0:00:21 > 0:00:23This is the Euston Road.
0:00:23 > 0:00:27And the only good thing about it are its three railway stations.
0:00:32 > 0:00:37Yes, our railways carry us from A to B...operating difficulties permitting.
0:00:37 > 0:00:43But, unlike motor cars, trains have entered our hearts, bequeathing us a rich cultural history.
0:00:43 > 0:00:48And by walking into a station in London, you can connect straight to it.
0:00:51 > 0:00:54St Pancras was one of the London railway termini
0:00:54 > 0:00:58used by those regular off-peak travellers Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson.
0:00:58 > 0:01:03The ghost of John Betjeman gazes upwards at the roof of the station he helped save.
0:01:05 > 0:01:09Imagine a poet battling to save a motorway.
0:01:09 > 0:01:13As for Euston Station, well, one can still read in the station bookshop
0:01:13 > 0:01:19of the great fermentation involved in the construction of its lines.
0:01:20 > 0:01:25'And down the road at King's Cross, well, that has Platform 9 and three quarters,
0:01:25 > 0:01:28or, at least, a sign coyly indicating it,
0:01:28 > 0:01:32and a sawn-off luggage trolley, cooed over night and day by Japanese tourists,
0:01:32 > 0:01:37because this is the magical portal for the world-beating boy wizard Harry Potter.
0:01:39 > 0:01:46There is an entire world of literature, poetry and film devoted to the railways.
0:01:46 > 0:01:51What is the source of the railways' mystique and why have they inspired
0:01:51 > 0:01:55creative minds from William Wordsworth to JK Rowling?
0:01:55 > 0:01:57WHISTLE BLOWS
0:02:11 > 0:02:17Locomotives and the atmospheres they brew up have inspired writers, poets and film-makers
0:02:17 > 0:02:19over the last two centuries.
0:02:21 > 0:02:26'My name is Andrew Martin and I've taken my place at the back of this long line.
0:02:26 > 0:02:30'Over the past seven years, I've written a series of detective novels
0:02:30 > 0:02:34'set against the background of the railways in Edwardian times.'
0:02:36 > 0:02:40In those days, the railways were the lifeblood of the nation,
0:02:40 > 0:02:43the starting point of all adventures.
0:02:44 > 0:02:48A big station like York was a microcosm of the society it served.
0:02:48 > 0:02:55Here, as a writer, I could bring together travelling gentlemen with chimney sweeps on the move.
0:02:55 > 0:02:58Bristling platform guards could contend with station loungers,
0:02:58 > 0:03:02pickpockets and other species of railway yobbo.
0:03:02 > 0:03:07Stations were not just manned in those days, they were teeming with life.
0:03:09 > 0:03:15I set my novels in the Edwardian period because that's when the network was at its densest.
0:03:15 > 0:03:20This was a kind of vicarious revenge on behalf of my father,
0:03:20 > 0:03:23who'd worked in the Finance Department of BR here in York
0:03:23 > 0:03:27and was forever having to implement cutbacks.
0:03:31 > 0:03:35The railways had fallen out of fashion when I was growing up in York in the '70s.
0:03:35 > 0:03:38Even so, it was still a railway city.
0:03:38 > 0:03:42The station was merely the focal point of a sprawling railway territory -
0:03:42 > 0:03:46marshalling yards, engine shed, carriage works.
0:03:46 > 0:03:51I'd lie awake at night listening to the ghostly clanking of wagons being shunted.
0:03:53 > 0:04:00Because my father worked at BR North Eastern Region HQ, he seemed to me an aristocrat of railways.
0:04:00 > 0:04:06And not only did he have free first class rail travel, but so did his entire family.
0:04:13 > 0:04:17TANNOY: ..and Stevenage, please change here at Peterborough.
0:04:17 > 0:04:21If I was at all bored as a 14 year old, I'd say, "Dad, I'm off to London."
0:04:21 > 0:04:26I'd get on a train, lounge proprietorially in a first-class compartment and read a book.
0:04:26 > 0:04:30On crowded services, I might be interrupted by harassed businessmen.
0:04:30 > 0:04:35They'd barge in and say, "Excuse me, young man. Are you aware you're occupying a first-class seat?"
0:04:35 > 0:04:38I'd say, "Yes. I am, thanks," and go back to my book.
0:04:41 > 0:04:46To me, trains are a bit like libraries. I associated them with reading.
0:04:46 > 0:04:49Whereas there's no point taking a book with you on a car journey.
0:04:49 > 0:04:53You just got carsick if you looked at it. Trains were generally superior.
0:04:53 > 0:04:58They had a weight of history and culture attached to them.
0:04:58 > 0:05:02'The experience of travelling by rail was not always so sedate.'
0:05:02 > 0:05:07In the early days, you might be too busy gripping the arm rest of your seat to read a book.
0:05:07 > 0:05:13Imagine the shock of this form of travel when the quickest thing you'd ever seen
0:05:13 > 0:05:15had been a racehorse or a stagecoach.
0:05:15 > 0:05:20These were enormous, cataclysmic changes that were happening to everybody.
0:05:20 > 0:05:24And, of course, everybody then started to think, you know,
0:05:24 > 0:05:27"We get carried in a carriage at 10mph?
0:05:27 > 0:05:30"Our brains will fly out of our ears."
0:05:30 > 0:05:34It was that sensation that nobody had had anything like that at all.
0:05:34 > 0:05:39And that would engender such strong feelings. It was a massive change.
0:05:41 > 0:05:47One day, in 1843, the artist Turner was travelling on the Great Western Railway.
0:05:47 > 0:05:52He stuck his head through the window of a first class carriage during a rainstorm
0:05:52 > 0:05:55and he was most forcibly impressed.
0:05:55 > 0:05:58WHISTLE BLOWS
0:05:59 > 0:06:05Turner was met with the breathtaking force of travelling at high speed through clouds of smoke and rain.
0:06:05 > 0:06:09The experience would give rise to one of his best-known paintings,
0:06:09 > 0:06:12Rain, Steam And Speed - The Great Western Railway.
0:06:12 > 0:06:16If you want to be pedantic about it - and railway people often do -
0:06:16 > 0:06:22you'd say that the painting showed a Gooch Firefly 222 locomotive. But that's hardly the point.
0:06:22 > 0:06:29The image presents the viewer with something very like a bullet aimed straight at the heart.
0:06:29 > 0:06:34I once got into trouble at the National Gallery for reaching too far towards the picture
0:06:34 > 0:06:37to point out to my son the hare running in front of the locomotive.
0:06:37 > 0:06:42The point being that the hare, an extremely fast animal, is being caught up by the engine.
0:06:42 > 0:06:46Man is getting the upper hand over nature.
0:06:48 > 0:06:51The railway revolution was profoundly disturbing.
0:06:51 > 0:06:56It makes the arrival of the internet seem like a minor embellishment of lifestyle.
0:06:56 > 0:07:0490% of our current route mileage was authorised in the three years from 1844 to 1847.
0:07:07 > 0:07:11These vast iron gatecrashers thundered through house cellars,
0:07:11 > 0:07:16back gardens, beautiful meadows and social conventions.
0:07:16 > 0:07:19From the outset, they attracted the scornful eye of writers
0:07:19 > 0:07:23and anyone with a vested interest in contemplation.
0:07:23 > 0:07:29In "a just disdain", William Wordsworth wrote of a rural England
0:07:29 > 0:07:31being blighted by the age of steam.
