Brief Encounter
Stephen Roberts visits the site of one of the most memorable films in history involving the railway – Brief Encounter – and its 1974 remake.
Stephen Roberts visits the site of one of the most memorable films in history involving the railway – Brief Encounter – and its 1974 remake.
Ifell for my wife’s eyes. Dr Alec Harvey (Trevor Howard) suffered a similar fate with the diminutive Laura Jesson (Celia Johnson) in Brief Encounter (1945) once he’d got up close and personal to remove an annoying piece of grit from her eye. “I love you. I love your wide eyes, the way you smile, your shyness, and the way you laugh at my jokes.” That seems like a pretty good checklist for losing your heart to someone. Generations of moviegoers have also fallen in love with the film, which had notable scenes made at a north-western railway station.
World War Two had ended some three months before the film, directed by David Lean, with screenplay by Noël Coward, reached cinema screens, although the story was actually set just before that most destructive war in human history: set in the lull, filmed in the storm. Accurately depicting an era when moral fortitude still predominated, the two principal characters, passionately brought to life by Howard and Johnson, are pitched together by a chance occurrence, fall for one another, yet painfully head off in different directions just like their branch line trains, returning to familiar duty. A box of tissues is handy to have to hand, particularly with Rachmaninoff ’s Piano Concerto Number 2 pulling at the heart strings.
Carnforth
A few years ago, I journeyed to Carnforth to see where the iconic railway parts of the film were made, to place myself in those much-viewed locations and discover what changes time had brought to the station over some 75 years. This is perhaps the best example we have of ‘railway station cum tourist attraction’, although devotees of The Railway Children (1970) might disagree and would prefer me to be talking about Oakworth station. Notwithstanding that, first of all I had to reach Carnforth, which was a bit of a trot to be honest (some 300 miles by car for me). The only legitimate way to travel was by train, though, so I settled back for a lengthy anticipation-fuelled trip (Christchurch, Dorset to Carnforth, Lancs, via Waterloo and Euston).
Courtesy of Dr Beeching, it’s not feasible to take a West Coast Main Line train from Euston direct to Carnforth today (of which more later), although you can get close. I alighted from my Pendolino at Lancaster, the station immediately before Carnforth (and effectively serving as today’s junction). Then, while waiting for my onward connection, I photographed a plaque commemorating Joseph Locke (1805-60), the Sheffield-born civil engineer who was responsible for the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway, which opened in December 1846 and which I would shortly be following. Other passengers stared at me like I was going out of fashion or wasted their own time with ubiquitous so-called smartphones. After a brief wait, I boarded the ‘local’ bound for Barrow, with its first scheduled stop at Carnforth, just six miles further on. This is Northern’s Furness Line, named from the peninsula, which is home to Barrow-in-furness, historically a major producer of naval vessels and still big in the world of submarines.
It was around 1430 on a Tuesday early in March when I arrived at Platform 2 of Carnforth’s reduced station, the Milford Junction of the film, where some of the most dramatic sequences occur. Overcast weather greeted my arrival, but it was generally sunnier in the film (at least when the romance was going swimmingly. Storm clouds, rain and a good soaking came later as love hit the buffers). Mrs Jesson, a lady of leisure, was always slipping into Milford to while away the time while hubby was at work: changing library books in Boots (films are often a window on a lost world), taking in the latest movie and partaking of lunch. It’s all very sweet and innocent. Well, until Dr Alec enters her life.
Carnforth station dates to 1846, designed by William Tite (1798-1873), a Londoner, son of a Russian goods dealer, and architect of several stations in this part of the world. Carlisle Citadel and Lancaster Castle are also attributed to him during the 1846-47 period. Carnforth had a single platform to begin with and was a station of the Lancaster and Carlisle Railway (L&CR), embarking on its junction journey in 1857 when the Ulverston & Lancaster Railway (U&LR) arrived from the north west. This was taken over by the Furness Railway in 1862. With the original L&CR becoming part of the London and North Western Railway (LNWR), Carnforth became a Furness LNWR joint, with the Midland
Railway (MR) also running trains into the station. The Furness Railway left its mark with a very distinctive, lofty signal box at the northern end of the station (1882), which was only in use until 1903 but happily survives as a Listed structure, as does its 1903 successor. Carnforth was to play a part in national politics in February 1885, when Liberal Prime Minister William Ewart Gladstone (1809-98) was in the neighbourhood. When the news broke that Khartoum had fallen (January 26, 1885) to the forces of Muhammad Ahmad (the Mahdi), the PM headed straight back to London, from Carnforth station. It wasn’t a joyous homecoming and the fallout from Khartoum would see him resign in the June. Meanwhile, back at Carnforth, the station was rebuilt just before World War Two, by which time it had become a busy junction, being on the WCML as well as hosting local trains plying between Lancashire, Yorkshire and today’s Cumbria. The Platform 6 of that time (Platform 2 today), for Barrow, was newly opened at 300 yards in length. This feels overlong today given the scaling back that has taken place (a renumbering of platforms would occur once the main line platforms were taken out of use). Strolling to the northern end of Platform 2 is worthwhile to admire the 1903 manual-box just beyond
"Although much of the station filming took place at Carnforth, this external scene was studio shot. It was just the platform/ subway scenes that were filmed at the station ."
