Low Pressure

The Fates, or possibly The Controllers, have seen fit to decree that I should devote a good proportion of my precious life to commuting by train to and from central London.  In addition to this, as an inveterate non car-owner, my frequent trips to the North and holiday journeys elsewhere in England are also, invariably, undertaken by rail. 

 

Delays, cancellations, fare rises, and misinformation apart, it has its upside.  The train takes the strain, to quote the old Inter-City advertisement, and as the over-familiar scenery flashes or crawls by, I’m usually deep in a book, troubled only by those fellow passengers who feel impelled to share their telephone conversations and/or musical preferences with everyone within earshot.  As well as a book I often have a TLS or LRB in my bag, ansd usually a notebook to capture fleeting inspirations and overheard conversations lest they are lost forever.

Going at it mornings and evenings, the average novel is usually completed within a week or so.

 

(‘Average’ does not include the big three-decker beasts of Trollope, Dickens, and their whiskery ilk.  It’s entirely possible to pass slowly and seamlessly from one season to the next in their, usually pleasant, company before the finally drawing in to the great dénouements of marriages and bequests and revealed truths.)

  

The size and weight of much non-fiction is reason enough to keep  it to the home.  Then too, there’s a certain gaucheness in being seen in public with books about the Nazis or the Third Battle of Ypres or the Age of Sail, or whatever.  People might get the wrong idea. Or the right one.  And biographies, letters and essays always seem most cosily suited to being read late at night, propped up in bed, with just a lamp on and only the occasional wail of an urban siren to disturb.

I’ve never been a true railway enthusiast, though I did have a Great Western themed Hornby layout for a few years.  And I have never been a train spotter.  (Why are there always so many of them at Doncaster of all places?)  I must’ve passed through York on a hundred occasions without, yet, taking the time to venture across to the National Railway Museum, though that might change in the near future.  But what with spending so much of my time on the permanent way, and being of an enquiring mind, and having used pretty much all of the major British railway stations at one time or another, I haven’t been able to help but be vaguely interested in how the network developed into its current state.  

Why, for instance are all of the main London termini situated in a circle about the city centre?  Why, other than the Thameslink route, aren’t there any other lines through the capital?  Why is it so difficult to travel across the country?  Why is it so bloody expensive?  My season ticket now amounts to some 10% of my gross salary.

Fire and Steam: A New History of the Railways in Britain by Christian Wolmar, which I received as a Christmas present, and pretty much read from cover to cover in a single snowbound tea-fuelled sitting, answered all of these questions.  What they teach now in school I have no idea, but in my younger days it was impossible to avoid learning all about the Stockton-Darlington and the Rainhill Trials.  From my Hornby era I was familiar enough with the Big Four and hungover afternoons in front of cable television had acquainted me with just about every significant civil engineering project of the nineteenth century.  But the visions and the commercial schemings and shenanigans of the great period of Railway Mania had always remained somewhat hazy to me until now so I’m grateful to Wolmar for introducing me to the life and career of the superbly Balzacian George Hudson and the vainglorious tale of the Grand Central.  The sad tale of the past sixty or so years is worth reading too, from Nationalisation through Beeching to Privatisation to the present pretty pass throughout which period expenditure upon roads has invariably been portrayed as an "investment" while spending on rail amounted to (dread word) "subsidy".

Venturing precariously out into the ice and snow over the yuletide period, I undertook a tour around the bookshelves of a few charity shops in the course of which I picked up a copy of The Necropolis Railway by Andrew Martin. I’d been aware of this book for a while and it had piqued my interest, though not so much so as to buy it new.  Based upon one of the odder manifestations of railway-mania, the London Necropolis Railway  , this is a superb rendering of early Edwardian London and of the sounds, sights, smells and arcanery of that vanished world of steam.  It’s just a shame that ‘murder mystery’ plot doesn’t match up to the atmosphere. 

 

Frankly my dear, I didn’t give a toss who dunnit.