0:07:31 > 0:07:37"A power, the thirst of gold, that rules o'er Britain like a baneful star,
0:07:37 > 0:07:40"wills that your peace, your beauty shall be sold
0:07:40 > 0:07:45"and clear way made for her triumphal car."
0:07:50 > 0:07:56One man acted as a lightning conductor for all the railway anxieties of the time,
0:07:56 > 0:07:58Charles Dickens.
0:07:59 > 0:08:02His railway novel, Dombey And Son,
0:08:02 > 0:08:06contains one of the first descriptions of scenes flickering past a train window.
0:08:06 > 0:08:13"Through the hollow, on the height, by the heath, by the orchard, by the park, by the garden, over the canal,
0:08:13 > 0:08:18"across the river, where the sheep are feeding, where the mill is going, where the barge is floating,
0:08:18 > 0:08:21"where the dead are lying, where the factory is smoking.
0:08:21 > 0:08:27"Away with a shriek and a roar and rattle, and no trace to leave behind but dust and vapour.
0:08:27 > 0:08:30"Like as in the track of the remorseless monster, Death."
0:08:36 > 0:08:39A theme of Dombey And Son is the destruction wreaked
0:08:39 > 0:08:44by the building of the London and Birmingham Railway line that runs to Euston Station.
0:08:44 > 0:08:48This was the first railway to come into north London.
0:08:48 > 0:08:54Unfortunately, when it came to be built in the 1830s, Camden happened to be in the way.
0:08:59 > 0:09:03To get a sense of the trauma inflicted upon Camden at the time,
0:09:03 > 0:09:06you have to go onto the parcel deck of the current station.
0:09:10 > 0:09:15Here's one of the main railway canyons running through Camden.
0:09:15 > 0:09:19It was being gouged out in the years before Dickens wrote Dombey And Son
0:09:19 > 0:09:22and this is the work described in the book.
0:09:22 > 0:09:27Dickens was a man attached to the notion of Merrie England and travelling by stagecoach.
0:09:27 > 0:09:30Imagine what he must have made of this.
0:09:30 > 0:09:33It would have seemed a barbarity.
0:09:35 > 0:09:42In Dombey And Son, Dickens refers to Camden as Staggs' Gardens, and he knew the area well.
0:09:42 > 0:09:44He'd been brought up here, when it was a village.
0:09:44 > 0:09:48During the construction of the railway, he saw places he knew,
0:09:48 > 0:09:50including part of his old school, being destroyed.
0:09:50 > 0:09:53He was morbidly fascinated by the process.
0:09:55 > 0:09:56Mr Walter!
0:09:56 > 0:09:58Mr Walter!
0:09:58 > 0:10:01Oh, it is you.
0:10:01 > 0:10:03Oh, Mr Walter, help me.
0:10:03 > 0:10:06You may not remember me. I'm Miss Florence's maid servant.
0:10:06 > 0:10:10I've been trying to find Staggs' Gardens, where Mrs Richards lives.
0:10:10 > 0:10:12She that was nurse to Master Paul?
0:10:12 > 0:10:16Staggs' gardens? It's no more, the houses were pulled down to make the railroad.
0:10:16 > 0:10:17Oh, don't say that, Mr Walter!
0:10:17 > 0:10:20The railways were omnipotent,
0:10:20 > 0:10:26and so, like most railway novels of the era, Dombey And Son features a death by a locomotive.
0:10:26 > 0:10:29The treacherous Carker is run over by a train.
0:10:29 > 0:10:36"A red-eyed, monstrous express, it licked up his stream of life with its fiery heat."
0:10:38 > 0:10:40No! No!
0:10:40 > 0:10:41WHISTLE BLOWS
0:10:41 > 0:10:43Carker! Look out! Carker!
0:10:43 > 0:10:45Agh!
0:10:45 > 0:10:46WHISTLE BLOWS
0:11:00 > 0:11:06It wasn't just the gutting of the towns and countryside that seemed wrong to sensitive literary folk,
0:11:06 > 0:11:10the locomotives themselves had a murderous quality to them.
0:11:10 > 0:11:13In The Prime Minister by Anthony Trollope,
0:11:13 > 0:11:19the villain, Lopez, is "knocked to bloody atoms" by a shrieking Scottish express.
0:11:19 > 0:11:25In Anna Karenina, the heroine commits suicide by leaping in front of an oncoming engine.
0:11:28 > 0:11:32Locomotives didn't just symbolise the inhumanity of the machine age.
0:11:32 > 0:11:38Before they were tamed and trained, they really did have an unfortunate habit of killing people.
0:11:40 > 0:11:45Steam engines, still relatively new and frightening enough when stationary,
0:11:45 > 0:11:48were now being whirled about the country at fantastical speeds.
0:11:48 > 0:11:52At the opening of the Liverpool and Manchester Railway in 1830,
0:11:52 > 0:11:56a cabinet minister, William Huskisson, was knocked down and killed.
0:11:56 > 0:12:01No wonder British governments have been so reluctant to fund the railways ever since.
0:12:03 > 0:12:07The equation was a simple one. More railways meant more deaths.
0:12:07 > 0:12:14The 1860s were the darkest decade, when accidents were rarely out of the nation's news.
0:12:14 > 0:12:19These "smashes", as they were known, magnetised and repelled the Victorians.
0:12:19 > 0:12:22Here was a very modern way to die.
0:12:23 > 0:12:26In the 1860s,
0:12:26 > 0:12:30the railways were at their most dangerous. Trains began to speed up.
0:12:30 > 0:12:33We had 50, 60mph trains sometimes.
0:12:33 > 0:12:36There were more trains on the tracks
0:12:36 > 0:12:38so the likelihood of collisions was increased.
0:12:38 > 0:12:45The authorities did very little about safety until rather later, until the 1880s.
0:12:45 > 0:12:48So we had this decade, the 1860s,
0:12:48 > 0:12:54where more people died on the railways than ever before or since.
0:12:57 > 0:13:01Cartoonists portrayed the locomotives as beasts.
0:13:01 > 0:13:05Dragon-like, they were bent on the destruction of mere humans.
0:13:08 > 0:13:11Returning from France on June 9th 1865,
0:13:11 > 0:13:15all of Charles Dickens's railway nightmares came true
0:13:15 > 0:13:19when he was involved in a horrific train crash at Staplehurst in Kent.
0:13:20 > 0:13:25The accident was caused by a work gang lifting tracks on a viaduct.
0:13:25 > 0:13:29They'd reckoned without the 2.38 from Folkestone to London.
0:13:40 > 0:13:47Dickens helped soothe the injured and dying with brandy and his top hat filled with cold water.
0:13:47 > 0:13:51Ten people died in the accident, and for the rest of his life
0:13:51 > 0:13:57all Dickens' various anxieties would be subsumed in the great one over Staplehurst.
0:14:11 > 0:14:16The accident would prompt Dickens to write his finest ghost story, The Signal-Man,
0:14:16 > 0:14:22a superbly gloomy version of which was on TV seemingly every Christmas during my childhood.
0:14:22 > 0:14:25It was in fact the highlight of my childhood Christmases.
0:14:27 > 0:14:33The story concerns the fate of a signal man, stuck in a cutting next to a glowering red light.
0:14:34 > 0:14:40He's at the mercy of an electrical bell, and the necessity of showing his flag as the trains go past.
0:14:42 > 0:14:47An accident on this stretch of the line must be a terrible thing.
0:14:47 > 0:14:50In the tunnel, say?
0:14:52 > 0:14:55The tunnel collision is the worst to be feared.
