed most of the chaos, I find I am quite fond of any quirks that are left, providing I am not actually caught out by them.  The old timetable had quite a few variations that were interesting to those of us to whom, I suppose, these things are interesting.  Some were adjustments made to cope with rush-hour traffic; others were stop-gaps to ease miscalculations in the timetable itself.  Still others were Parliamentary trains, one of the token services run perhaps once a day or once a week to prove to the satisfaction of the law, but of very few passengers, that a line or station is still open for business, and thereby to avoid the palaver of applying to close it (There are enough of these to justify the compilation of this list of Passenger Services over Unusual Lines; see also my write-up of an adventure to Shippea Hill, the station that is hardly a station by a hill that is hardly a hill).  Other quirks seemed to exist for reasons no longer discernible, lost in the mists of time, for traditions last long on the railways.  The new regime’s planners, though, have striven to simplify things, adjusting irregularities and ironing out the oddities of the old order, and their achievement is impressive.  But some of the old timings will not pass unmourned; at least, not by those of us who mourn these things.

One quirk that we have lost involved the line that runs southwards from Dorking in Surrey to Horsham in West Sussex, an odd stretch of railway, because, although it was built as a double-track main line (and retains a line speed of 75mph), it is rather a backwater.  Perhaps it is because it does not aim squarely at a terminus as it nears London, but appears to dissolve into the various intertwining strands and loops in the suburbs.  These are now too congested with local traffic to accommodate many non-stop trains, and there are no facilities left for fast trains to overtake slow.  The map below shows how the route becomes ensnared in the confusion of South London.  Gone are the days when coastal expresses ran this way to and from London: the fastest trains from Horsham to Victoria now use the route to the east via Gatwick and East Croydon.  Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham, the three euphonically-named intermediate stations on the stretch between Horsham and Dorking, have only an hourly service in each direction, and all trains stop at all stations.  My complaint is not of dullness, as we have established! — rather, the disappointment lies in the failure to exploit railway infrastructure to the full.  What is a main line for, if you do not send trains down it at top speed?


A tangle really is what they are.  (Click to enlarge; the Dorking-Horsham line is in the lower left-hand corner)

Yet under the old timetable the line was allowed, once a weekday, to reclaim its former glory.  For the unassuming 0756 from London Victoria, having extricated itself from the tangle of South London lines and trundled unhurriedly through outer suburbia in accordance with its designation as secondary passenger service 2E12, was transformed, on its arrival at Dorking just before nine, into the Horsham Flyer, the Wealdman, the Sussexpress, unique in being timetabled to run fast from Dorking to Horsham, non-stop through Holmwood, Ockley and Warnham.  It was not quite clear for whose benefit this dash was made, away from London in the morning peak and rather on the late side for rush hour anyway.  Most likely not for the passengers’: it may well have been for operational ease, to avoid the need for guards who were still needed to oversee stops on this line, or perhaps simply to reach Horsham in time to form an ordinary stopping service back.

Still, it was there to be travelled on by any passengers who wanted it.  It also produced a fluke in the ticketing system.  For those approaching from the north and wanting Ockley or Warnham stations at that time in the morning, it was quicker to take this train to Horsham, be carried straight past the desired station, and then double back with the returning London service, than to wait for the next direct ‘down’ train — and, just this once per day, an easement made this doubling-back perfectly valid on ordinary tickets to these stations.  What more remained for me to do, then, than to concoct some pressing need to arrive at Ockley station at 9.20 in the morning, before the arrival of the direct train seven minutes later, and thus give myself an excuse to try it out?

For months after I discovered it, this drifted around pleasantly in my thoughts as a nice idea to do some day, along with the knowledge that Leith Hill, the highest point in south-east England, stands nearby.  But the advent of an all-standardising, quirk-free new timetable, under which I found this oddity was to be abolished, concentrated my mind.  Yes, definite action was suddenly necessary: there was now a deadline before which a walk from Ockley station to Holmwood station via Leith Hill was absolutely required to take place.  And might 9.27 a.m. not be a little on the late side to set off on this walk?  Indeed, would not a slightly earlier time, such as 9.20, be more or less perfect?