the Barrow-leeds junction, as well as its Furness Railway predecessor. Signalling is shared between this box and a power-box on the main line at Preston. There was further development in 1944 when the Government approved the rebuilding of Carnforth MPD as a major regional depot. Originally a Furness Railway depot, it would become the site of ‘Steamtown Carnforth’, and now acts as the HQ of West Coast Railways.
Filming (1945)
The war was still on when filming was underway in February 1945, so Carnforth was deliberately chosen as somewhere off the beaten track (pardon the pun), far from the cities and industrial and military targets. The chosen site was apt enough during wartime, as thousands of servicemen would pass through here on their way to service overseas. Carnforth was also perfect for other reasons, including the fact it had main line and branch platforms with easy access between them. There was the subway to add dramatic effect, with ramps, not stairs, so actors would tear up and down in order to not to miss their trains or one another. And, finally, being remote, those dreaded and inconvenient blackout restrictions could be ignored.
Station settings feature prominently in the film. The platforms, subway (where Alec and Laura managed a subterranean kiss) and the refreshment room, which in this movie is the ‘meeting place’, Carnforth’s Rovers Return or Queen Vic. The subway is a vital thoroughfare as the two protagonists head in different directions physically – Alec to Platform 6 (trains to Churley) and Laura to Platform 4 (for Ketchworth) – as well as emotionally. The film lasts 86 minutes, with the 14 clips recorded at Carnforth lasting just under nine of those (and not including scenes inside the refreshment room that were filmed at Denham, and ‘external’ station shots that were also studio work). It’s fair to say that it’s the nine minutes, rather than the other 77, that really get the pulse racing, particularly if you’re a lover of the railways. Filming took place between 2200 and 0600, so regular services were unaffected. Incidentally, there is a glimpse of Churley but don’t look for its real-life alter ego as it was more studio work, although it looked authentic enough.
Beeching (1968)
Carnforth grew from small village to railway town in the 19th century when it became the junction of three routes (NW main line, plus local routes to Barrow and Leeds). The station would certainly suffer its setbacks, though, and the fame of Brief Encounter would not grant it immunity from rail rationalisation. With the closure of Carnforth MPD in 1968 (steam locos persisted there until that year), the station was also ready for reduction. Beeching heralded the changes that led to Carnforth being downgraded and run down, with local stopping services ceasing on the main line in 1968, and the station effectively becoming branch only, with buildings falling into disrepair and main line platforms closed. Two years later, in 1970, those main line platforms disappeared in the most drastic confirmation that Carnforth was no longer Milford. Therein lies my one regret when I visited Carnforth, namely that you can’t quite recreate Milford in its entirety with all its former platforms and its mix of main line and branch. The WCML was heading for its brave new world of electrification, but Carnforth’s future was to be the local DMU. It was now a time for ghosts, the sound of Laura padding through the subway, and memories, of steam in all its romantic glory. Those local platforms used by Alec and Laura were renumbered, 1 for Lancaster and Ketchworth and 2 for Barrow and Churley, another reminder that times had changed. There are crucial moments in the film that can’t quite be recreated now, such as Laura exiting the refreshment room on to the main line platform (the original 3), either for the plot development of getting an annoying bit of grit in her lovely eye (where’s a doctor when you need one?), or for the contemplation of a suicidal close encounter with a thunderous boat train. Today there is a large solid fence (albeit in colourful red and green) preventing the unwise or unwary from getting too near to those lost platforms. It rarely pays to get too close to a Pendolino
"It’s a hotel that seems to have enjoyed a recent renaissance, much like the station it overlooks.."
bearing down at full tilt. On the other side of the main line tracks there is just enough of the original Platform 2 remaining, a walkway really, enabling access to the subway and from there across to today’s branch platforms and other facilities, such as the all-important refreshment room.