0:14:56 > 0:14:58Nightmares would go hard to equal it.
0:15:00 > 0:15:04The wreckage becomes hideously compressed in the confined space.
0:15:04 > 0:15:10If fire breaks out, the tunnel and its ventilating shafts become furnace flues.
0:15:10 > 0:15:14You cannot see in the dark to get the wreckage and bodies out.
0:15:15 > 0:15:18The screams of the injured and dying
0:15:18 > 0:15:22echo in a most...persistent way.
0:15:24 > 0:15:27Dickens' signal man is a fascinatingly neurotic figure.
0:15:27 > 0:15:30Like many railway men, he has intellectual interests.
0:15:30 > 0:15:32He has taught himself a language in the box.
0:15:32 > 0:15:35He has worked at decimals and fractions
0:15:35 > 0:15:38but he is tormented by the loneliness of the job,
0:15:38 > 0:15:43the memory of two previous accidents and the premonition of a third.
0:15:44 > 0:15:46TREMULOUS STRING MUSIC
0:15:56 > 0:15:57What is it?
0:15:57 > 0:16:00What is it?!
0:16:02 > 0:16:04Where is the danger?
0:16:04 > 0:16:07Tell me what to do!
0:16:08 > 0:16:11Answer!
0:16:11 > 0:16:14What is it? What can I do?
0:16:22 > 0:16:28He constantly feels the urge to send the telegraphic signal "Danger, take care." But he can't say why.
0:16:28 > 0:16:31Of course, a smash is looming.
0:16:31 > 0:16:33Look out!
0:16:33 > 0:16:34Look out!
0:16:49 > 0:16:54It's been suggested that Charles Dickens was the very last victim of the Staplehurst crash.
0:16:54 > 0:17:00Towards the end of his life, he put down the cause of his ill health to "railway shaking".
0:17:00 > 0:17:04He died on the fifth anniversary of the accident.
0:17:09 > 0:17:12By the middle of the 19th century,
0:17:12 > 0:17:16railways were shaping literature in other, more benign ways.
0:17:16 > 0:17:19A railway journey was an opportunity to read,
0:17:19 > 0:17:26and so, in 1848, WH Smith opened their first railway bookstall here at Euston station.
0:17:30 > 0:17:33Station bookstores have always been about reading for the masses.
0:17:33 > 0:17:36In fact, they generated a whole new type of fiction.
0:17:36 > 0:17:39Books that were the forerunners of the airport novels.
0:17:39 > 0:17:44They were cheap and had story lines that could withstand all the distractions of a train journey -
0:17:44 > 0:17:48the stopping and starting and "Excuse me, is this the train for Birmingham?"
0:17:48 > 0:17:51As Cicely says in The Importance Of Being Earnest,
0:17:51 > 0:17:54"One must always have something sensational to read on the train."
0:17:55 > 0:17:59An entire industry of sensationalist fiction developed,
0:17:59 > 0:18:02with writers competing for travellers' attentions.
0:18:02 > 0:18:06Every author hoped to find their books on the racks of W H Smith
0:18:06 > 0:18:09and things are no different today.
0:18:09 > 0:18:12A shop manager of discernment!
0:18:16 > 0:18:21Between garish covers was everything the man or woman on the 2.22 required.
0:18:21 > 0:18:28Sex, insanity and, above all, violent death.
0:18:28 > 0:18:32Cheaply-bound sensational novels were known as yellow backs.
0:18:32 > 0:18:35Their authors, such as Mary Elizabeth Braddon
0:18:35 > 0:18:38who wrote this one, sold in their thousands from railway bookshops.
0:18:38 > 0:18:42The success of Braddon irritated George Eliot, who wrote to her publisher,
0:18:42 > 0:18:47"I suppose the reason my own six shilling editions are never on the railway stalls
0:18:47 > 0:18:53"is that they are not so attractive to majority." Well, no, they weren't.
0:18:53 > 0:18:58One reviewer of Braddon's work expressed the regret that "a book without a murder,
0:18:58 > 0:19:05"a divorce, a seduction, or bigamy, is not apparently considered either worth writing or reading."
0:19:16 > 0:19:20Given the Victorian nervousness of train travel, it isn't surprising
0:19:20 > 0:19:24that the railways themselves would be used to unsettle the reader.
0:19:26 > 0:19:33The Victorian sensation stories would play on their readers' anxieties about railway travel.
0:19:33 > 0:19:38For instance, you might have a woman sitting alone in a railway compartment,
0:19:38 > 0:19:43feeling rather nervous, reading a story about a woman sitting alone in a railway compartment.
0:19:43 > 0:19:50Except that in the story, a man suddenly clambers in through the carriage window.
0:19:50 > 0:19:54A very shifty looking man as well, with a top hat and a big moustache.
0:19:59 > 0:20:01Breaches of compartment etiquette
0:20:01 > 0:20:04would be depicted later on in cinema.
0:20:04 > 0:20:08In Alfred Hitchcock's film version of The 39 Steps,
0:20:08 > 0:20:13Robert Donat bursts in on Madeline Carroll while she's reading alone.
0:20:18 > 0:20:21Darling, how lovely to see you!
0:20:28 > 0:20:30Don't mind having a free meal in there!
0:20:32 > 0:20:35Hitchcock appreciated railways, but he was no train spotter himself.
0:20:35 > 0:20:39His version of The 39 Steps contains a notorious mistake.
0:20:39 > 0:20:43Well, notorious to a certain category of railway fanatic...
0:20:43 > 0:20:46Hannay flees London heading for Scotland.
0:20:46 > 0:20:52He does so by boarding what is evidently a London and North Eastern railway train - reasonable enough.
0:20:52 > 0:20:54Hitchcock cuts away from it.
0:20:54 > 0:20:57When he cut back, it's become a Great Western Railway train,
0:20:57 > 0:21:00emerging from Box Tunnel near Bath.
0:21:02 > 0:21:07Then again, somebody once devoted an entire review of one of my books
0:21:07 > 0:21:11to moaning about how I'd invented an entirely new class of tank engine.
0:21:11 > 0:21:12I'll be right along!
0:21:15 > 0:21:19Trains are quite marginal to the original story of The 39 Steps.
0:21:19 > 0:21:23But Hitchcock boosted their role, in order to maximise the speed and drama of the narrative.
0:21:28 > 0:21:33Things can happen in carriages because doors can open,
0:21:33 > 0:21:37people can jump out or can hang on to the outside of trains.
0:21:37 > 0:21:41That device he uses so well in that, particularly combining
0:21:41 > 0:21:45the fact that Donat gets out of the train on the Forth Bridge.
0:21:45 > 0:21:48You've got these two iconic things.
0:21:48 > 0:21:52There is the train, the compartment, but then to have him coming out into
0:21:52 > 0:21:56the shriek of whistles and steam onto those massive girders...
0:21:56 > 0:21:59It's against all regulations to stop the train on the bridge!
0:21:59 > 0:22:04- But a man jumped out. We've got to chase him.- Which way did he go? - He must have jumped out here.
0:22:04 > 0:22:07- I cannae see him.- You sure he jumped?- I can't wait here any longer.
0:22:07 > 0:22:12- There he is, getting on the train! - No, that's a passenger. - It's he, I tell you.- Come on then!
0:22:12 > 0:22:16Hitchcock also made good use of the slow-burning anxieties
0:22:16 > 0:22:20that could arise from sharing a train compartment.
0:22:20 > 0:22:22Might I have a look at your paper?
0:22:22 > 0:22:23Certainly.
