On the Slow Train Read Online Free PDF Page A

its 24 arches, 104 feet high, held up by 1.5 million bricks faced with limestone it was one of the engineering marvels of the Victorian age. No matter that it had a Grade II * listing from English Heritage and that its domination of the landscape is every bit as great as that of Stonehenge, the estimated £6 million cost of repair was deemed uneconomic by the BR accountants in London. But they didn’t reckon with the 25,000 people (and a dog) who put up objections. After a six-year campaign , the bureaucrats, worn down by the gritty folk of North Yorkshire, backed off. It would be a reckless official indeed who ever tangled with this hardy breed of locals to propose its closure again.
    My journey to Dent began on the 15.03 from Carlisle to Leeds, a spartan little two-car Class 158 diesel unit, all vinyl and worn seats, typical of British Rail in the 1980s, when passengers were reckoned to get in the way of the real business – closing down railways. These days it is operated by Northern Rail, a consortium of the Dutch State Railways and a company called Serco, more famous perhaps for operating detention centres and speed cameras on Britain’s highways. This may seem a surreal commercial arrangement in this heartland of traditional England, but such is the nature of the modern privatised railway.
    The Express Sprinter unit – a misnomer if ever there was one – sits wheezing and guttering, and shooting clouds of blue fumes over Carlisle’s Platform 1. At least the heaters are working full blast, though the windows could do with a clean, and one of them has so much condensation between the double glazing it looks as though there’s a pea-souper outside. It’s a far cry from the splendour of the first train on the opening of the line on May Day 1876. James Allport had been to America and met a young carriage manufacturer called George Mortimer Pullman (the name was yet to pass into the lexicon as a synonym for luxury). Allport ordered two of George Mortimer’s new-fangled Pullman cars for the Settle and Carlisle and opened up a new era of luxurious rail travel, with flushing lavatories and sprung bogies which gave a ride like silk. ‘Altogether magnificent,’ pronounced the correspondent of the
Railway News
.
    All the seats are covered in Utrecht velvet, while the whole of the woodwork is of American walnut, with much tasteful gilding and painting. Numerous other comforts, great and little, including a system of warming by hot water pipes, and abundance of curtains, and lavatories for both ladies and gentlemen, raise travelling in the Pullman Palace train from a fatigue to a positive pleasure.
    But it’s not the life of a Victorian sybarite I’m thinking of as our little train rattles over the points to leave the Newcastle line at Petteril Bridge Junction for the relentless ascent for the next fifty miles along the spectacular landscapes of the Eden Valley. For the moment this is gentle country, all fruit trees and pasture in the summer. But it was a different story for the line’s first surveyor, a lanky young Tasmanian called Charles Stanley Sharland, who set out to walk the entire route before it was built, armed with just a compass, theodolite and a few basic instruments. Just as Robert Stephenson had waded across bog and fell to determine the course of the first passenger railway from Liverpool to Manchester fifty years before, so Sharland and a couple of assistants trudged through the mountains, sometimes trapped by snow in lonely fellside inns for weeks on end. Unlike Stephenson, the Tasmanian’s brief was to prepare for the construction of not a local line, but a state-of-the-art main trunk route. There had to be no gradient steeper than 1 in 100, which meant that three and a half miles of expensive tunnels and dozens of viaducts were needed. To this day the Settle and Carlisle is the only fully fledged main line in the world running through such mountainous