So on the fourteenth of May, in the last week of the old timetable, I too had cause to extricate myself from South London so that I could number myself among the last beneficiaries of the the Unmitigated England Express.  It was a still-golden morning flooded with still-welcome sunshine, long before drought was to drain England of all her colour.  All down the line the train had been emptying, and there were only a handful of us left aboard as we drew unostentatiously out of Dorking, round the corner and into Betchworth tunnel.  Through the darkness we accelerated, bursting out into unsuburbanised Surrey, past trees aflash with fresh May foliage, past stiff haughty pines, past the working farms and all that space in the fields beyond.  And continued to accelerate, leaving behind us the chalk cliffs of the North Downs, and bringing the shadowier evergreen of the Greensand Ridge, with its culmination in the summit of Leith Hill, into view on the right.  Straight through Holmwood, the ride becoming a bit rough, and gaining speed until at least Ockley, after which a stretch of jointed track lay in wait with its ambush of nostalgia.  (To run over jointed track at 75mph is to recall old England to life).  Warnham, warm in the sun, with one lone gentleman on the platform, was gone as soon as it was glimpsed.  The distance to Horsham, 13 miles and 30 chains, was covered in just over fifteen minutes — an average speed of about 53mph.  Not bad, it must be said, for suburban stock designed to pootle around South London all day.

At Horsham I stepped nonchalantly onto the platform and then just as nonchalantly boarded again, and presently the train set off back towards London again, possibly with its own air of nonchalance.  No high speeds but business as usual between there and Ockley, where I alighted.  I noted not without smugness that I had indeed arrived a crucial three minutes earlier than the next down train, and therefore that the detour via Horsham and the Unmitigated England Express had been entirely and unquestionably worth the effort.  The nearby A24 made its presence felt, but I lingered for a while to admire the handsome station building, before then setting off on my walk.

The time I had gained by doubling back via Horsham was immediately wasted faffing around in a half-field-half-scrapyard beside the dual carriageway where nature had been allowed or possibly encouraged to obfuscate the footpath.  So it was the long way round that I came to Capel village (here, as so often with British railways, the station is not named after the nearest significant settlement), and rested in the parish church.

St John the Baptist’s Church, Capel, Surrey.

Setting off westwards from the village I found myself in that sort of England which, not unlike a railway timetable, impossibly survives and even thrives in spite of all that threatens it.  The atmosphere was encroached upon but not shattered by the intrusions of the A24 and A29, nor by the procession of aeroplanes in the bright south descending towards Gatwick.  I met someone only once (a man building a roof in the blazing sun) and lost my way only twice (a GPS reader would have saved me a lot of trouble and spoilt all the fun) in the five or six miles before I reached Leith Hill Place, where stands the childhood home of Ralph Vaughan Williams.

Leith Hill Place

Leith Hill itself is understandably well-known and even on a weekday there were plenty of people at the top.  From its summit on a clear day London can be seen to the north, and the sea glimpsed through Shoreham Gap in the south.  The enjoyable story of the tower at the top is that it was built (or had built!) in 1765 by Richard Hull, an earlier resident of Leith Hill Place, in order to bring the hill, whose natural summit is 965 feet high, to an elevation of a thousand feet.  The tower is looked after by only the fourth keeper since the mid-nineteenth-century, who sells elderflower lemonade from a hatch in the ground floor of the tower.  There are other refreshments for sale as well, but it is the elderflower lemonade I remember.

Leith Hill Place from just below the summit of Leith Hill.  The Weald and South Downs in the distance.

Then down from the summit via Coldharbour village (whose apparently incongruous name probably comes from the French col d’arbour, a wooded hill), back to Holmwood for the London train, and home.  It was almost as if the main point of the exercise had not been to justify the exploitation of an obscure piece of railway operation for the sake of curiosity.

This is something else that railways do.  Their rules and patterns and occasional oddities add spice to the whole idea of planning a jaunt like this, and turn the whole country into a kind of puzzle or board game, though not always in a frivolous way.  Roads have no timetables, so they have no timetable quirks.  I am sure my trip was more enjoyable for all that meticulously-planned messing about in trains.

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Ten years of Mitcham Eastfields station

Mitcham Eastfields station, with London’s skyline in the distance, 6 January 2015.

