The engine that could

[John Ashworth]

The engine that could

The return of steam trains, four decades on, might spark the revival of our beleaguered railways

Andrew Martin
The Guardian, Monday August 11 2008

The 1960s might have been a time of increased glamour for individual Britons, but the "youthquake" also caused devastation. In the name of being "with it", many of our town and city centres were destroyed, often to make way for exciting new car parks. On the railways, beautiful and useful branch lines were closed and steam traction was ended prematurely.

The finale came 40 years ago today, with the operation of a steam-hauled excursion from Liverpool to Carlisle and back. Tickets cost the equivalent of £400 each in today's money, but sold out immediately. The engines that had hauled the last scheduled steam services had been mobbed; mock coffins were placed on their buffer beams, "Goodbye cruel world" chalked on their boilers.

We had always known it would come to this, having long regarded these charismatic machines with that anticipation of nostalgia that is a feature of love. Stephenson's engine, Locomotion, was put on a plinth at Darlington North Station as early as 1857. York's first railway museum was established in 1927.

In E Nesbit's novel The Railway Children, everything good in the children's lives is brought to them by the steam engines of the country railway. When, in The Titfield Thunderbolt (an Ealing comedy of 1953), the Railway Magazine-reading vicar is told that the village branch line is to close, and its engine to be replaced by a bus, there is a silence of about 30 seconds.

The plotline of the film prefigures the creation of a steam preservation movement that today extends to a 108 railways, carrying 6 million passengers a year. The efforts of the Taliban aside, it is hard to think of a bigger-scale exercise in turning back the clock. The engines are steam-powered, but the real driving force is the memory of the glory days in the minds of the volunteer operators. As the old guard fades away it is difficult to find replacements - this even though a likely youngster of either sex can be commanding one of these beasts by the age of 22. This is no small prize. Driving a steam locomotive is like being in charge of a thunderstorm. In the course of writing a series of novels set on the steam railways, I never met an ex-driver for whom the novelty had worn off.

There is equally a recruitment crisis on what the preservationists call "the big railway": the real one. To interest young people in becoming railway engineers we need a revival of the romance, and sense of unequivocal purpose, that steam engines supplied. Today, things are in the balance for our railways. They have been a blind spot for both Blair and Brown, but rapidly rising demand, and environmental imperatives are forcing Network Rail to consider expanding the network. Even the Conservatives are talking of the need for another high-speed line. Our only one so far runs from St Pancras, which has been triumphantly restored. On the other hand, Network Rail is proposing to build a tower block on top of Waterloo which, it turns out, is only partly listed.

Our train operating companies parade a Uriah Heap-ish strain of PR rather than engineering panache. Who can believe in an industry so neurotically obsessed with any inconvenience it may have caused? Earlier this year, National Express East Anglia offered to clean the cars of its customers in a "meet the managers" exercise. The masochistic impulse was clear: they wanted to lick motorists' boots. But other train operators are asserting the ecological benefits of trains as against cars or planes, and a new, thermodynamically efficient version of steam technology may play a role here, which just goes to show that attitudes considered progressive in 1968 are progressive no longer.

· Andrew Martin is author of Death on a Branch Line
andrew.jmartin@virgin.net