Not motoring
Romantic lines
Gavin Stamp
I. have long been fascinated by the last few minutes of Hitchcock's North by North- West. Remember? First Cary Grant is inside a Frank Lloyd Wright house, then, after a struggle, he is holding on to the hand of Eva Maria Saint as she dangles from the top of Mount Rushmore before the scene dissolves to reveal our hero haul- ing up his new bride to an upper berth in a sleeping car. Now, do (or did) American trains really have double beds on board? Everything in America is bigger, of course, but even so that does seem an extraordi- nary hostage to immorality.
There are certainly no double-berths on British sleepers and, although I confess I have not tried, it would surely be difficult to get up to anything on the night train between London and Glasgow: not much room in the bunk and a distinct danger of falling out. My brother decided to take the sleeper for the first part of his honeymoon and, naturally, tried to book First Class until it was pointed out to him that not only was Second Class cheaper but there was then room for two in the cabin.
Even so, I still find the sleeper intensely romantic — in all senses. This is partly to do with departures and arrivals. Saying good-bye to someone squeezing into a car is never satisfactory, the occasion somehow `The garden isn't looking its best after the hard winter.' undignified and indecisive, while platform farewells can be desperately poignant. Yes, there may be that awkward pause before the train goes — or, worse, when it doesn't go — but one person standing at the win- dow, the other on the platform as the train moves out of the station adds a proper and inexorable finality to the event.
Seeing someone off on a sleeper is even better. There is a sense of adventure: it is dark, shortly before midnight; the station both echoing and empty and yet noisy and vibrant with people, singly or in couples, rushing to get the last train home or kissing good-bye. And one can say one's good-byes at the door of the carriage or, better, in the bar car, where the traveller can then drown sorrows or celebrate departure before stag- gering along the moving train to bed. Arrivals by sleeper are not quite so roman- tic, of course; when I stumble off the train at Glasgow Central in the early hours, unshaven, hung-over, I certainly do not want to see anybody before I get home.
Immediately in front of my house are rails in a shallow cutting, running under what was once Strathbungo Station but is now Susie's the grocers. I like that. Not only do I find the rumble of trains more agreeable than the roar of motor traffic, but I like to think where those rails are going, for it is comforting to see lines of steel that reach out to places and people that I love. Once upon a time those rails connected St Pancras with St Enoch — two of the most obscure saints in the calendar — and so across the mountains and across the border, for this was the Midland Rail- way's route from London to Glasgow. St Pancras is still with us, fortunately, but St Enoch has gone — superseded by Central Station, and its magnificent train shed stupidly destroyed in favour of a meretri- cious glass-roofed shopping centre.
But the rails survive on which once ran the first Pullman cars in Britain. The first sleeping carriages were operated by the North British Railway in 1873 on the East Coast route to Scotland, and soon followed by the West Coast. But the Midland Rail- way soon did better and came to an agree- ment with George M. Pullman, the wicked Chicago railroad tycoon, to operate his American-style sleeping and 'parlor' cars on its new main line to Scotland. So, in 1876, Pullmans began to run from St Pan- cras over the new and spectacular Settle and Carlisle railway, then along the Glas- gow & South Western's rails — through Strathbungo, of course — to St Enoch.
Well, sleeping cars are not what they were, but they are available for people like me and not just for First Class passengers. The new stock may no longer have a hook for your pocket watch, and the air condi- tioning can be noisy, but I still like them they enable me to have an evening in Lon- don, and then be back home at dawn. And I also like the sleeper as a metaphor of life and hope. You get on board at night, travel through the dark, over the great obstacles of Shap and Beattock — perhaps through rain, gales or snow — to arrive at a differ- ent and perhaps better place in the light. It helps if the sun is shining, of course, at the other end, which it doesn't always in Glas- gow, but I have never forgotten my first sleeper to Scotland: from King's Cross those were the days — to Edinburgh and pulling up the blind to greet the blazing morning sun and finding that we were fly- ing over the cliffs just north of Berwick.
Hooray that the Scottish Sleeper service has been given a Thistle Award for services to tourism, Pity that it has to be Euston now, alas, and that the Edinburgh and Glasgow sleepers are combined. So the saddest thing is to be together in the bar, then having to lurch off through the inter- mediate guard's van long before the split to get into the Glasgow section while the friend travels on through the night to that other city. It could be better in reverse, I suppose: joining up for a drink after Carstairs Junction; but the trouble is that the train goes on to Euston which is the least romantic and most depressing of all British stations to arrive at.
Early temperance tracts railway worked the theme of the Railway of Life to death, and I fear my forced railway metaphors only take us so far. Anyway: a Happy New Year's travelling to all my readers and I, for one, hope to be on lots of sleepers in 1997.
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