On the Slow Train Read Online Free PDF Page B

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    Appleby station is the fiefdom of Anne Ridley, the station supervisor, a jolly blonde who greets me like a long-lost friend. How nice! Since she does not know me, it is clear she must welcome all the passengers who alight at this isolated town in similar fashion. There’s plenty of time for a natter before the next train arrives, although Anne has been busy this morning, she tells me, feeding the sheep at her farm in the village of Kirkby Thore, along the line. ‘I’ve also been cleaning the toilets and dusting and polishing the waiting room, as well as doing the ticket office accounts.’ She smiles. ‘And then there’s my husband. He doesn’t always come last, though it may sometimes sound like it! Come and have a coffee,’ she says. With its neat pot plants and wood-burning stove, Anne’s waiting room is a homely place. The polished limestone floor is so shiny, you could eat your dinner off it , as Alan Bennett – also from this part of the world and a leading figure in heading off the line’s closure – might say.
    Anne has been queen of Appleby station for nine years, after swapping her career in the police for ‘the best job in the world’, and works in shifts with her staff of two. She also organises the refreshments for all the trains, sourcing her food from local farmers’ wives. ‘I’m a people person, you see, and I love it here.’ Her customers are not just sightseers doing the Yorkshire Dales, but locals heading up and down the valleys – farmers off for tough interviews with their bank managers in Leeds and their teenage children heading for the (relatively) bright lights of Carlisle. ‘Honestly, what would they do without us? It’s unbelievable – you have to take two buses to get into Carlisle, and it takes hours.’
    As I wait for the next train south, it is hard to imagine that the sleeping-car trains from London to Scotland once stopped here, in the middle of nowhere. Nightshirted and nightcapped figures would lean out of the carriages in the small hours wondering where on earth they were. But Appleby station has another, albeit poignant, claim to fame, commemorated by a little plaque on the platform and a shrine of memorabilia in the corner of Anne Ridley’s immaculate waiting room. Back in 1978, the Right Reverend Eric Treacy, Bishop of Wakefield, lifelong railway enthusiast and celebrated railway photographer, suffered a fatal heart attack while photographing trains on the down platform. The ‘Railway Bishop’ was devoted to the Settle and Carlisle, describing it as one of the three wonders of northern England, along with York Minster and Hadrian’s Wall. His memorial service, held on the platform, was attended by 3,000 people, including six bishops – and three steam locomotives. As Anne waves me off, I notice that the station clock, made by Potts of Leeds in 1870, has stopped at twenty to five. Goodness knows for how long. But it seems appropriate somehow.
    It is appropriate too that I should buy a slice of home-made ‘Stem Ginger Shortbread handmade in Dalefoot Farm’ from Anne ’s trolley on the train. Delicious. I imagine Dalefoot Farm somewhere out there in this chilly autumn countryside – remote maybe, but with the Aga ever warm and the sheepdog curled up at its side. I ask the guard about the weather up at Ribblehead as we climb relentlessly through an increasingly bleak landscape. ‘Just like it generally is – cold and getting colder,’ he tells me. ‘’Twas much worse at one time, winter after winter. Just watch you wrap up well when you get off! It’s the wind that’s the trouble,’ he says, telling how icy gusts coming straight off the North Sea would blow the coal off the fireman’s shovel in steam days. ‘Then there were the chap whose hat was blown off a train on the Ribblehead Viaduct, sucked right through an arch