0:22:28 > 0:22:31Of course, you'd try to weed out the nutcases as you picked your seat,
0:22:31 > 0:22:37but once you'd sat down opposite someone, you were stuck with them.
0:22:38 > 0:22:43When I was a boy, travelling on the railways in the '70s, I'd often stretch out and go to sleep.
0:22:43 > 0:22:49Then I'd wake up and see a big fat businessman sitting three feet away from me.
0:22:49 > 0:22:52I'd pretend to be still asleep but I'd be watching him.
0:22:52 > 0:22:58Once, I was jolted awake to see a man reading a pornographic book called The Desire To Dominate.
0:22:58 > 0:23:01It was very hard to get back to sleep with him in the compartment.
0:23:04 > 0:23:07Walter de la Mare wrote in one of his short stories,
0:23:07 > 0:23:11"It's a fascinating experience, railway travelling.
0:23:11 > 0:23:17"One is cast into a passing privacy with a fellow stranger, and then it is gone."
0:23:24 > 0:23:28By the end of the 19th century, railway travel was becoming normalised.
0:23:28 > 0:23:33Locomotives that had once been agents of turmoil and social change had been tamed.
0:23:35 > 0:23:39For late Victorian gentlemen such as Sherlock Holmes and Dr Watson,
0:23:39 > 0:23:41trains were not a danger in themselves.
0:23:41 > 0:23:45They were something familiar, comprehensible.
0:23:46 > 0:23:49Watson, we're going well.
0:23:49 > 0:23:51Our speed at present...
0:23:51 > 0:23:54is 53.5 mph.
0:23:56 > 0:23:59I have not observed the quarter-mile posts.
0:23:59 > 0:24:01Nor have I.
0:24:01 > 0:24:06But the telegraph posts on this line are 60 yards apart.
0:24:06 > 0:24:08The calculation is a simple one.
0:24:10 > 0:24:14The two depart, incidentally, from every terminus in London except Marylebone.
0:24:14 > 0:24:18The only reason they don't go from there is that it was built too late,
0:24:18 > 0:24:23in 1899, by which time Holmes and Watson were about done.
0:24:27 > 0:24:33Holmes and Watson weren't above recourse to that humblest of documents, the railway timetable.
0:24:35 > 0:24:39Until the early-1960s, Britain's railway timetables were called Bradshaws
0:24:39 > 0:24:42after the man who had started publishing them in 1841.
0:24:42 > 0:24:45They were as thick as, well, this,
0:24:45 > 0:24:50and they were full of exasperating footnotes. "Except Mondays."
0:24:50 > 0:24:54"Should the arrival of the steamer be late, the train will not stop."
0:24:54 > 0:24:59When Holmes asks Watson to reach for the Bradshaw, our pulses quicken.
0:24:59 > 0:25:01The game is afoot.
0:25:01 > 0:25:04We can just catch our train to Paddington!
0:25:04 > 0:25:08Watson, would you be so kind as to bring your field glasses? Ha!
0:25:08 > 0:25:14Even for all his powers and his influence with the police, the railway are not going to say,
0:25:14 > 0:25:18"Well, yeah, we'll hold a train up for an hour, Mr Holmes, while you do this or do that.
0:25:18 > 0:25:20"Go and see that guy."
0:25:20 > 0:25:22It's not going to happen.
0:25:22 > 0:25:26So, for all that's happening, these great moments,
0:25:26 > 0:25:29there is also the train timetable which is there and is going to be
0:25:29 > 0:25:33the guiding factor to probably what they will do next and where they go.
0:25:35 > 0:25:40In those days, the Bradshaw would have been as readily to hand for any man of action
0:25:40 > 0:25:42as car keys would be today.
0:25:42 > 0:25:46But sometimes Watson knows the train times without looking them up.
0:25:46 > 0:25:50In The Retired Colourman, for example, Holmes asks Watson
0:25:50 > 0:25:53for the train times to Little Pearlington in Essex.
0:25:53 > 0:25:57And, not withstanding the fantastic obscurity of the destination,
0:25:57 > 0:26:02Watson immediately replies, "There's one at 5.20 from Liverpool Street."
0:26:02 > 0:26:07We have here the beginnings of a peculiar new sub-genre in which the factual pedantry
0:26:07 > 0:26:14of the detective novel is merged with the even greater factual pedantry of the railway timetable.
0:26:14 > 0:26:17The result is something very factual and pedantic indeed.
0:26:17 > 0:26:21A murder mystery with train timings at its core.
0:26:22 > 0:26:25Take Agatha Christie's novel, The 4.50 From Paddington
0:26:25 > 0:26:30whose provocatively dull title was changed to Murder She Said for the cinema.
0:26:30 > 0:26:33A timetable and map provide Miss Marple
0:26:33 > 0:26:37with clues to a murder she has witnessed on a passing train.
0:26:39 > 0:26:41Ah, yes, here we are.
0:26:41 > 0:26:45I calculate the 5 o'clock express to Brackhampton
0:26:45 > 0:26:48overtook my train somewhere about there.
0:26:48 > 0:26:50But how can you be sure?
0:26:50 > 0:26:53I remember the ticket collector saying five minutes to Brackhampton.
0:26:53 > 0:26:57It couldn't have been a more than a minute after the murder he came in
0:26:57 > 0:27:00so that makes it six minutes before Brackhampton
0:27:00 > 0:27:02at, say, 30 miles an hour.
0:27:02 > 0:27:06So...about there.
0:27:08 > 0:27:14For me, the apex or nadir of this sub-category is The Cask, a novel of 1920
0:27:14 > 0:27:20by Freeman Wills Croft, which is all about the logistics of transporting by rail a particular barrel.
0:27:20 > 0:27:23Actually, that does sell it rather short.
0:27:23 > 0:27:26The barrel contains a dead body.
0:27:26 > 0:27:30Freeman Wills Croft was an engineer and he wrote rather like an engineer.
0:27:30 > 0:27:34His novels seem almost as full of numbers as they are of letters.
0:27:34 > 0:27:37This is typical. "He looked at the timetable again.
0:27:37 > 0:27:42"The train in question reached Calais at 3.31 and the boat left at 3.45.
0:27:42 > 0:27:44"That was a delay of 14 minutes.
0:27:44 > 0:27:50"Would there be time, he wondered, to make two long-distance phone calls in 14 minutes?"
0:27:50 > 0:27:55Of course, this sort of number crunching would prove a gift to satirists.
0:27:55 > 0:27:57I must dash or I'll be late for the 10.15.
0:27:57 > 0:28:01I suggest you murdered your father for his seat reservation!
0:28:01 > 0:28:04I may have had the motive, but I could not have done it.
0:28:04 > 0:28:09For I'd just arrived from Gillingham on the 8.13. Here's my restaurant card ticket to prove it!
0:28:09 > 0:28:13- But the 8.13 from Gillingham doesn't have a restaurant car. - It's a standing buffet only.
0:28:13 > 0:28:17Did I say the 8.13? I meant the 7.58 stopping train.
0:28:17 > 0:28:21But the 7.58 stopping train arrived at Swindon at 8.19,
0:28:21 > 0:28:25owing to annual points maintenance at Whisberer Junction.
0:28:25 > 0:28:29So how did you make the connection with the 8.13, which left six minutes earlier?
0:28:29 > 0:28:33Simple, I caught the 7.16 Football Special arriving at Swindon at 8.09.
0:28:33 > 0:28:38But the 7.16 Football Special only stops at Swindon on alternate Saturdays.
