Belles and Whistles, by Andrew Martin (Profile Books, £15.99)
Andrew Martin is clearly not a fan of today’s trains, which he describes as a ”noisy hell of shuddering grey plastic”. This may not be surprising since his fans will know him as the creator of Jim Stringer, the railway detective – hero of his best-selling series of thrillers, set in the Edwardian golden age of the railway.
But now local author Martin, who lives in Highgate [subs, please check], puts the image golden age to the test against the reality of five journeys along the route of history’s most famous named trains. You may guess we are heading down the tracks to disappointment.
First he travels the route of the Golden Arrow to Paris, Britain’s most famous boat train, with its luxurious Pullman carriages, fine dining and favourite of Winston Churchill, Tallulah Bankhead, the Aga Khan and every celebrity of the day you care to name. Today’s equivalent journey is aboard a workaday commuter Electrostar with an egg sandwich and a miserable ferry across the Channel.
It is a similar dispiriting tale with the Brighton Belle, non-stop to the South Coast – another luxury train, where succulent kippers at breakfast were once a favourite of the actor Lord Olivier. Today this is a bog-standard modern stopping train, with the only consolation a takeaway coffee in a paper bag.
The present-day Cornish Riviera Express, once the longest non-stop journey in the land and famous for its luxury accommodation, is “tightly packed with high-backed seats as in economy class on an aeroplane. “ Martin is equally appalled when the guard on the Flying Scotsman fails even to mention the train’s famous name.
He concludes that today’s railways are lacking in romance and style with “crammed-in seats, vacuous paranoid announcements and ugly liveries and train interiors” – though he accepts that modern trains are faster and safer than ever.
This is not a book for “gricers” (obsessive number collectors), nor is it a “widow gazer”, describing the route as seen through the carriage window. Nor will it appeal to nostalgists who go misty-eyed at the thought of a 1970s British Railways diesel. It is far subtler than that
Like all good trainspotters (and I mean this in the most flattering sense) Martin has a wonderful eye for detail and he is a marvellous truffler of facts. He observes that the nipples on the stone mermaids on the façade of Victoria station are fully visible on the side where the Continental trains once departed, but only half a breast is displayed on the suburban side. Another gem is that the first ever known use of the now ubiquitous “high-vis” jackets was on a Scottish railway in 1964. We discover, too, the favourite tipple of the BBC journalist Kirsty Wark aboard the Caledonian Sleeper.
We are in the hands here of the best of travelling companions, ever charming, well informed, brimming with anecdote, full of bitter-sweet observation yet never unkind – even about the worst excesses of the modern railway which he clearly disdains. Martin’s love of railway travel shines through every page.
And he’s never afraid to laugh at himself. There is a delightful episode where he turns up at Victoria station togged up in a Prince of Wales check suit, determined to get into the flapper-age spirit of the old Brighton Belle only for his wife to discover a stain on the lapel, which rather deflates the experience.
I’d love to find Andrew Martin’s sitting in the corner of my compartment on my next long-distance train journey. (But, oops, I forgot! They don’t have compartments on modern trains any more…)
Michael Williams’s newest book ‘The Lost Trains of Britain’ will be published by Penguin Random House in May 2015
