A Better Class of Train

The two-forty-five express — Paddington to Market Blandings, first stop Oxford—stood at its piatform with that air of well-bred reserve which is characteristic of Paddington trains, and Pongo Twistleton and Lord Ickenham stood beside it, waiting for Polly Pott. The clock over the bookstall pointed to thirty-eight minutes after the hour.

Some train engines are simply superior. But it’s not just engines. Stations, too, can be well-bred, or not.

Paddington Station

Consider Paddington Station through the mind of Lord Ickenham – Frederick Altamont Cornwallis Twistleton, the 5th Earl of Ickenham: 

“To one like myself,” he said, “who living in Hampshire, gets out of the metropolis, when he is fortunate enough to get into it, via Waterloo, there is something very soothing in the note of refined calm which Paddington strikes. At Waterloo, all is hustle and bustle, and the society tends to be mixed. Here a leisured peace prevails, and you get only the best people – cultured men accustomed to mingling with basset hounds and women in tailored suits who look like horses.”

Lord Ickenham is Pongo’s Uncle Fred and they are off to Shropshire to kidnap a pig known as the Empress of Blandings in P. G Wodehouse’s Uncle Fred in the Springtime. (1939)

It’s all very silly and very P.G.Wodehouse and, when you are in the right frame of mind, quite hilarious. 

The Prevention of Anarchy

Of course the traveling arrangements on the train are divided by class and for very important reasons as Wodehouse points out in this opening to his story Something New  

The four-fifteen express slid softly out of Paddington Station and Ashe Marson settled himself in the corner seat of his second-class compartment. Opposite him Joan Valentine had begun to read a magazine. Along the corridor, in a first-class smoking compartment, Mr. Peters was lighting a big black cigar. Still farther along the corridor, in a first-class nonsmoking compartment, Aline Peters looked through the window and thought of many things.

In English trains the tipping classes travel first; valets, lady’s maids, footmen, nurses, and head stillroom maids, second; and housemaids, grooms, and minor and inferior stillroom maids, third. But for these social distinctions the whole fabric of society would collapse and anarchy stalk naked through the land, as in the United States.

All ship-shape and Swindon fashion

Those of us with even a remote connection with the “works” at Swindon will find it not surprising to hear of the superior breeding of GWR trains. And if we didn’t know from personal experience, we would have learned it from the Rev.W Awdry whose railway stories gave the world Thomas the Tank Engine et al. 

Awdry grew up listening to trains, and one of his childhood homes was only 200 yards from the western end of Box tunnel where the Great Western Railway mainline climbed up a gradient of 1 in 100 for two miles. A banking engine was kept there to help heavy goods trains up the hill. These trains often ran at night and Awdry could hear them from his bedroom. He imagined they were talking to each other.

“It needed little imagination to hear, in the sounds the train engine and banking engine made, what they were saying to each other. There was no doubt in my mind that steam engines all had definite personalities. I would hear them.” (Hahn, 2015)

One of the fun things about The Railway Series stories is that most were were based on real-life events. Awdry was a lifelong railway enthusiast and wanted his stories to be as realistic as possible. The engine characters were mostly based upon real classes of locomotive and there are even guest appearance by real and famous trains co-opted as characters. The Flying Scotsman is Gordon’s ‘brother’, and when the speed record breaking City of Truro visits Sodor he has a very nice chat with an awe struck pannier shunter tank called Duck. (Real name Montague, but called Duck because he waddles as a result of the side water tanks.) Really superior trains are not snobs. But Swindon engineered GWR trains are the best. Obviously. 

Duck goes on about the GWR so much that the other engines become sick and tired of him.

The Fat Controller

And of course the Fat Controller – that’s Sir Topham Hatt to you – started as an apprentice in Swindon.

SIR TOPHAM HATT (1880-1956) was apprenticed at Swindon Works at the age of 14. There he seems to have struck up a friendship with W. A. Stanier.* He came to Sodor in 1901, joining A. W. Dry & Co at Tidmouth. On their recommendation he became Engineer successively, to the Tidmouth Knapford and Elsbridge Railway in 1909, the Tidmouth Wellsworth & Suddery in 1912, and the North Western Railway on its formation in 1914. – The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways 1987. 

The Railway Stories  taught us that trains have distinct personalities and temperaments. Engines are often very naughty and misbehave and let their feelings get away from them. The Fat Controller  has to be stern with them so they learn their lesson and become Really Useful Engines again.  

Sir Topham often becomes exasperated with the behavior of the trains but he is no fool and certainly not heartless. Take Henry for example. As a young engine, Henry had some severe behavioral and health problems. At one point he had to be bricked up in a tunnel for refusing to come out from where he was hiding from the rain. But this is a story of growth and redemption. Given a second chance, Henry is rehabilitated and Sir Topham even put him on a special diet of Welsh coal. to buck him up. With a refit at Crewe, Henry is able to pull his weight and, in a later story,  he heroically rescues two diesel engines, proving his worth and maturity as a Really Useful Engine. 

