“Nowt fancy” – as they say around here about the railway journey we’re about to take for 50 miles and through 26 stations on a slow train into the historic and spiritual heart of Lancashire – passing along the way through seemingly unremarkable towns such as Preston, Blackburn, Burnley and Nelson and all the little places along the valleys up the branch line to Colne, coming to a premature halt in the shadow of Pendle Hill. But what riches are available on the journey – and what rewards for those who take the trouble to seek them out.
I chose the Blackpool to Colne line as one of the great railway journeys of Britain after being asked by the publishers Random House to define the best train trips in the land for a new book. After 40,000 miles of travel from the north of Scotland to the far west of Cornwall, the charms of this unconventionally interesting rail route are limitless for those prepared to discover them.
This is a railway on nobody’s tourist map, yet the returns for quarrying beneath the surface are immense. It is no exaggeration to say that there are more concentrated riches, mile for mile in terms of landscape and heritage than almost anywhere else in the country. But, to use another Lanky phrase, you have to “pick ter ger at it”. It is easy to forget in the global age that it was this little bit of Lancashire that made Britain great. In these narrow upland valleys where the soft waters ran down from the fast flowing moorland Pennine Hills, Richard Arkwright and his steam age contemporaries sparked a revolution that has not yet been surpassed in its impact – even by the modern potentates of the information age.
Our train this morning will take us from Blackpool’s shore, where the trams still sway timelessly along the prom, past imposing mills as mighty as palaces. Here, too, are blackened, god-fearing granite churches and marble-ornamented town halls, constructed to mark the power of forgotten aldermen and even more obscure civic splendours. It was one of the guides in the blandly modern Blackburn Cathedral who said to me: “People these days are starting to forget what it all stood for. It’s as though we’re squatting in the remains of the Roman Empire.”
Loss of empire? No single town on Britain’s railway system has suffered it more tragically than Blackpool. Read and weep. Our 08.44 this morning from Blackpool South, via Blackpool Pleasure Beach, on the old Lancashire and Yorkshire main line, runs on a meagre hourly service from a single platform, with a bus shelter and a buffer stop. Long gone are the days when the trains ran up almost to nudge the Blackpool Tower, where hordes of Wakes Week millworkers funnelled through the barriers to the smell of sea spray, chips and candyfloss.
But cheer up we’re now passing into “posh Lancashire”, stopping at first at St Annes, with its genteel Victorian pier and running alongside the manicured fairways of the famous Royal Lytham and St Annes Golf club, home to the British Open, and into Lytham itself. Even though he made his home here, the comedian Les Dawson ridiculed the locals for their snobbery, claiming they “wore sailing caps to eat their fish and chips”.
Soon a broad highway of tracks starts to appear on the left as we approach Preston station on the West Coast Main Line – with the old Tulketh Mill and its soaring brick chimney on the right of the railway, a reminder of how Lancashire’s county town was once the epicentre of the cotton industry. Now the University of Central Lancashire reigns supreme here. As well as being Britain’s sixth biggest university, it is Preston’s biggest employer and you can catch a glimpse of its futuristic lime-green Media Factory on the left just before the station. Cotton factories to media factories in less than a generation!
All the way along the East Lancashire Railway, what were once bustling goods yards, serving mills, mines and heavy industry have returned to nature. Who now remembers that the little stations along here once served some of the north’s darkest and most satanic mills. Even many of the names – Pleasington, Cherry Tree and Rose Grove – sound as though they belong to a remote little branch line deep in the heart of the countryside. Once they were euphemisms for a kind of industrial hell, but now they are covered in wild flowers
One thing the post-Beeching penny-pinchers could not remove is the magnificent engineering of this route as it sweeps across the East Lancashire valleys. We encounter the first of these grand structures as the train plunges down the bank to Hoghton Bottoms, at whose foot the engineer Joseph Locke built the graceful three-arch Hoghton Viaduct, towering 116 feet above the Darwen gorge. Less fortunate has been Blackburn station, the major junction on the line, where it is possible to change for slow and infrequent trains heading north to the pretty market town of Clitheroe and south into Manchester Victoria. Until not long ago, there was a grand structure here, fit for the gateway to the “weaving capital of the world”. But now the fine old roof has been swept away and the platforms remodelled in what you might call “shopping centre, wipe-clean bland”.
Much humbled, too is Accrington, once a proud junction, bordered by clattering goods yards and smoking engine sheds, where services would head south to Manchester until Beeching shut them down. Still, it’s hard to erase the heritage etched into every feature of this gritty landscape. There is probably no more authentic distillation of the essence of industrial Lancashire than here, where, the cast-iron roof of the Victorian market hall echoes to the county’s heritage. At “Bob’s Quality Tripe and Black Pudding” stall under the cast-iron roof of the Victorian market hall I buy my lunch – a “Hot Black Pudding – now being served 9.30-1.30pm.” And where else might you be asked: “Which would you like, love? The fatty or the lean one?”Although I turn down the offer of some “cow heel”, “pig’s feet”, “honeycomb” or “seam” tripe.
We’re now clanking over the points onto the single track of the Colne branch, mercilessly trimmed by Beeching from what was once a double-track main line through to Skipton in the Yorkshire Dales. The Victorian aldermen of Burnley would have been mortified to think that a station called “Central” in what was one of the grandest industrial towns of Victorian England would one day comprise a single platform on an hourly branch line service. But Burnley still has its splendid 15-arch stone-faced Ashfield Road viaduct, built in 1848, spanning the narrow valley of the River Calder and offering fine vistas of the town.
There are compensations, too as we pull into Nelson, with its cheery Victorian cast-iron overall roof – all spick and span, gleaming glass and freshly repainted as part of a new transport interchange. Beyond Nelson, the scenery takes on high drama and with Pendle Hill looming mysteriously in the distance, trains cross a viaduct before entering the spartan single-platform terminus at Colne. Here, at a simple unstaffed halt, my 50-mile mile journey from the coast comes to an end amidst spectacular moorland scenery on the borders of Lancashire and Yorkshire. The town is birthplace of Wallace Hartley, the bandmaster on the Titanic – appropriate since it must be one of the unluckiest stations in Britain. It lost its through services to Yorkshire under Beeching. But currently has one of the best cases for the reopening of a railway line in Britain. I’m prepared to bet it will happen. Folk round here don’t have a habit of giving up easily.
Michael Williams is Senior Lecturer in journalism at the University of Central Lancashire. His book ‘On the Slow Train Again’ has just been published in paperback by Arrow Books, price £8.99
