On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Read Free Book Online Page A

Hold on. Where are we? Is this some jaded city worker’s Monday-morning dream? No, we’re in the time warp that is the Isle of Wight.
    Ever since the railway building mania of the 1840s, the Isle of Wight, just three miles across Spithead from Portsmouth, has been home to one of the most surreal and eccentric railway operations anywhere in the world. Given its mostly rural aspect and tiny population of 132,000, it is astonishing that the Isle of Wight ever had any railways at all, yet until the 1950s there were fifty-two miles of branch lines covering the entire island. In the 1960s the islanders not only fought Beeching’s plans to close down all but one and a half miles of track, but actually succeeded in getting one of the busiest sections electrified and retaining parts of the two existing branches as other seaside communities in the south of England, such as Swanage and Lyme Regis, lost their trains altogether.
    So my 10.53 to Shanklin service, sitting in the platform in Ryde Pier Head station, has many reasons to feel proud of itself, its red livery looking especially splendid on this sunny morning. Formed of two former Tube cars which spent most of their lives carrying weary Northern Line commuters from the West End and the City to the northern and southern suburbs of High Barnet, Edgware and Morden, the train and its sisters are the oldest in regular service on the national rail network, built more than seventy years ago. (I know this because the provenance is embossed in metal plates below each door: ‘Built by Metropolitan-Cammell Carriage and Wagon Co. Ltd, Saltley, 1938’.)
    But this is no heritage train, and there is no gracious retirement by the seaside for this little Class 483 unit. The Island Line stations are as much part of the national network as Waterloo or Clapham Junction, and the services are run by the South West Trains franchise, whose hard-headed boss Brian Souter is not famous for nostalgia. ‘Do you know that we’re the most efficient railway in Britain?’ the guard tells me as he sells me an Island Liner ticket for my eight-and-a-half-mile journey to the end of the line at Shanklin. ‘And these old girls run like a dream.’ He reads from a piece of paper with the official performance statistics for the past four weeks: ‘Punctuality 99.4 per cent. Reliability 100 per cent. You can’t argue with that, can you?’
    Back in the pre-Benidorm, pre-Ford Anglia era of the 1950s, the platforms here would be thronged with hundreds of thousands of families dressed in their holiday best, arriving on the railway company paddle steamers from Portsmouth. There was once a glorious dome-roofed ballroom here, where if you were lucky you might hear the latest hits of Victor Sylvester before going home to your B & B in Seaview (H & C running water, interior-sprung mattresses in every room). Today’s foot passengers zip over on fast Australian -owned catamarans, and most of the people who still choose the Isle of Wight over Faliraki or Phuket arrive on the car ferries that dock along the coast at Fishbourne. Today, the day after a bank holiday, Ryde Pier Head station has a rather melancholy air. There are fifteen minutes before the train goes, and I buy a Minghella ice cream (‘famous in Ryde since 1950’ but more famous still for being made by the parents of the late Oscar-winning film director Anthony Minghella) and chat to two boys fishing over the edge of one of the platforms next to a notice saying D O NOT FISH HERE . Nobody seems to care. ‘We got four wrasse and a bream today – really nice ones.’ The train is busy enough, with mothers and pushchairs, business types with sharp haircuts and suits over from Portsmouth and elderly couples tugging suitcases on wheels, taking the traditional route for a late-season holiday, perhaps to a ‘nice guest house’ in Shanklin or Ventnor. Sadly, there are no longer any porters, and the