0:28:38 > 0:28:42- Yes, surely you mean the Holiday-maker Special? - Oh, yes. How daft of me.
0:28:42 > 0:28:47I came on the Holiday-maker Special, calling out Bedford, Fen Ditton, Sutton, Wallington and Gillingham.
0:28:47 > 0:28:49That's Sundays only!
0:28:50 > 0:28:51Damn!
0:29:04 > 0:29:10By the beginning of the 20th century, there was no place in England untouched by the railways.
0:29:12 > 0:29:15Every day half-a-dozen passenger trains and their lumbering goods
0:29:15 > 0:29:20would call at such apparently insignificant spots as Oakworth in Yorkshire,
0:29:20 > 0:29:24whose preserved station may strike many as strangely familiar.
0:29:27 > 0:29:30This is the Edwardian country station par excellence.
0:29:30 > 0:29:36Being the main location in both the film and television adaptations of The Railway Children.
0:29:36 > 0:29:40By the time Edith Nesbit published The Railway Children in 1906,
0:29:40 > 0:29:44the railways had become thoroughly accommodated into British life.
0:29:44 > 0:29:46We were used to their little ways.
0:29:46 > 0:29:51It was now possible to see them as something cosy and whimsical as well as potentially dangerous.
0:29:51 > 0:29:54And far from being the despoils of the landscape,
0:29:54 > 0:29:58they'd become an honorary part of it.
0:30:02 > 0:30:05The railways were losing their Gothic aspect.
0:30:05 > 0:30:08An age of railway romance was emerging
0:30:08 > 0:30:13in which they became something that could be romanticised, sentimentalised, loved.
0:30:18 > 0:30:23For the Railway Children, the country station is both a rural idyll and a joy.
0:30:23 > 0:30:25- Come on!- Come on!
0:30:25 > 0:30:29Nisbet writes, "The rocks and hills and valleys,
0:30:29 > 0:30:35"trees, the canal, and, above all, the railway, were so new and so pleasing that the remembrance
0:30:35 > 0:30:39"of the old life in the villa grew to seem almost like a dream."
0:30:39 > 0:30:43- Doesn't it look spiffing? - It's like a sort of green dragon.
0:30:43 > 0:30:46A fiery green dragon.
0:30:46 > 0:30:48It saw me! I waved and it whistled back!
0:30:50 > 0:30:53Come on.
0:30:53 > 0:30:56Oh, look, an old man's waved back!
0:30:56 > 0:31:00- Race you to the station.- Do you think we should go on to the line?
0:31:00 > 0:31:03Why not? The train's gone. There won't be another one for ages.
0:31:03 > 0:31:07- Well, I will, but I think it's dangerous.- Come on.
0:31:07 > 0:31:12The Railway Children really showed that the railways
0:31:12 > 0:31:16had become a totally accepted part of life.
0:31:16 > 0:31:21They had been around, by then, for 60 or 70 years.
0:31:21 > 0:31:26And people saw them as the way into the big town
0:31:26 > 0:31:28and the way back from the big town.
0:31:28 > 0:31:31There was something totally comforting about it.
0:31:31 > 0:31:37People relied on a railway. It was the thing on which they depended for nearly every aspect of their lives.
0:31:44 > 0:31:48- Golly Moses!- Gosh! Can I come up?
0:31:51 > 0:31:56- What's it called? - SHE is called Sir Berkeley.
0:31:56 > 0:31:58WHISTLE BLOWS
0:31:58 > 0:32:02The railways play a very charming role in this.
0:32:02 > 0:32:05They are, for a start, kind of morally neutral,
0:32:05 > 0:32:09unlike the people who have locked up the dad.
0:32:09 > 0:32:12And they have nice Mr Perks, the porter,
0:32:12 > 0:32:14who is part of the landscape as well.
0:32:14 > 0:32:18And they're lovely things to go and watch and they're free to go and watch.
0:32:18 > 0:32:21They are just part of the scenery. You don't have to pay to watch them.
0:32:21 > 0:32:25And it's a lovely thing to do, as it was in my childhood as well.
0:32:25 > 0:32:31Standing on a railway cutting edge and watch trains was a thing that we did.
0:32:31 > 0:32:36- Look, they all waved. Why? - Because we got the watches.
0:32:36 > 0:32:39- And we are heroes. - Off you go. Lessons.
0:32:42 > 0:32:46The great success of the film The Railway Children, released in 1970,
0:32:46 > 0:32:49proved the enduring power of the country railway fantasy.
0:32:49 > 0:32:55Of course, the presence of a fascinatingly feverish-looking Jenny Agutter did help.
0:32:55 > 0:32:58There's a lovely touch towards the end.
0:32:58 > 0:33:01When the railway brings her missing father home,
0:33:01 > 0:33:03he emerges from a cloud of steam.
0:33:03 > 0:33:06The charming special effect that all locomotives
0:33:06 > 0:33:08conveniently carried about with them.
0:33:19 > 0:33:23Almost any novel from the first half of the 20th century
0:33:23 > 0:33:24is a railway novel to some extent,
0:33:24 > 0:33:29as long as any character moves any distance.
0:33:30 > 0:33:34The notion of the railway and landscape existing in harmony
0:33:34 > 0:33:38seems a perfectly natural one, but it was deliberately fostered.
0:33:38 > 0:33:41The railway companies of the early-to-mid 20th century
0:33:41 > 0:33:43were extremely image-conscious.
0:33:43 > 0:33:47They might be said to have been pioneers in public relations
0:33:47 > 0:33:50and the poster was their primary medium.
0:33:50 > 0:33:56Even the most hardened motorist and collector of Jeremy Clarkson DVDs
0:33:56 > 0:33:59is probably vaguely familiar with these images,
0:33:59 > 0:34:03so evocative of a mellower, sunnier age.
0:35:02 > 0:35:08Giving names to trains, such as the Flying Scotsman, only added to the mystique of rail travel.
0:35:08 > 0:35:14The age of railway romance would last a couple of generations until well into the 1950s.
0:35:14 > 0:35:19Among young boys, the weirdos and misfits were the ones not interested in trains.
0:35:19 > 0:35:23Between 1911 and 1950,
0:35:23 > 0:35:28The Wonder Book Of Railways For Boys And Girls went through 21 editions.
0:35:28 > 0:35:31It is full of very detailed accounts of railway working.
0:35:31 > 0:35:35A chat with the engine driver. Mr Brown, the signal man.
0:35:35 > 0:35:41At the same time, railway stories were being written for children in their thousands.
0:35:41 > 0:35:47Life Or Death, An Indian Railway Yarn, The Missing Mail Bag.
0:35:50 > 0:35:54The railways started attracting followings amongst young people,
0:35:54 > 0:35:57probably from the turn of the 20th century,
0:35:57 > 0:36:01although train spotting as such did not emerge until rather later.
0:36:01 > 0:36:05But, I think, people would go to the seaside
0:36:05 > 0:36:13on the railway and the whole family would go and take the huge trunk in the goods van,
0:36:13 > 0:36:19the luggage van, and they would sit in a compartment all together eagerly going off to the seaside.
0:36:19 > 0:36:24A lot people have written about that as the most exciting thing they did in their childhood.
0:36:37 > 0:36:41The perfect evocation of the railways as part of England
0:36:41 > 0:36:43is generally taken to be in the form of a poem.
0:36:43 > 0:36:47Adlestrop by Edward Thomas.
0:36:47 > 0:36:51On the face of it, the poem recalls a non-event.
