On the Slow Train by Michael Williams

reopen it. How do we know we are back in England? Because Gobowen station is the first on the route without dual language signs. G OBOWEN FOR O SWESTRY it announces grandly in large wooden letters on a huge black and white sign, unchanged since Great Western days. It is a prompt for me to get off, since waiting on the platform is the man who probably does more to promote the line than any other. ‘Shall I put the kettle on?’ he asks.
    Martin Evans runs the ticket office here, although he is not employed by a railway company. He rents part of the station building, where he runs a private travel agency and also acts as booking clerk. Without him, Gobowen would be as cold and bleak as the other boarded-up and unstaffed stations along the line. Chairman of the Shrewsbury–Chester Rail Users Association, Martin is one of the army of people who fiercely guard the welfare of country railways across the land. Neither professional railwaymen nor train buffs, they believe passionately in the future of their local rail line. Any future Beeching should beware of people like Martin.
    â€˜It was terrible the way they cut the line back from the days when the Kings and Castles would steam in from Birkenhead with the London trains in the 1960s,’ he tells me as we drink coffee from GWR-monogrammed cups in the snug waiting room, which must be one of the comfiest on the entire network, complete with a library of books for passengers to browse while they wait for their train. Things are looking up now, though. The Welsh Assembly has underwritten a through service from Cardiff to Holyhead, and now there’s the Wrexham and Shropshire with its direct trains to London. ‘Do you know, their guards use whistles? I don’t think I’ve heard the sound of a train whistle for years!’ Martin ’s next ambition is to get Network Rail to double the single track between Wrexham to Chester, cut back as part of the Beeching economies. ‘And see that branch down there,’ he says, pointing to a rusting set of lines veering away from the bay platform? ‘We might get that reopened too.’ This was the route to Oswestry, headquarters of the old Cambrian Railway, mothballed by the Department for Transport after it closed in 1971. The company’s magnificent Victorian locomotive works still survives in the town – the ‘Swindon of Shropshire’ as it was once known.
    Before I head on to Shrewsbury to catch the next Wrexham and Shropshire train to London, Martin shows me round the station with its gorgeous Florentine building, complete with campanile, built of ashlar stone. It was recently restored with a grant from English Heritage and painted a gentle powder blue. The old GWR signs are actually replicas, Martin tells me, and one has been taken away for repainting. ‘But, look, take some photographs,’ he urges. ‘There’s a nice view of the signal box.’ I don’t mention the ugly uPVC windows that have been installed to replace the old wooden ones. There is nothing on Gobowen station of which he is not proud, including a little children’s area made in the shape of an old railway carriage. He presses a book on the history of the line into my hand. ‘Borrow it,’ he says. ‘No hurry about getting it back.’ In Gobowen there’s no hurry. No hurry at all.
    I travel south to Shrewsbury on the next stopping train, where the passengers seem mostly to be shoppers and students. In the seat opposite me a young mother struggles with a fractious two-year-old. Chester to Shrewsbury is neither a branch line yet nor a main line either – unpretentious, going nowhere very fast – but lines like this in gentle rural surroundings remain the sinews of the national rail system. Their charm, wrote David St John Thomas in
The Country Railway
in 1976,
    was no one thing, any more than a superb landscape painting is any one of its ingredients. It was the total