‘Change at Georgemas’ cried Karachi clerk
I DECIDED to let the train take the strain. It wasn’t a difficult decision. My car was making strange clanking and creaking noises and I had a "must attend" meeting in Inverness. Taking the train meant I could sit back and enjoy the journey and, more importantly, familiarise myself with all the paperwork as I headed south.
The downside is the 6.20am early morning start – and the time it takes to get to Inverness. In a car, on a good day, you can reach the Highland capital in a little more than two hours. The bus journey takes just under three hours while the ScotRail epic a mighty four-and-a-quarter – if everything goes according to plan.
It’s been a while since I last travelled on the Far North line. I’m used to travelling regularly between Inverness and Perth, and also Glasgow and Edinburgh by rail. I must admit I do like a train journey.
So does Matthew Engel whose 2009 travelogue, Eleven Minutes Late, A Train Journey to the Soul of Britain, reminds readers how "Britain gave railways to the world, yet its own network is the dearest (definitely) and the worst (probably) in western Europe". Is he being unfair?
Engel says "train journeys are deeply embedded in the national psyche and folklore" and yet he reflects how it is somehow considered uncool to care about them.
The railway system, to Engel’s mind, is the "ultimate expression of Britishness". So he decided to set off on a quest to unravel all the mysteries associated with a travel system that "represents all the nation’s ingenuity, incompetence, nostalgia, corruption, humour, capacity for suffering and even sexual repression".
It turns out to be some journey for the former Guardian and (current) Financial Times columnist who has written variously on everything from "terrorism to tiddlywinks". What emerges is both a polemic and a paean, which is also very funny.
MAYBE we do need that sense of humour to journey on the Far North line. Not many trips have you literally doubling back on your own tracks as you have to do from Wick to Thurso before branching off at Georgemas Junction to finally head south. Or rather west, into a seemingly endless void of empty northlands.
The ultimate experience is tantamount to one of those great train journeys we see on the telly – something Engel might describe as "Jimmy-Shand-White-Heather-Club" scenery and others, less kindly disposed, as "miles and miles of bugger all"!
Personally, I’m feeling very favourably inclined to ScotRail as we tiddle-ee-dee along the tracks.
As if on cue a jaw-dropping red sky sunrise radiates over the great Highland wilderness. Quite breathtaking and humbling at the same time. It takes an hour from our departure from the old royal burgh before the train actually leaves Caithness. By then we are chuntering through Forsinard bound for Kinbrace and Kildonan and onwards to Helmsdale. It takes the train one hour and 40 minutes to reach Helmsdale bang on schedule. The equivalent car journey can be done in just over 45 minutes...
The route so far has not been what you would call direct... And nothing’s ever going to change that. Friends of the Far North Line (FoFNL) has campaigned for years, though, to seek improvements in the Inverness to Wick rail experience; primarily to ensure the route is retained but also to see an increased local usage as well as growth in its tourist and freight potential.
There are those who lament the lost golden opportunity when radical plans were proposed back in the 1980s to avoid the Lairg loop by redirecting the route over the Dornoch bridge at the time of its construction. Sadly, as we know, those plans failed to materialise.
Indeed Engel describes frustrations with the due process. Think about it: first you need a scoping exercise, site investigations, a tendering process, preliminary consultations, engineering reports, government commitment, the need to secure funding, probably a public inquiry, compulsory purchase orders... the next government’s commitment and so on...
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One imagines after the Edinburgh tramline fiasco that no government will have the stomach for railway expansion. With ever-exorbitant and rising costs it would be like asking how long is a piece of string?
I imagine all those rail enthusiasts looking over old network maps, dreaming nostalgically about the good old days before the Beeching axe of the 1960s decimated the country’s railway systems.
T’S when Engel delves into psychoanalytical theories of Jung and Sigmund Freud that I’m confused. Maybe it’s too early in the morning for me. The hypotheses between the railway passions of boys, the onset of puberty and perceptions of the locomotive as some sort of phallic projectile is not something I want to think about, thank you.
My dad used to tell a great story about being posted to India during the war. He was home on leave from the RAF when he received a travel warrant instructing him to report with his squadron to Karachi.
He duly reported to the railway station at Wick where he spent a large part of the day as the station staff worked out his itinerary. Eventually a huge wad of tickets was presented to him.
The rail trip entailed changes at Georgemas, Inverness, Perth, Preston, Kings Cross and then down to Southampton. There he took a ship to Gibraltar, onwards through the Med to Malta and then down through the Suez Canal before he finally reached his destination. He spent more than three years attached to his RAF squadron before being demobbed in 1946.
At Karachi railway station the clerk looked at his travel warrant before rubber stamping just one single return ticket declaring: "Change at Georgemas!"
I came home by bus.