0:36:51 > 0:36:56Thomas' train made what is technically called an unscheduled stop
0:36:56 > 0:37:00at Adlestrop in Gloucestershire which has a station no longer.
0:37:00 > 0:37:02Nothing happened.
0:37:02 > 0:37:06But the tranquillity of the moment, the sense of time suspended across
0:37:06 > 0:37:12the sunlit English countryside, stayed with Thomas and has stayed with us all ever since.
0:37:15 > 0:37:19"Yes, I remember Adlestrop,
0:37:19 > 0:37:21"the name, because one afternoon of heat,
0:37:21 > 0:37:26"the express train drew up there unwantedly. It was late June.
0:37:26 > 0:37:29"The steam hissed. Someone cleared his throat.
0:37:29 > 0:37:33"No-one left and no-one came on the bare platform.
0:37:33 > 0:37:37"What I saw was Adlestrop, only the name.
0:37:37 > 0:37:40"And willows, willow herb and grass.
0:37:40 > 0:37:42"And meadowsweet and haycocks dry.
0:37:42 > 0:37:48"No whit less still and lonely fair than the high cloudlets in the sky.
0:37:48 > 0:37:54"And, for that minute, a blackbird sang close by and around him mistier
0:37:54 > 0:38:02"farther and farther all the birds of Oxfordshire and Gloucestershire."
0:38:02 > 0:38:06That kind of poignancy could only have been generated retrospectively.
0:38:06 > 0:38:11Thomas' diary records the date of the stop. June 23rd, 1914.
0:38:11 > 0:38:18But the poem was written whilst he was serving with the British Army in WW1, in which he would be killed.
0:38:18 > 0:38:23In the poem, the railway is seen as it would increasingly come to be seen,
0:38:23 > 0:38:26through a haze of nostalgia.
0:38:30 > 0:38:34In the Great War, trains took on another significance.
0:38:34 > 0:38:40The railways carried soldiers to the front and brought them, in rather fewer numbers, back.
0:38:41 > 0:38:46As the public became familiar with terms like ambulance carriage and hospital train,
0:38:46 > 0:38:50the word "departure" gained a more ominous ring.
0:38:51 > 0:38:53All those partings.
0:38:53 > 0:38:55All that emotional turmoil
0:38:55 > 0:38:58that gets focused down to a train platform,
0:38:58 > 0:39:02particularly at the big London terminuses.
0:39:02 > 0:39:07But then the reality of these guys - thousands - in khaki,
0:39:07 > 0:39:10jostling to get onto the trains.
0:39:10 > 0:39:13The wives, the girlfriends, the husbands, the boyfriends,
0:39:13 > 0:39:17the brothers and sisters all fighting to get one last glimpse.
0:39:17 > 0:39:20"Will I ever see them again?"
0:39:20 > 0:39:24Of course, the great sadness of so many not coming back.
0:39:25 > 0:39:29I always feel a certain apprehension when I go to a railway station,
0:39:29 > 0:39:32however mundane the journey before me.
0:39:32 > 0:39:38Marcel Proust said they were inherently tragic because they carried people into the unknown.
0:39:38 > 0:39:42But imagine how the stakes were raised for wartime departures.
0:39:42 > 0:39:47Thomas Hardy's poem, In A Waiting Room, from a collection published in 1917,
0:39:47 > 0:39:53captures a leave-taking on a wet morning described as being,
0:39:53 > 0:39:55"sick as the day of doom".
0:39:57 > 0:40:02"A soldier and wife with haggard look subdued to stone by strong endeavour.
0:40:02 > 0:40:09"And then I heard, by a casual word, they were parting as they believed forever."
0:40:11 > 0:40:15In the poem, the separating couple are part of a collection of characters
0:40:15 > 0:40:17found in a waiting room like this one.
0:40:17 > 0:40:22The narrator's attention is quickly diverted by a pair of laughing children.
0:40:22 > 0:40:27The private agony of the departing couple is swiftly put aside.
0:40:32 > 0:40:36In WWII, the waiting room's collision of personal misery
0:40:36 > 0:40:38and mundane chatter was brought to the cinema.
0:40:38 > 0:40:39Hello, hello, hello.
0:40:39 > 0:40:43It was beautifully realised by David Lean in Brief Encounter.
0:40:43 > 0:40:45BELL RINGS
0:40:45 > 0:40:49- There's your train.- Yes, I know. - Oh, aren't you coming with us?
0:40:49 > 0:40:51- No, my practice is in Churley. - Oh, I see.
0:40:51 > 0:40:55- I'm a general practitioner at the moment.- Dr Harvey is going out to Africa next week.
0:40:55 > 0:40:57Oh, how thrilling!
0:40:57 > 0:41:00You would think a love story would justify one,
0:41:00 > 0:41:04possibly even two heart-rending farewells at a railway station.
0:41:04 > 0:41:06But Brief Encounter is absolutely stuffed with them.
0:41:06 > 0:41:09It's a bit like a railway timetable.
0:41:09 > 0:41:12A series of arrivals and departures.
0:41:12 > 0:41:13WHISTLE BLOWS
0:41:14 > 0:41:17Quickly, quickly! The whistle's gone!
0:41:19 > 0:41:22I'm so glad I had a chance to explain. I didn't think I'd see you again.
0:41:22 > 0:41:25How absurd of you. Quickly! Quickly!
0:41:26 > 0:41:30- Next Thursday? - Yes, next Thursday.- Bye.- Goodbye.
0:41:30 > 0:41:31Thursday!
0:41:31 > 0:41:32There's the shriek of the train.
0:41:32 > 0:41:34The train that won't wait.
0:41:34 > 0:41:38Things have got to be done. Things have got to be said.
0:41:38 > 0:41:43They have to be said and therefore that whole feeling between them is heightened
0:41:43 > 0:41:46by probably what they can't say, what can't happen,
0:41:46 > 0:41:48but it's heightened by that waiting room.
0:41:49 > 0:41:52It doesn't matter, not saying anything I mean.
0:41:52 > 0:41:54I'll miss my train and and wait...
0:41:54 > 0:41:58- No, please don't. I'll come with you to your platform. I'd rather. - Very well.
0:42:00 > 0:42:05In the film, the railway station is described as "the most ordinary place in the world".
0:42:05 > 0:42:08In the earlier period of steam, a tormented heroine would have
0:42:08 > 0:42:11flung herself on the tracks like Anna Karenina.
0:42:11 > 0:42:15But, by the 1940s, the worst the locomotive can do
0:42:15 > 0:42:18is to fling a bit of grit into Celia Johnson's eye.
0:42:25 > 0:42:30Brief Encounter was shot in the closing months of the war at Carnforth station in Lancashire.
0:42:30 > 0:42:36A place remote enough, it was hoped, for the bright film lights to go unnoticed by the Luftwaffe.
0:42:39 > 0:42:42David Lean had a proper regard for steam engines.
0:42:42 > 0:42:46He understood that they were natural stars and instructed the drivers
0:42:46 > 0:42:50to race through the station with as much din and steam as possible.
0:42:52 > 0:42:54Steam's a great thing.
0:42:54 > 0:42:56What better thing can you have in a film
0:42:56 > 0:43:01if you want to suggest evanescence or impermanence
0:43:01 > 0:43:06or drama than a great big shot of almost stage-like steam?
0:43:15 > 0:43:18After the War, Britain looked to the future.
0:43:18 > 0:43:21We became a self-consciously modern society.
