'The lost idea of a train': Looking for Britain's railway novel

Journal of Transport History, The,  Sep 2000  by Carter, Ian

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At Paddington, Margaret Schlegel's wedding party entrains in a private saloon for the journey to Shropshire, enjoying `the low, rich purr of a Great Western express' as far as Shrewsbury. There they lunch, then transfer to limousines for the last stages of the journey. `Maids, courier, heavy luggage,' we are told, `had already gone on by a branch-line to a station nearer Oniton.41 Social discrimination distinguishes family members from physical and human luggage. Such discrimination was not new. A generation earlier, Arthur Quiller-Couch ('Q') had introduced us to Troy Town (Fowey) in Cornwall, a right, tight little port symbolically opened to landward influences in 1875 when the town's old gatehouses were knocked down to allow the passage of railway omnibuses. Those omnibuses belonged to the Cornwall Mineral Railway, which the previous year had opened a mixed-gauge branch line to Fowey from `Five Lanes Junction' (Par) on the Cornwall Railway's main line from Plymouth to Falmouth.42 In The Astonishing History of Troy Town (18 88) Fenian bombers masquerading as gentry travel first-class by train from London to Troy. Of course, their servants travel third. Arrived at Five Lanes junction, these servants trundle on to Troy over the steeply graded branch. Their employers disdain that route, avoiding the possibility of a long wait (only five trains a day, according to my 1910 Bradshaw) and a huggermugger journey by hiring a post coach. The Wilcoxes' privileged freedom from branch-line travel is not new, we see; novelty lies in private transport powered by the internal combustion engine rather than the hayburners. A revolution is in progress. Five years after Forster published Howards End this revolution's cusp was exposed. Disguised as upper servants, Ashe Marston and Joan Valentine travel third-class by the 4.15 express from Paddington to Market Blandings, avant garde of that horde which led their creator to declare later that `Blandings [Castle] had impostors the way other houses have mice.43 Arrived at Market Blandings station, interface between the railway's metropolitan corridor and a fiercely pre-modern market town (`The church is Norman,' we are assured, `and the intelligence of the majority of the natives palaeozoic'44), they watch their employers - who, of course, have travelled first-class from Paddington - whisked away in the ninth Earl of Emsworth's sole but stately Hispano-Suiza limousine. Ashe and Joan settle down to a long wait with the luggage. Eventually an open horse and cart arrive to provide an interminable, jolting, cold ride from Market Blandings through Blandings Parva, the closed estate village at the castle's gate, to the mansion's extensive servants' quarters.45 Comic neo-pastoral, this is a dream world carefully specified in time: a world where the wealthy travel short distances by car while other classes walk, cycle or jog along behind a spavined horse.

No more than twenty years after Ashe and Joan's chilly journey, motor vehicles had penetrated British life sufficiently for the wry Roy Vickers to tell his readers that: