The dignity of trains

[John Ashworth]

The dignity of trains is in looking like themselves, not ice-cream vans

Ian Jack
Saturday August 18, 2007
The Guardian

When Richard Hannay fled London for Scotland at the start of The Thirty-Nine Steps, he took a Glasgow express from St Pancras and went the middle way, though Leicester and Leeds and then up over the Pennines to change to a Galloway local at Dumfries. That route was comfortable but slow and vanished from the timetable in the 1970s. Alfred Hitchcock had already discarded it in the 1930s. His film played fast and loose with John Buchan's novel. When Robert Donat's Hannay flees north, he catches the Aberdeen train from King's Cross and speeds north as far as the Forth Bridge, where he jumps off after hugging Madeleine Carroll in a short-lived attempt to deceive the police. Later, of course, he takes off her stockings.

In Hitchcock's day, thanks to the locomotives of Sir Nigel Gresley and the marketing department of the London and North Eastern Railway, the East Coast route had become the fashionable way north. It was quicker, much more so than the line from St Pancras, and by then also faster than the London Midland and Scottish Railway's West Coast route, where the trains toiled over the summits at Shap and Beattock and where, save for a glimpse of Morecambe Bay, the traveller does not see any coast. Rivalry between east and west was serious in the 1890s and grew so again in the 1930s, and out of it came the world speed record for a steam locomotive, which has stood for nearly 70 years; how strange now that such a famous event - enginemen driving Gresley's Mallard at 126mph south of Grantham on June 3 1938 - could have stemmed from the publicity battle over the fastest overland way to travel the 400 miles between London and Edinburgh or Glasgow.

This week the Department for Transport announced that National Express would in December take over the franchise for the East Coast route from the Great North Eastern Railway (GNER), which has run it since privatisation in 1997. Aesthetically, the results could be sad. Alone of the big train operating companies formed by privatisation, GNER perpetuated the handsome dignity of trains by seeing that their attraction lay in their looking like themselves rather than a cut-price airline or an ice-cream van. There was a lot of history to draw on. Railways once thought of design and livery as great selling-points. John Major may never be forgiven as the prime minister who instigated railway privatisation, but, bless his sentimental English soul, as well as the warm beer and cricket he remembered the chocolate-and-cream carriages of the Great Western and imagined, foolish man, that the return of capitalism to railways would restore an old pride in their local identities. Instead, Britain has train companies with titles that could belong to mobile phone service providers or credit cards - C2C, First Capital Connect - stamped on rolling stock painted in gay purple or go-faster stripes. The "Great Western" is still there, but brand management insists it carries the prefix "First" on its frequently late-running and overcrowded trains.

GNER did something different. It was a subsidiary of Sea Containers, led by James Sherwood, an American who liked railways and saw them as more than a business. GNER remembered history. It devised for itself an old-fashioned coat of arms and inscribed the legend "The Route of the Flying Scotsman" on its rolling stock, and then cleverly undercut what could have been a too-saccharine heritage appearance, the Laura Ashley of railways, with some elegant sans-serif typography and a livery of deep blue and red. The same design scheme runs through its restaurant-car china, timetables and staff uniforms and the look of its trains remains one of the few recent British success stories in transport design. I see these trains many times a week, sliding over Holloway Road on their way south or north, and when my children were younger we would sometimes go to the local park and watch them cruise up the bank from King's Cross. To me, they say that trains have a tradition distinct from aircraft and buses, that they are capable of their own kind of elegance and can be lovely to look at.

If National Express can retain this elegance, (a) that will be good and (b) I shall be surprised. Railways are now scrutinised entirely by a quick glance through the prism of profit and cost. Here too, if you happen to travel by GNER, there are reasons to worry. GNER found that by agreeing to pay £1.3bn to the Treasury for a 10-year franchise it was heading towards bankruptcy. National Express will pay £100m more for a contract that is 30 months shorter. The revenue will have to come from somewhere. National Express promises more trains and 14,000 extra seats every weekday - revenue from passenger growth - but also that all "unregulated" fares will rise at rates well above inflation.

Anthony Smith, chief executive of Passenger Focus, said this week: "The government puts a lot of emphasis ... on doing something about the equality gaps that are opening up in society. The railways should not be excluded from that. If you keep pricing up tickets, it will have long-term consequences."

The evidence for government concern about the growing inequality of wealth in Britain would be interesting to see. In terms of rail travel, it expresses itself by regulating season ticket rises to no more than 1% above inflation - a concern not brought about by ideas of social justice or holding carbon emissions in check but by needing to appease the commuting electorate of south-east England.

Elsewhere, the disparities of the Gilded Age prevail. With a Family Railcard and a fortnight's foresight, an adult and two children can travel standard-class from London to Glasgow by Virgin Trains for £40. Due to over-sophisticated engineering, the toilets may not work; due to the need to pack in as many standard class seats as possible, there is little space for any luggage bigger than a laptop. Until Preston comes, the train in standard class will resemble an evacuation instrument for refugees.

But travel first-class and you enter the world of the Pullman - food, drink and newspapers brought to you and a train threequarters empty; by Glasgow it had 10 first-class passengers for 149 seats. You pay a lot - £177.50 for a single bought on the day, the equivalent of two return airfares (to be ecological you need to be rich). But even more striking is the division of the train. Nine coaches are divided nearly equally between first and standard class. The rich may number only 10% of the passengers but they occupy 50% of the space.

I think this was not even true of the Titanic. Certainly, in the heyday of the East Coast route, when apple-green engines were pulling varnished teak coaches, the third-class passenger felt more a part of the same train (if not the same world) as the people sitting on the softer cushions in first class. They even shared the same dining car. Did Donat's Hannay go third? I can't remember. As he sat opposite a couple of lingerie salesmen, that seems likely, but the fact is that in 1930 it was harder to spot the difference. And what a troubling fact that is.