The Trains Now Departed by Michael Williams

Author:Michael Williams
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781409052340
Publisher: Random House

Chapter Nine

Goodbye to the toy train

Who could forget the delightful little Lynton & Barnstaple narrow-gauge railway which once traversed Exmoor through the Switzerland of England? Certainly not the legions of enthusiasts who have never recovered from its closure more than eighty years ago.

COULD THERE BE a more revered closed railway in the land with a meaner, more miserable substitute to replace it? As I search for my bus, a right old mist is swirling in from the Atlantic on this early autumn morning, and its chilly fingers are probing all the recesses of Barnstaple bus station. At the back end of town, never a place of much charm at the best of times, it is deserted apart from a couple of superannuated New Agers swigging the last drops from cans of Stongbow. The assembly of shelters here that calls itself a bus station could single-handedly provide a doctoral thesis on the decline of rural public transport in the twenty-first century.

No integrated interchange for a brave transport future this. The diaspora of north Devon villages dotted around what has been known since Victorian times as the Switzerland of England are served by a raggle-taggle bunch of private coach operators with no coordinated timetable that I can find. Do I want Beacon Bus or Turners Tours, Riders Travel or TT Coaches? ‘Is this the Lynton and Barnstaple service?’ I ask as a battered yellow and blue single-decker pulls in. It seems an appalling heresy to utter the name of the fabled and much mourned Lynton & Barnstaple Railway in the context of this long-in-the tooth road vehicle. ‘Hold on,’ says the driver, busily inspecting a dent on the side of his bus. ‘I had a bit of a scrape on the way down.’

Once our journey to the small north Devon resorts of Lynton and Lynmouth, twenty miles from here, would have started at Barnstaple Town station on the dreamy banks of the Taw, aboard what many enthusiasts have long regarded as one of the most perfect little railways ever created through some of the most beautiful scenery on God’s earth. A smart green locomotive, massive brass dome polished to perfection, with a couple of rich brown and creamy white carriages, would have been waiting for the London connection to roll into the bay across the platform. With one or two exceptions, there cannot ever have been so many superlatives nor so many eulogies for such a tiny train.

Despite its demise eighty years ago, the Lynton & Barnstaple Railway ranks alongside the Darjeeling Himalaya Railway in India and the Ffestiniog Railway in Wales as one of the iconic narrow-gauge railways of the world. Narrow-gauge railways, because of their cheapness to build, were once regarded as the poor relations of full-size trains – operating quarries, mines, paper mills, running humble passenger services off the beaten track. Once there were thousands of them, part of an industrial heritage now forgotten.

But, unlike these, the L&B – conceived at the end of the nineteenth century and running

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