Heritage and refreshment
The Carnforth Station Heritage Centre and Brief Encounter Refreshment Room opened in 2003 after a three-year £1.5m restoration project. They now welcome worldwide visitors, people who’ve watched the film and want to luxuriate in its most iconic location. The refreshment room is an essential part of this experience, faithfully restored to its 1940s heyday. It is like stepping back in time, anticipating a visit from either Trev or Celia. Off the refreshment room is the stationmaster’s office, replete with interesting memorabilia, including a copy of a letter home from Celia, who waxes lyrical about the station. She’d clearly fallen in love with it. February 1945 was bitter, so the kindly incumbent stationmaster allowed a chilled Celia to warm in front of his fire.
Pre-pandemic, the centre was receiving around 50,000 visitors per annum, with a coach party pitching up every other day on average. The draw of the film is palpable, with fewer than 50% of visitors actually coming here to catch a train. Sometimes fiction trumps real-life. Fantasy Brief Encounter may be, but it has played its part in revitalising Carnforth station, which had seen its refreshment room close in 1969 and its booking office in 1986. It became unmanned in 1987, with a serious danger of its buildings being demolished, before the recovery in its fortunes really began from the mid-1990s. The station clock was symbolically restarted in July 1999, then just over four years later came the Heritage Centre and Refreshment Room.
It was in the refreshment room where the film’s pivotal scene takes place, when hapless Laura has that grit removed from her eye by the gallant and conveniently handy doc. The characters return to the same place at the film’s heart-rending conclusion, their final meeting and parting, when their all too brief last moments together are cruelly trampled over by an acquaintance of Laura’s, who joins them and ‘talks for Ketchworth’. With the sands of time ebbing from the illfated couple you half wish you could launch yourself into the movie and drag the pesky Dolly away with a bishop’s crozier.
That refreshment room is also a fake. Inside scenes were shot in the studio and even the outside was formed of film ‘flats’, built on what is now Platform 1, in the space between the station clock and today’s refreshment room. Often in movies things are not what they seem. Milford Junction’s refreshment room may have been a set, but it bore a close resemblance to late-1930s reality. So stepping into today’s equivalent is redolent of walking on to the self-same film set, but also back in time to just before World War Two when refreshment rooms were rather more genteel. The clock was important too, symbolic of the lack of time the courtship is meant to have. It became iconic as the film repeatedly referenced it.
Milford
The weather invariably seems spring-like and sunny in fictional Milford, except for the storm-laden occasion when the vacillating Laura hovers between catching the train home or visiting the doc at his mate’s flat, and getting a thoroughly good soaking for her guilt-ridden pains. The sun was setting on their brief romance too.
Trying to fathom where Milford was supposed to be is tricky. The main characters sound ‘awfully’ Home Counties and there is a boat-train tearing through that Laura momentarily considers launching herself under as Alec has finally ‘exited right’. Although the prospect of sharing a carriage home with Dolly may also have been a consideration. So, down in the south then?
Well, perhaps not, as there are alternative trails when the doc talks about nearby coal -mines, and back at Milford Junction trains depart for Leeds, Keighley, Bradford and Skipton, and there are LMS steam locos. Perhaps up north then? Just to further confuse (apologies), Milford street scenes were filmed down south at Beaconsfield, Bucks. Some internet sites listing ‘Fictional Railway Stations’ can’t decide either, describing Milford’s county as ‘Unknown’.
The Royal Station
I needed a place to stay and where better than the Royal Station Hotel that sits across the road from the station? The hotel, established in 1880, came about because of the expansion of Carnforth Junction and the need to provide decent overnight accommodation for the many passengers travelling countrywide. The Royal appellation was added in 1900
after the Duke of York (the future George V) availed himself of some hospitality while enjoying a shooting trip in the area. The reasonably imposing central -staircase is redolent of a time when folk, especially the well-to-do, travelled by train and Carnforth was a thriving junction. I expect the hotel was ever busy. It’s a hotel that seems to have enjoyed a recent renaissance, much like the station it overlooks. From my bedroom window I gazed out at the war memorial. In the movie, a devastated Laura sits below just such a memorial on a wet evening, thoroughly soggy and discontented. That memorial was a set but could very easily have been inspired by Carnforth’s. I fancied I could see the similarity but there the reflection ends. Carnforth is a small town with a headcount of some 5,500 (2011 Census). Milford (or rather Beaconsfield) is clearly much larger.