It is strange that a town once skirted by the world’s first public railway line should have emerged from the industrial age rather poorly served by rail, but this was the misfortune of Mitcham in South London.  The opening of the Surrey Iron Railway in 1803 had augured well for its transport prospects, but the iron was to give way to irony: Mitcham largely missed out on the rest of the railway boom, and was to end up oddly cut off from the network for a century and a half — until, that is, the opening of Mitcham Eastfields station, ten years ago today.

It had not been total isolation: there was Mitcham station itself, some distance from the centre of town on the Wimbledon-West Croydon line, a route running east to west mostly along the old track-bed of the Surrey Iron Railway.  But the passenger service was always sporadic, and a change was always required for London and the south.  (Frequencies on the route were drastically increased by conversion to tram operation in the year 2000, but a change is still required.)

Derived from material © OpenStreetMap contributors.

When, in 1868, the London, Brighton and South Coast Railway opened its new route from London Bridge to Sutton, its route skimmed the eastern edge of what was then still Mitcham village, but no station was provided.  Instead, to the south, Mitcham Junction station was built where it met the existing Wimbledon-Croydon railway.  Unusually, the new main line (which for many years really was a main line, carrying South Coast expresses — another story!) deferred to the less important branch line, simply because the latter had been there first.  The new line curved sharply to meet the east-west alignment of the old, and then, immediately beyond the station, veered southwards again.  Mitcham Junction is even further from town than the first Mitcham station, but this was to remain the total railway provision for the next 140 years, the only alternative being Tooting, lying just as far to the north.  So, all in all, it may justly be said that Mitcham lost out in the great railway lottery of south London.

2–8 Tamworth Lane (now demolished) and Eastfields level crossing in 1974.  Photographer: Eric N. Montague. 
© Merton Historical Society, reproduced by their kind permission.

According to the current local Member of Parliament, Siobhain McDonagh, improvements to this situation was first considered properly in the 1930s.  A new station at the Eastfields Road level crossing was proposed: Avenues and Closes and Gardens galore of suburban housing were then being constructed in the area, setting the seal on Mitcham’s transformation from a village into a suburb, and promising a lucrative commuter market.  Still, fine words butter no parsnips, and no progress was made.  After the war, the population increased steadily, and has risen particularly rapidly since the millennium, so as the years went on the question was pressing harder and harder.  All day the trains that could be ours were rushing through before our eyes, and all the while, plain to see on each side of the level crossing, were broad, level, unbuilt-on verges, which just the right width for a platform…

Under construction, April 2008

Then, all of a sudden, in summer 2007, it was action stations.  Network Rail (the body in charge of national railway infrastructure) declared itself able and willing to build the new station, and Merton Council granted the scheme planning permission.  Siobhain McDonagh MP also deserves credit for her part in the long campaign.  Once these decisions were made, Mitcham Eastfields was built and opened within a year.  One reason for this quick work was the method of construction: the station building is ‘modular’, prefabricated in sections elsewhere, brought on site by lorry and assembled in situ.  Another quirk of the design is that the platforms are staggered on either side of the level crossing, so that in each direction trains cross the road before stopping at the station; this allows the barriers to be lifted behind them and keeps the road traffic moving. 

All in all, the total cost of six million pounds does not really sound too much for the first new station to be built in south London since the war.  Mitcham’s third and most convenient station was opened at 4 o’clock in the afternoon on June 2, 2008, ten years ago today, and the first train called ten minutes later.  Incidentally, this tenth anniversary resonates with the 150th anniversary of the line on which it stands (opened 1st October 1868, the same date as St Pancras station).  This is a good year for railway anniversaries!.

(Filmed by YouTube user ‘mm267a’)

The councillors from the Labour Party were very quick off the mark…  They beat most people to it and were at the station in time to meet the first train.  For latecomers there were free bags handed out, with flasks and plates emblazoned with the slogan ‘Mitcham Eastfields: Get on board and GO!’ which I presume didn’t mean ‘permanently’!

Forty minutes old on opening day, 2nd June 2008

Well, for ten years we have been coming as well as going, and have had the benefit of being able to reach Clapham Junction in twelve minutes, London Victoria in twenty and London Blackfriars in just under half an hour.  Other exciting (or at least useful) destinations include Sutton, Epsom and St. Pancras International, as well as London Bridge in the rush hour.  Many local people now depend on the station and annual passenger numbers are around a million and a half.  Its structure may be rather unassuming, but perhaps that rather suits this part of London that doesn’t give itself airs, and it also shows particularly well what difference a railway station, such a simple thing, can make to a place.   It is good to have a station we can call our own.