0:43:23 > 0:43:28While the newly nationalised railways trundled on, the affection we'd built up
0:43:28 > 0:43:34for rail over the 20th century was transferred, for a while at least, to the motor car.
0:43:39 > 0:43:43The motor car, until after WWII, is not very well developed.
0:43:43 > 0:43:48After the Second World War, it really takes off as the way to travel.
0:43:48 > 0:43:54Everybody wants to own a motor car and a television set and get hooked up on the telephone.
0:43:54 > 0:43:58That's their aim in life. It's not to take a train anywhere.
0:43:58 > 0:44:01So that's when the romance starts wearing off.
0:44:05 > 0:44:10It was now the automobile that could take you off into picturesque backwaters of England.
0:44:10 > 0:44:16And, what's more, you no longer had to share the journey with strangers who either picked their teeth
0:44:16 > 0:44:19in an annoying way or were just plain murderous looking.
0:44:21 > 0:44:26Like a man in a mid-life crisis, the country became paranoid about seeming old-fashioned.
0:44:26 > 0:44:31And this was the moment that trains came to be perceived as a second-class form of transport.
0:44:31 > 0:44:34A form of social services on wheels.
0:44:34 > 0:44:39You travelled by train if you couldn't afford a car or were too decrepit to drive.
0:44:44 > 0:44:49The moment of transition was captured in the film The Titfield Thunderbolt in 1953.
0:44:49 > 0:44:53Here, a cherished branch line is threatened by a local bus company.
0:44:53 > 0:44:58And the competition between rail and road is played out for the cameras.
0:45:05 > 0:45:07WHISTLE BLOWS
0:45:10 > 0:45:11HORN BLARES
0:45:17 > 0:45:19Faster, Alec, faster!
0:45:19 > 0:45:22WHISTLE BLOWS AND HORN BLARES
0:45:23 > 0:45:25HORN BEEPS
0:45:25 > 0:45:27It's safer by road(!)
0:45:29 > 0:45:34That was filmed on the Cam Valley, just south of Bath.
0:45:34 > 0:45:40And the film, as we know, is about the closure, fighting the closure of a railway line.
0:45:40 > 0:45:42And, in fact, when it was made,
0:45:42 > 0:45:48the line had already closed, and this was in the very early 1950s.
0:45:50 > 0:45:53A BBC news team, chronicled the making of the film,
0:45:53 > 0:45:57including the famous runaway locomotive scene.
0:45:58 > 0:46:02The scriptwriter was, in fact, a neighbour of Dr Beeching,
0:46:02 > 0:46:07the future chairman of the British Railways Board and slayer of branch lines.
0:46:11 > 0:46:16The Titfield Thunderbolt includes a remarkable prescient call to arms.
0:46:16 > 0:46:22A warning to the villagers and to us all of the great migraine that was coming.
0:46:22 > 0:46:25Open it up to buses and lorries and what is it going to be like?
0:46:25 > 0:46:27Our lanes will be concrete roads.
0:46:27 > 0:46:30Our houses will have numbers instead of names.
0:46:30 > 0:46:33There will be traffic lights and zebra crossings
0:46:33 > 0:46:36and that will be twice as dangerous. If you don't believe me, go by bus.
0:46:36 > 0:46:38We don't want a monopoly.
0:46:38 > 0:46:41All we're asking for is a chance to keep our train running.
0:46:41 > 0:46:44Mr Blakeworth, you said people were scared of our idea.
0:46:44 > 0:46:47That's quite true. Perhaps you're one of them
0:46:47 > 0:46:49but give us a chance and we'll prove we can do it.
0:46:56 > 0:47:01With its cast of English eccentrics trying to turn back or at least stop the clock,
0:47:01 > 0:47:08The Titfield Thunderbolt also prefigured the growth of steam railway conservation societies.
0:47:08 > 0:47:13But even in the 1950s, the passion for locomotive preservation was nothing new.
0:47:14 > 0:47:18I think it's significant that Stephenson's engine locomotion
0:47:18 > 0:47:22was put on a pedestal and displayed the public as early as 1857.
0:47:22 > 0:47:25We've been trying to commemorate and preserve these things
0:47:25 > 0:47:28long before any serious threat to their existence occurred.
0:47:32 > 0:47:37Given the aesthetic appeal of railways, it seems only right that a poet
0:47:37 > 0:47:40should emerge as their champion when they were under attack.
0:47:42 > 0:47:48In the writings and films of John Betjeman, railways found their most eloquent advocate.
0:47:51 > 0:47:53Evercreech junction, Somerset.
0:47:53 > 0:47:57It was to be the Clapham Junction of the west.
0:47:57 > 0:47:59The place where one line branched away to Bath
0:47:59 > 0:48:02and collared the Midland trade.
0:48:02 > 0:48:06And the mainline ran to Highbridge and collared the coal from Cardiff.
0:48:06 > 0:48:12That Pickwickian figure in the frightful hat is, I'm sorry to say,
0:48:12 > 0:48:17me, talking to the station master. But a station master's life.
0:48:17 > 0:48:20That's something worth living.
0:48:20 > 0:48:21I'd like to have met Betjeman.
0:48:21 > 0:48:25A line from one of his poems, Parliament Hill Fields,
0:48:25 > 0:48:28is one of the reasons I started writing railway fiction.
0:48:28 > 0:48:33"Rumble under, thunder over, train and tram, alternate go."
0:48:33 > 0:48:39Something to do with the way a very dynamic image is created from such unpretentious language.
0:48:39 > 0:48:42A friend of mine did meet John Betjeman.
0:48:42 > 0:48:47He was helping the platform guard by slamming the doors on a train at Didcot Railway Station.
0:48:47 > 0:48:51"Do you work here, Mr Betjeman?" my friend perhaps rather archly asked him.
0:48:51 > 0:48:54"Oh, what a lovely idea," beamed the poet.
0:48:55 > 0:48:59For Betjeman, much of the railway's appeal was its permanence.
0:48:59 > 0:49:02It was a very useful bequest from our forefathers.
0:49:02 > 0:49:06As he writes in Pershore Station, "the Victorian world and the present,
0:49:06 > 0:49:09"in a moment's neighbourhood."
0:49:11 > 0:49:14In his poetry, the railway station often stands for a world
0:49:14 > 0:49:17that is disappearing or has vanished completely.
0:49:20 > 0:49:25This is a monody on the death of Aldersgate Street Station.
0:49:33 > 0:49:38Snow falls in the buffet of Aldersgate Station.
0:49:38 > 0:49:42Soot hangs in the tunnel in clouds of steam.
0:49:42 > 0:49:46City of London, before the next desecration,
0:49:46 > 0:49:51let your steepled forest of churches be my theme.
0:49:52 > 0:49:57Betjeman's poetry and prose seem to elide churches and railway stations
0:49:57 > 0:50:01with both offering a refuge from the modern world.
0:50:01 > 0:50:06I find it very apt that he was behind the campaign to save St Pancras from demolition.
0:50:06 > 0:50:11St Pancras, after all, is both a Christian saint and a railway station.
0:50:11 > 0:50:17Betjeman is really at the root of the Railway Preservation Societies.
0:50:17 > 0:50:21He tried to save the Euston Arch and got involved in that.
0:50:21 > 0:50:26They lost that campaign but then, in the 1960s,
0:50:26 > 0:50:28there was a plan to demolish St Pancras.
0:50:28 > 0:50:34It's extraordinary now, but he was very active in ensuring that did not happen.
0:50:34 > 0:50:38And that St Pancras, this great, Gothic cathedral,
0:50:38 > 0:50:42our greatest railway building, was not demolished.