On my second day, a Wednesday, I awoke to falling snow, which made me ‘ponder’ my long journey home. It reminded me just how far north I had ventured. Taking the Barrow train through Silverdale, the next stop at Arnside, would be in Cumbria. Had I slept through Lancaster the day before, and remained on the main line, I might have alighted at the next station, Oxenholme, also in Cumbria. Continuing the fictional theme for a moment longer, Oxenholme also masqueraded as a make-believe station – as Strickland Junction, in Arthur Ransome’s Swallows and Amazons. Fortunately, the snow didn’t set in and by the time I was back at the station to complete my research and photography the sun was gracing me with its presence for the first time on the trip. Suddenly the mood seemed more Milford.
Services and separation
At the time of my visit (March 2016), services were provided by Northern and still are, Northern having taken over the running of the station that year from First Transpennine Express). DMUS were typically Class 153 Super Sprinter (198788) and 156 Super Sprinter (1987-89) on the Furness line, with 142 Pacer (198587), 144 Pacer (1986-87) and 150 Sprinter (1984-87) units being utilised on the Leeds route. Pacer 142091 was one I got a decent gander at on Platform 1, an example of a fleet originally built between 1985 and 1987, with 142091 being towards the end of the batch. Since July 2019, the new Class 195 Civity units have also been used. These twocar (195/0) and three-car (195/1) units were built between 2017 and 2019. Freight trains were a common sight too, and I was happy to see two mighty Class 37s during my stay (37059, built in 1962, previously dubbed Port of Tilbury, and 37401, Mary Queen of Scots, built in 1965).
Of course, the world is very different now from the one depicted in the movie, and we live our lives by an alien set of mores, but we can still empathise with Laura, a decent person who briefly embraces a lie before stark reality intervenes. “We’re neither of us free
to love each other. There’s too much in the way.”. Living a double-life for a brief period begins as breathless escapism but becomes a miserable reality check. “This can’t last. This misery can’t last.” In the end, the impossibility sees Alec move to Johannesburg, but without Laura. It is a cruel denouement as self-denial trumps happiness. The railway’s own bit of hard-faced realism followed, with proposals to belatedly reinstate Carnforth’s main line platforms rejected by Network Rail in 2011, which argued there would be insufficient footfall to justify slowing down those Pendolinos.
Postscript (1974)
It was a brave, or foolish, decision, to try to remake such a classic, but in 1974 the cameras rolled again, this time in Hampshire. A change of county was but one of several essential differences that ‘Take 2’ would offer. It would be a colour offering, the original having been black & white; there would be no romance of steam, this time it was slam-door electric rolling stock, which didn’t quite cut it; there would be no flashbacks, unlike in the original. The principal characters fell to Sophia Loren and Richard Burton, a late replacement for Robert Shaw, who’d dropped out at the last minute, but they didn’t convince in the way that Johnson and Howard had. The movie is approximately 100 minutes, so around a quarter of an hour longer than the original, but they might have done better to have kept it shorter. They might also have done better to wait a few more years. 1977 would see the reopening of the Mid-hants Railway, or ‘Watercress Line’, with steam once more on the agenda.
Laura became Anna. The name may have changed but she’s still popping into town (in this case the city of Winchester) to get some ‘me time’ as well as engage in a bit of social work. The assignation place will be familiar to travellers on the London Waterloo to Weymouth line. It’s Brockenhurst in the New Forest, which plays the part of Winchester. Like Carnforth, Brockenhurst benefited from main line and branch platforms, the branch in question being the Lymington branch, although the film didn’t make use of that opportunity. There was a footbridge, but no subway. The station is very much a contemporary of Carnforth, though, having been built in 1847 by the Southampton and Dorchester Railway. The remake did improve on the original in one respect. Another station was used for Anna’s return home and it was Shawford, which lies between Winchester and Eastleigh. It was opened in 1882, the year the Furness Railway built that lofty but short-lived signal box at Carnforth. Shawford would later play its part in a bit of TV drama when the road outside the station was used for the final act in the life of Victor Meldrew in the popular series One Foot in the Grave. Having made his way down from the station platform, the cantankerous Meldrew is struck by a car right outside. It was an odd way to finish off a sitcom.
OK. I think I’ll forget the remake and watch the 1945 version again. Now, where did I put those tissues?