Last Man Sitting – by Nige Tassell
Imagine no trains. It’s easy if you try. But what a lesser world we’d live in.
This weekend marks the 200th anniversary of passenger rail travel. When, on 27 September 1825, George Stephenson piloted Locomotion No 1 from Shildon to Stockton with several hundred people on board, it marked nothing less than a new dawn in civilisation. Daily life hasn’t been the same since.
To mark the occasion two whole centuries later, I took a series of train journeys up, down, across and around the United Kingdom. Locomotion No 1 hit the buffers in Stockton, and I stayed on board until the end of the line each time too – from Wick to Penzance, and to 14 other termini in between. Then I gathered together all these journeys, these adventures, into a book. It’s called Final Destination.
My journeys weren’t high-speed charges between major conurbations. By their very nature, many (if not most) places at the end of the line are distant, faraway, remote. Almost exclusively, I wasn’t arriving on a long, snaking inter-city service. Most often, it was a shorter (usually a two- or three-carriage) affair, clanking and clunking in glorious fashion towards its destination; several of the services reached there by way of a single track, be it Severn Beach overlooking the Bristol Channel, Sheringham on the north Norfolk coast or the aforementioned Wick, a station 140 miles closer to Bergen in Norway than to London.
Once I stepped off the train in all 16 places, I had a good nose around into all of their nooks and crannies, which allowed each chapter in the book to be a combination of both a travelogue of the train journey and a character study of the final destination itself. These end-of-the-line locations were varied, from decommissioned ferry ports and Victorian seaside resorts to landlocked towns that had seen better days and, in the case of Dungeness on the Kent coast, a pebble desert with its own power station.
I was interested to find out the history of each place, of what it was like to grow up there beyond the buffers, or to move there later in life. Accordingly, as well as chatting with my fellow passengers, I interrogated the locals too, be they fishermen, hoteliers, football fans or, in a couple of towns, TV celebrities who now live there. For all of them, the railway to their particular final destination is an invaluable connection to the rest of the world, the lifeline, the link. And it also brings them back again, back home, back to their sanctuaries at the end of the line.
And each line was fascinating in its own way. Sometimes, in the case of the rightly named Far North Line, which takes passengers four-and-a-half hours north of Inverness, I travelled through landscapes that could only be described as wilderness, where – the train line aside – you could go a full hour without a single sign of human activity, or even human existence.
Elsewhere, the journey was shorter and more heavily populated. This included taking a packed commuter service on the Tyne and Wear Metro from Newcastle Airport across and over to South Shields. Here the views weren’t of deep, dark lochs or snow-capped peaks, so people-watching was the order of the day – aside from, of course, the majestic crossing of the Tyne.
Ever since I completed all 16 trips, people have asked me which was my favourite journey that I took, which is the one that I would recommend to those who also fancy a little rail-based escapism. The obvious recommendation is to take the West Highland Line from Glasgow Queen Street to the tiny port of Mallaig, the point of departure for sea-bound onward travel to the Inner Hebrides. The line is 164 miles (and five-and-a-half hours) of breathtaking landscapes and scenery, including, of course, the magisterial curve of the world-famous Glenfinnan Viaduct.
Those good at mental arithmetic will have worked out that that’s an average speed of less than 30mph, the Highlands going past the window in slow motion. This is a line that doesn’t hurry itself – and rightfully so, all the better for absorbing picture-postcard view after picture-postcard view. If you’re fortunate, as I was, you might even catch sight of a stag or three watching the train slip by.
What were my other favourites? That Far North Line was another wonderfully widescreen affair, while the journey I took from Birmingham New Street to Pwllheli in north Wales was glorious too; once past Shrewsbury, it’s a continual thrill of rolling hills and golden beaches.
The hidden gem in the pack was the Esk Valley Line between Middlesbrough and Whitby. Once beyond the Middlesbrough suburbs, the train doesn’t visit any towns, stopping only in small villages and tiny hamlets. As it chugs through the beautiful landscape, the three-carriage service crosses the River Esk no fewer than 18 times, while also linking up with the North Yorkshire Moors Railway at Grosmont, and so cheap is the 90-minute journey (I paid £2.90 each way) that I went there and back between Whitby and Middlesbrough twice in a single day; six hours of train travel through glorious countryside for less than £12. It’s surely the best bargain on the entire rail network.
Not only did I encounter some wallet-friendly travel, I also – amazing as it might seem – didn’t ride on a single service that was running late. On all 16 journeys, my train left bang on time and arrived, just one train-replacement bus aside, exactly at the minute it should.
If he could see 200 years into the future, George Stephenson would certainly approve.
Nige Tassell’s book – Final Destination: Riding Britain’s Rails to the End of the Line – is out now, published by Mudlark
