On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Page A

railway in the countryside, serving it as part of it, the smell of steam and oil, the people arriving and departing, the ticket racks in the booking office from which you could tell how many people had gone where on the previous day – the tail of the signalman’s dog flopping on the lino, asking for attention.
    If only it were still so. Many of the intermediate stations on this line have closed and their remains flash by – all with names straight out of Flanders and Swann: Whittington, Rednal and West Felton, Baschurch and Leaton. Only the ghosts of booking clerks or signalmen’s dogs here. The arrival of the conductor flourishing his ticket machine as we pass through the remnants of Baschurch means I nearly miss one of the famous local landmarks – the hill to the north-east is thought to be Pengwern, seat of Prince Cynddylan, the seventh-century ruler of Powys.
    Shrewsbury is perhaps the last major old-fashioned country junction left in Britain. From here lines meander gently through the most rural parts of Wales and the Borders. Until the arrival of the Wrexham and Shropshire in 2008 there had been no through services to London since Virgin abandoned them in 2001. Now the station is operated by Arriva Trains Wales, who have slapped their ugly turquoise house colours on every conceivable bit of paintwork, turning this grand old lady, designed by T M Penson in 1848 in the style of a miniature Houses of Parliament, into something of a tart. But the corporate image has failed to eradicate the charm. It’s easy to imagine the young Darwin embarking here after his time at Shrewsbury School for his first journey up to Cambridge. Now the weeds grow through the tracks and pigeons flap under the canopies, defecating on the little stone heads carved into the roof bosses. Long-disused platform ends are a reminder of the days when grand trains of twelve carriages stopped here. Now six coaches comprise a very long train indeed.
    As we approach from the north, passing the junction with the Crewe line on the left, the signalman leans from the sliding doors of his box with a wave for the driver. I am reminded of a description by Adrian Vaughan, a former signalman who became Brunel’s biographer, in his book
Signalman’s Morning
:
    Levers were always pulled with a duster. This prevented sweat from rusting the carefully polished steel handles and made pulling more comfortable and easier because the handle had to move in the hand, which it could not do when gripped tightly in bare fists. Not any rag did for this job, but a proper duster – a square of soft cotton cloth with red, light and dark blue lines. The design had not changed in living memory – only the initials, and even in 1960 I was the proud owner of a duster with the magic cipher GWR woven into it.
    My stopping service pulls in alongside the last ‘big train’ of the day – the 16.07 Wrexham and Shropshire service to London Marylebone. Big, of course, is relative in this part of the world – two coaches plus a restaurant car and a DVT. (DVT stands for the inelegant ‘driving van trailer’ in railway jargon. Its purpose is to allow a train to be driven with the locomotive at the back.) This DVT was pensioned off from the Euston line when the Pendolinos took over in 2002 and was designed with a cavernous space for parcels but no seats for passengers. As you might expect, there are no parcels on the slow train from Shrewsbury to Marylebone this afternoon, although the DVT represents fifty tonnes of non-revenue-earning weight.
    But the stewards, welcoming a handful of passengers onto the train, look important and busy in their maroon waistcoats, striding up and down the platform. A red-faced German tourist puffs up asking, ‘Is this the quickest way to London?’ ‘Well actually, you might do better getting the next train to Birmingham and then the fast train to Euston’ is the reply. But he decides to