Underneath the Arches....

This week's Saturday Snapshot hasn't moved far from Tamworth Station, because on this day (August 4) in 1839, railway pioneer George Stephenson drove one of his engines across the newly constructed 19 Arches spanning the Anker Valley at Tamworth. Behind the engine (which was named after the town) were six carriages packed local VIPs and directors of the Birmingham and Derby Junction Railway Company. They had left Curzon Street, in Birmingham, earlier in the day, en route for Derby, where they enjoyed a celebratory lunch at a hotel before setting off on their return journey.

But it's the Arches which fascinate me. When I was working I drove through one of them as I went backwards and forwards to the office, and each time I walk into town, or down to the station, I reach out to touch the stonework, and wonder anew at the skills of those Victorian engineers. At the time the railway viaduct, started by Stephenson, but completed by his son Robert, was one of the marvels of the age, enabling the new-fangled trains to cross the river and its low-lying flood plain.

It's 45-feet high (which is, I am reliably informed, around 7 metres), built of huge slabs of rustic-looking rock (though these may be facings on brickwork) and it runs across the landscape for 417 feet (that's more than 200 metres), crossing two busy roads, a park, the River Anker, and an area of open land. One arch is slightly lower and wider than the others, and two have small walls which once formed part of gateways.

It's a Grade Two Listed structure which, hopefully, means it is protected, but that protection doesn't seem to extend as far as keeping it clean and tidy, and some parts look sadly neglected, with weeds and bushes sprouting from the parapet (actually, I think this top bit may be called a cornice, but I'm not very familiar with architectural terms). One year a small tree flourished above an arch, until it was removed following complaints from residents.

The trains still run across the Arches (more correctly known as the Bolehall or Bolebridge Viaduct, but no-one ever calls them this) on their way from Birmingham to Derby on the West Coast Main Line, stopping at the upper level at Tamworth Station. But two major rail lines cross at Tamworth, so there's a lower level providing a stopping place for trains on the Cross Country Line travelling between York and Bristol.

This second route, originally the Trent Valley Line, was started by a new company whose chairman was Edmund Peel, brother of Sir Robert Peel (he and his family keep popping up in Tamworth's history) but they were taken over by the London and North Western Railway long before work finished. That, in turn, merged with other rail companies (including the Derby Junction) to form the Midland Railway in 1844, and it was three years later that the Trent Valley Line opened, along with Tamworth's first station (a gorgeous Victorian Gothic affair) which was demolished in 1961 and replaced by the very nasty concrete block which is still there today, and doesn't deserve to have its photo taken.


For more Saturday Snapshots see  Alice's blog at http://athomewithbooks.net/


Sources: Tamworth, Past and Present, by John Harper; Tamworth, A History, by Richard Stone.

Talking Trains with John Betjeman

The older I get, the more I like John Betjeman, especially his prose, and particularly Trains and Buttered Toast, an anthology of his radio talks, mostly from the thirties, forties and early fifties. The subject matter is varied, but his enthusiasms are apparent: Victoriana, seaside towns, great British eccentrics, churches. Despite his campaigns to preserve old buildings, he was never political, but portrayed the small details of everyday life which gave him pleasure – and the things which aroused his ire. His cuddly teddy bear image belies his sharp wit, and he can be quite scathing about things (and people) he doesn’t like.

He hated the word nostalgia, but there seems to be an element of it involved in many of these pieces, for the world he grew up in had changed, and he looked back longingly at the values and lifestyle of that earlier age. Life has altered even more since these short essays were first aired. Take Back to the Railway Carriage, broadcast in March 1940 for the BBC Home Service, in which he sings the praises of our railways. “If you want to see and feel the country, travel by train,” he tells us. According to him:

Roads are determined by boundaries of estates and by villages and other roads; they are shut in by hedges, peppered with new villas, garish with tin signs, noisy with roadhouse ...railways are built regardless of natural boundaries and from the height of an embankment we can see the country undisturbed, as one who walks along an open footpath though a field. Roads bury themselves in the landscape. The railways carve out a landscape of their own. .. Railways were built to look from and look at. They are still pleasures for the eye.

And he adds:

But the greatest gift the railways give to us is the proper management of time. Of course there are expresses which will hurtle you from place to place in no time. But the others – no longer the mania for getting from one town to another volleying along a tarmac road at sixty miles an hour, but a leisurely journey, seeing the country, getting to the place much sooner and much more comfortably in the long run and with the pleasant discipline of having to catch a train at a stated time. And if the train is a bit late, what matter?

Betjeman wrote this long before the closure of branch lines, the destruction of ornate Victorian stations, and the development of high-speed trains. He ddidn’t like the ‘new, smart jazz expresses’ with cocktail bars and stifling heat. No, what he enjoys is ‘an old, bumpy carriage with a single gas light in the ceiling’, posters of holiday destinations on the walls, and a rack for ‘Light Articles Only’. I’m not old enough to remember gas lights, but I do recall the pictures of mountains, hills and seaside towns, the luggage racks made from thick cord netting, windows that pulled down to provide fresh air, and doors with handles rather than electronic buttons.

He throws in comments about railway architecture, passengers and staff, as well as a tribute to Bradshaw, guru of Victorian travellers, who produced railway timetables, maps and information about the towns whre the trains stopped. In addition, there are some lines from Edward Thomas’ wonderful poem, ‘Addlestrop’, where Betjeman writes about the wonderful silence of country stations, which is something you don’t come across these days, with all those pre-recorded messages telling you not to smoke, not to leave luggage lying about, to stand well back from the platform edge, and how many carriages make up each train. Once on the train there is no peace, because there are all kinds of beeps and messages about ‘station stops’ and the name of your train manager. And don’t get me started on the sound of computers being turnrd on and off; other people’s music which can be heard all over the carriage, even though they are wearing head phones; the ringing of mobile phones, and the shouted conversations as people communicate on these devices.

How Betjeman would have hated modern train travel. But he would, I think, have been delighted to know that after many years out of print, a reproduction of an 1863 Bradshaw’s Handbook, a Victorian guide to Britain’s railways, has been issued, largely as a result of Michael Portillo’s TV programmes, ‘Great British Railway Journeys’, of which I am a huge fan. Like Betjeman, Portillo improves with age, and his view of our railways is as quirky as that presented by the poet. Interestingly, Betjeman’s talk was intended for broadcast in November 1939 to mark the centenary of Bradshaw’s first railway guide, but went out later than planned.

Oh dear, I was going to write a much more general post on the entire book, not a look at one essay and my thoughts on trains. And the tenses are all to pot, because it’s been thundering, and has started again, and I’m phobic about storms, and have to keep turning the computer and radio and lights off, so I shall publish it as it is, and maybe tidy up the grammar later. By the way,  I've posted this for the Essay Reading Challenge 2012 hosted by Carrie K, and if you've never read any of Betjeman's prose you've missed a real treat, and this book is a good place to start, so do, please,  give it a try.