The station opened and our bypassed town

was open too.  Our town became a place,

and they belonged to us, the trains that race

and rattle south or north, that scurry down

to Surrey and to Sussex, chalk and clay

and mellow valleys, or that sprint across

to London’s alternating grime and gloss.

Change once for France and Belgium, some trains say;

Change once to reach the South Coast and the sea;

yet know the line can always bring you back

to this familiar platformed stretch of track,

which joins us to all places.  We are free

to flee, return or stay, since now we share

the thrill of rails that lead to anywhere.

(composed December, 2009)

Southward panorama: Rialto Road to the right and the Laburnum Road flats in the background. (2 March 2015)

Betjeman the prophet

Highbridge Wharf, your hopes have died:

They flow like driftwood down the tide,

Out, out into the open sea —

O sad forgotten S. & D.

Any readers who feel like a laid-back half-hour might enjoy this film, ‘A Branch Line Railway’ with John Betjeman, broadcast by the B.B.C. in 1963 and now available indefinitely on the I-Player.  (Since this is the B.B.C.’s website I have a feeling it can be watched only in the U.K.).  It is a journey from Evercreech Junction to Burnham-on-Sea in Somerset, along part of the former Somerset and Dorset Joint Railway.  The ‘S. & D.’ was a line from the west Somerset coast to Bournemouth, with a long arm from Bath joining at Evercreech.  It was built in anticipation of a surge of goods traffic from South Wales and the Midlands to the English Channel and the Continent.  As Betjeman explains, this traffic never emerged; the line was a backwater all its life.  (The music accompanying the film is Percy Grainger’s ‘Lincolnshire Posy’, arrangements of folk-songs that he had collected in that county in the early 1900s).

Most of the Somerset & Dorset is no more: of course, 1963 was also the year of Dr. Beeching’s infamous report on ‘The Reshaping of British Railways’, in which he recommended the pruning of about a third of this country’s route mileage in the name of efficiency (see p. 109 for the renowned list of ‘Passenger Stations and Halts to be Closed’ and its unexpected pathos).  This was so vehemently the age of the motor-car and the motorway that Betjeman’s appeal to save the Doric arch at Euston station in London was a lonely and eventually unsuccessful one, and an era so eager to jettison the past that he, almost alone, deserves the credit for having preserved the splendour of St Pancras station from a modernisation scheme.  Against such a backdrop Betjeman’s nostalgic film gains a rather polemic quality.  His journey is an argument as much as a portrait, and every so often (for example at eight minutes in) there are flashes of rhetoric and rawer protests at the spirit of the age:

You know, I’m not just being nostalgic and sentimental and unpractical about railways.  Railways are bound to be used again.  They’re not a thing of the past. And it’s heart-breaking to see them left to rot and to see the fine men who’ve served them all their lives made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.  What’s more, it’s wrong in every way when we all of us know that road traffic is becoming increasingly hellish on this overcrowded island. […] I think it’s more than likely that we’ll deeply regret the branch lines we’ve torn up and the lines that we’ve let to go to rot.

It is easy to think of Betjeman more or less as a nostalgist par excellence, and it is true that the burden of much of his writing and many of his broadcasts was to cherish, to defend and, indeed, to mourn the past.  He was also a prophet, though, and I think rather a better prophet than his modernist, forward-thinking contemporaries.  He saw through the illusory freedom of the internal-combustion engine and the motorway to their fundamental soullessness, and likewise saw through the rust and soot of the post-war railways to their fundamental usefulness, wholesomeness and even moral superiority (about which I have tried to set down my own thoughts here).  So it is that we are slowly and expensively re-opening some of those lines too hastily closed and sold off by British Rail in the 1960s, and so it is that we struggle now to believe that such an idea as the demolition of George Gilbert Scott’s astonishing St. Pancras station, under whose seemingly weightless roof travellers by rail to and from Europe arrive and depart, ever even entered anybody’s mind.

The statue of John Betjeman at St. Pancras station, the building he defended against demolition and now a magnificent welcome for passengers from the Continent.