All aboard for a steamy ride through the valleys
SMALL ISLAND BY LITTLE TRAIN by Chris Arnot (AA Publishing £16.99)
HAVE you ever seen the railways section in your local bookshop? it’ll be vast. Every year, unimaginable numbers of books are published on trains: old trains, new trains, but mainly old trains.
i don’t see any equivalent books about cars, buses or helicopters selling in the same quantities. Chris Arnot’s book, therefore, has its work cut out, but what sets it apart from the steamy pack is that, in its quiet way, it is very much a state of the nation book.
Arnot is an old-school journalist with a taste for the eccentric. in the past, he has written books about Britain’s lost mines and lost cricket grounds, and you get the impression he’s never happier than when sitting outside a country pub with a pint of something tasty in one hand and a return ticket to God Knows Where in the other.
trains, to him, represent freedom. it doesn’t matter what you’re running away from; it’s where you’re going and how you’re getting there that count.
And nothing typifies this more strongly than Britain’s relatively few narrow-gauge railways. Most railways, as you may know, operate on a gauge of 4 ft 8½ in, that being the distance between the two rails.
Narrow-gauge railways, from 15 in upwards, are smaller but more manoeuvrable. they can take tighter bends and go up and down steeper hills. they are, in short, much more fun.
Arnot takes trips along 14 narrow-gauge railways and writes about what he sees. He describes some extraordinary scenery he witnesses along the way. He talks to passengers and the railway nuts who work on these trains, some of them paid, most volunteers.
His book makes you want to drop everything and set out on these journeys yourself. i’m pretty much booking tickets as i write.
in one chapter, he travels up the snowdon Mountain railway, which takes you all the way to the top. Where else in the world would someone build a railway to the summit of a very high mountain? When the line was in its infancy, most travellers wore hats, which often proved a problem in some of the open-topped carriages. ‘Off they flew like frisbees when the passengers stood up to look down on to the Llanberis Pass, or the valley of the Hats as it’s known today.’
On the Leighton Buzzard Light railway, Arnot chats to the driver as they pass a particularly tough-looking council estate.
‘it’s good when kids are waving at you,’ says the driver, ‘because you know their hands are empty.’ On one particularly nasty occasion, he explained, they had discovered rather a lot of dog poo to throw at the train.
Four of the 14 railways he rides are grouped together in North Wales, but the others range from the south Kent coast to the lowlands of scotland. He also walks along the routes of two railways that have been torn up, and mourns their disappearance.
this is an exceptionally good-natured book. it’s a tale of the untrammelled joy that trains can bring. Everyone he speaks to seems happy and fulfilled.
this, of course, is why the railway section of your bookshop is so huge. On balance, it’s amazing that anyone publishes any books on any other subject at all.