The engines grow and learn from their mistakes. They sulk  they scowl, they but they are always steam trains so nothing really underhand happens. Unlike with Diesel.

They experience pride and feel shame. They get above themselves and are brought down a peg or two. They learn humility and how to work together, form alliances, and behave as Really Useful Engines who are Respectable and know their place. 

“It isn’t wrong, but we just don’t do it.“

Gordon, for example, was self-important, prone to jealousy, bad-tempered and an utter snob  It is beneath him to pull goods wagons and troublesome trucks.

In Henry the Green Engine (1951) he chides Henry for cheerful tooting with, “It isn’t wrong, but we just don’t do it.” and then gets his shameful comeuppance when his whistle gets stuck and he charges through the countryside frightening the horses.

Going Downhill Backwards

As an enthusiast, Awdry followed the railway news and he often based his stories on actual events.

When James loses traction on an uphill haul the train starts to slide backward:

Anthropomorphic Vehicles have Feelings and are Sensitive

As the series  grew, Awdry developed a detailed setting for his North Western Railway on the island of Sodor.  off the west coast of England. In partnership with his brother George (the librarian of the National Liberal Club), Awdry developed a detailed  account of  Sodor’s history, geography, language, industries and geology. This was published as The Island of Sodor: Its People, History and Railways in 1987. 

And it’s not just rail engines. There’s a whole mechanical cast of anthropomorphic vehicles. There’s Bertie, the single decker bus;  Trevor the traction engine and Harold the helicopter. There’s bad-tempered Bulgy – “free the roads from railway tyranny!”  – the double-decker bus with an ideological opposition to railways. 

Rudyard Kipling and .007 “The Story of an American Locomotive”

Rudyard Kipling – who created the talking animals of The Jungle Book – was the first to imagine machines with human personalities, In his 1897 short story “.007,” Kipling tells the tale of a new locomotive with fresh red paint, shy and unsure among the seasoned engines in a U.S. railway shed. When a pig on the line derails a freight train, .007 proves himself, worthy in an emergency, earning respect and joining the “Amalgamated Brotherhood of Locomotives.”

Its a classic bildungsroman, coming-of-age tale of the new boy finding his place. In Awdry’s language, .007 has grown into a Really Useful Engine with a respected place in the hierarchy of the engine shed.

A LOCOMOTIVE is, next to a marine engine, the most sensitive thing man ever made; and No. ·007, besides being sensitive, was new. The red paint was hardly dry on his spotless bumper-bar, his headlight shone like a fireman’s helmet, and his cab might have been a hardwood-finish parlour. They had run him into the round-house after his trial—he had said good-bye to his best friend in the shops, the overhead travelling-crane—the big world was just outside; and the other locos were taking stock of him. He looked at the semicircle of bold, unwinking headlights, heard the low purr and mutter of the steam mounting in the gauges—scornful hisses of contempt as a slack valve lifted a little—and would have given a month’s oil for leave to crawl through his own driving-wheels into the brick ash-pit beneath him. The opening of .007 – a short story by Rudyard Kipling

Kipling’s work established the concept of talking trains. Awdry popularized it with with the Railway Series debuted in1945. Since then, talking transport has proliferated in the world of children’s books and we have no shortage of talking everything.

Graham Greene and The Little Train

“.007 “is clotted with slang and railway jargon which rather spoils the story. That’s a criticism that could not be leveled at Graham Greene’s The Little Engine, (1946) – a wholly delightful children’s book with illustrations by Edward Ardizzone. 

You can read it here at the Internet Archive Open Library. Recommended. 

The White Horse and the Third Class Compartment

While P.G.Wodehouse was publishing the story of Uncle Fred and his musings on trains and stations, Eric Ravilious was one of the first artists to be commissioned by the War Artists Advisory Committee (WAAC) and appointed as an official war artist. 

That’s the White Horse on the chalk of Bratton Down, Westbury Wiltshire as seen from a third class carriage. Or is it? 

The art curator, social historian, and Ravilious expert James Russell has a fascinating set of observations about the painting. It’s in his book ‘Ravilious in Pictures: Sussex and the Downs’, published by the Mainstone Press featuring twenty-two of the artist’s watercolours. In an excerpt on his blog he describes the class dilemma of Ravilious and his wartime travel arrangements.

Russell also outlines a plot twist involving Tirzah Garwood, and cut and paste. 

“Restorers working on ‘Train Landscape’ recently discovered that the Westbury Horse had been glued over something else …  Read more here.

 

Toot! Toot! – from the most superior station at Little Snoreing.