0:50:42 > 0:50:48His efforts are now demonstrated by the fact that there is a statue of Betjeman in St Pancras station.
0:50:50 > 0:50:55Betjeman is thought of as fogeyish, but he was ahead of his time.
0:50:55 > 0:51:00He was writing about the foul racket caused by aeroplanes over London as early as the 1970s.
0:51:00 > 0:51:04And he sounds like a modern-day environmentalist when talking about railways.
0:51:07 > 0:51:11You know, I'm not just being nostalgic and sentimental
0:51:11 > 0:51:13and unpractical about railways.
0:51:14 > 0:51:20Railways are bound to be used again. They are not a thing of the past.
0:51:20 > 0:51:24And it's heartbreaking to see them left to rot.
0:51:24 > 0:51:28To see the fine men who served them all their lives
0:51:28 > 0:51:32made uncertain about their own futures and about their jobs.
0:51:32 > 0:51:38What's more, it's wrong in every way when we all of us know that road traffic
0:51:38 > 0:51:44is becoming increasingly hellish on this overcrowded island and that, in ten years from now,
0:51:44 > 0:51:50there will be three times as much traffic on English roads as there is today.
0:51:52 > 0:51:56Whilst St Pancras was saved, so much wasn't.
0:52:00 > 0:52:04And another one of the last 300 steam locomotives in service
0:52:04 > 0:52:08with British Railways comes to the end of the line.
0:52:08 > 0:52:13To its final resting place here at Carnforth in a siding
0:52:13 > 0:52:16which is becoming known as the graveyard of steam.
0:52:20 > 0:52:23Beeching's cuts were swiftly followed by the end of steam.
0:52:23 > 0:52:27In 1968, Carnforth, where David Lean had encouraged engine drivers
0:52:27 > 0:52:31to let rip, became the last stop for many locomotives.
0:52:31 > 0:52:36# I'm the last of the blood and sweat brigade
0:52:38 > 0:52:44# And I don't know where I'm going
0:52:44 > 0:52:47# Or how I came
0:52:51 > 0:52:56# I'm the last of the good old-fashioned
0:52:56 > 0:53:01# Steam-powered trains. #
0:53:04 > 0:53:08There's no doubt, a diesel train is less inspiring than a steam engine.
0:53:08 > 0:53:14I think people start losing their fondness for it as steam is phased out.
0:53:14 > 0:53:17It doesn't inspire any poetry.
0:53:17 > 0:53:21If there hadn't been steam engines, and had been diesel engines straight away,
0:53:21 > 0:53:25we wouldn't half the literature about the railways that we have.
0:54:07 > 0:54:10And what do we have now?
0:54:10 > 0:54:16At York, where my own fascination with railways began, it's clear that things have gone awry.
0:54:19 > 0:54:22Even the locomotives are disappearing.
0:54:22 > 0:54:27Instead, we have multiple units that are about as graceful and aerodynamic as wardrobes.
0:54:27 > 0:54:32With names like 365 class. Yes, they are functional.
0:54:32 > 0:54:35Like worms, they can still move after being chopped in half.
0:54:35 > 0:54:39But they are hardly going to inspire writers.
0:54:39 > 0:54:44In fact, I suspect that the entire secret purpose of modern railways in this country
0:54:44 > 0:54:47could be to deflect the interest of artists.
0:54:52 > 0:54:55York station is sadly depleted now.
0:54:55 > 0:55:00It still has a grandeur about it, but I can't imagine anybody setting a novel here today.
0:55:00 > 0:55:04It's not just that the steam locomotives, those literal generators of atmosphere
0:55:04 > 0:55:08have gone, the place has generally been de-railwayfied
0:55:08 > 0:55:11in quite a distressing way.
0:55:17 > 0:55:20The old station signal box is now a Costa Coffee.
0:55:20 > 0:55:24The office of the night stationmaster - an intriguingly shadowy
0:55:24 > 0:55:27if not satanic job description -
0:55:27 > 0:55:30is a tourist information centre.
0:55:31 > 0:55:35The old booking hall is now a Burger King.
0:55:38 > 0:55:41Railway stations have ceased to be about the business of railways
0:55:41 > 0:55:45and have become about the business of retail.
0:55:45 > 0:55:49The mysterious soot-blackened hinterlands have been tidied away.
0:55:49 > 0:55:51We are passengers no longer.
0:55:51 > 0:55:54We are officially customers.
0:55:54 > 0:55:57Consumers as well, of course.
0:55:57 > 0:56:01The railway satirist who writes under the name Tyresius
0:56:01 > 0:56:03has updated Adlestrop for the modern day.
0:56:03 > 0:56:07"Haycocks and meadows sweet, I wouldn't know.
0:56:07 > 0:56:10"I never looked outside the train.
0:56:10 > 0:56:13"Just drank canned beer from a plastic cup
0:56:13 > 0:56:17"until the damn thing started again."
0:56:17 > 0:56:24We are not going to have the Edward Thomas experience of blackbirds singing in hedges. That's gone.
0:56:24 > 0:56:28And it's a great sadness. We don't have that any more.
0:56:28 > 0:56:32We are packed into these tubes. We are delivered. We are a statistic.
0:56:32 > 0:56:34And therefore, the romance,
0:56:34 > 0:56:39unless one thinks about it in a very different way, which I've not got my head round,
0:56:39 > 0:56:42it's changed, I think, irrevocably.
0:56:46 > 0:56:49The few of us who do write about railways these days are usually
0:56:49 > 0:56:54summoning up a railway system that has either disappeared or has never existed at all.
0:56:59 > 0:57:06Note that the Hogwarts Express of Harry Potter fame is not a diesel multiple unit.
0:57:08 > 0:57:12It's supposed departure platform, the elusive nine and three quarters,
0:57:12 > 0:57:18is a portal to a fantasy railway network a world away from modern King's Cross.
0:57:20 > 0:57:23Walk into the ground floor of Betjeman's beloved St Pancras
0:57:23 > 0:57:29and you could be forgiven for failing to realise you're even in a railway station,
0:57:29 > 0:57:33so replete is it with designer outlets, cappuccino opportunities, juice bars.
0:57:35 > 0:57:38But the real action is going on upstairs.
0:57:38 > 0:57:43It's no accident that at the start of the latest Bourne film,
0:57:43 > 0:57:47so strenuously and self-consciously cool, Matt Damon arrives in London,
0:57:47 > 0:57:52not on a plane, but on the Eurostar.
0:57:52 > 0:57:54This is highly promising.
0:57:56 > 0:58:02For writers to turn in numbers again to the railways, we need a revival of railway romance.
0:58:02 > 0:58:04Eurostar offers some hope.
0:58:04 > 0:58:08It's the only train in Britain that really gets my pulse racing.
0:58:08 > 0:58:10A top speed of 200mph.
0:58:10 > 0:58:14Champagne on tap in the buffet. Smartly turned-out staff.
0:58:14 > 0:58:19And the undersea tunnel. Anything could happen in that.
0:58:19 > 0:58:21For the future of trains to be assured,
0:58:21 > 0:58:25they must once again become the vehicles of our dreams.
0:58:27 > 0:58:31# Feel like an old railroad man
0:58:31 > 0:58:36# He's really tried the best that he can
0:58:36 > 0:58:41# To make his life add up to something good
0:58:41 > 0:58:45# But this engine no longer burns on wood
0:58:45 > 0:58:48# And I guess I may never understand... #
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