AUF WiedeRseHen: noRtH coUntRy boat tRain FaReWell to baoR

In the age of the car and the Channel Tunnel, travelling by boat and train can be a bit rubbish. You slog your kit up gangways and through departure halls, not to mention between various platforms, during the multiple changes you’re likely to need to make to reach the port in the first place. Dover Marine has gone, so has Folkestone Harbour. Harwich International is still there, but my overriding memory of travelling crosscountry is of cold waits on stations for the next connection (yes, I’ve done it). Neil Howard – he of the Class 20s-hauled aid train to Kosovo and the 2012 re-creation of the British Military Train – wants to change that. Next year. His plan is for a ‘North Country Continental’ to run from Manchester to Harwich in June, connecting with an overnight boat, and then to carry on across Europe. Neil tells me that the original ‘North Country Continental’ was started by the Great Eastern Railway to compete with Lancashire & Yorkshire services to the Continent via Goole, and those of the North Eastern Railway via Hull. “After 1948 it was just BR competing against itself, but with a million rail-sea passengers using Harwich annually it was still a slice of the pie worth having,” he says. Decline in the 1980s led to it being converted from a seven-coach train to a twocar ‘Sprinter’, a move which, in Neil’s words, “killed it”. Apparently just a stub now runs, from Ipswich, not even 20 miles from what we used to know as Parkeston Quay. As with 2012’s ‘Berliner’, Neil’s reason for reviving the train in 2019 is a military connection; from 1946 to 1961 Harwich was the preferred starting point for troop movements to Germany. Next year marks the end of a long British

military drawdown; although a few elements may remain, it is effectively the end of what for years was known as the British Army of the Rhine. So, following on from the ‘Berliner’, Neil is working on a week-long commemorative tour via places such as Arnhem, and terminating in Berlin. ‘Auf Wiedersehen BAOR’ is likely to include a variety of black and red machines on the Continent. Neil believes international boat trains – whereby passengers walk from one conveyance to another – will be of interest, but are currently unviable. Passenger terminals have gone at Hull, Tilbury, Dover, Folkestone and Newhaven, and even Hoek van Holland is served by tram, and no longer heavy rail.