Trains and the great stations that marked the beginning and end of their routes once held a magical allure for most people. The very sight of them brought to mind images of adventure and escaping to unseen far-away places. No more...at least not for the weary modern commuter. To him there are no more unknown bends in the track, nothing beyond that horizon he hasn't seen before all too many times. To him a train is merely a rolling waiting room from which he will soon alight onto the exact same bit of asphalt as the day before and the day before that. Train travel to him isn't about adventure, it's about tedium and predictability.
But even the most jaded of daily commuters into Marylebone Station must certainly permit themselves just a moment of escapist fantasy when glancing over at the Wrexham and Shropshire Line's 7:33 to Wrexham General purring away on track 3 as it prepares to depart. Unlike the brightly coloured modernist stock most of us travel on these days, which have more in common stylistically with European street trams than genuine trains, the Wrexham and Shropshire is a proper passenger train.
Who among us has not looked over at the grey, vaugely old school locomotive idling away with the large and largely empty carraiges behind it and not thought, even just fleetingly, of turning around and escaping the daily treadmill by simply climbing aboard? Where is it going? Who knows? Who cares?
As a foreigner to these shores I must admit to having absoutley no idea where Shropshire is or what it looks like...but in my mind I am quite clear. It must be a place of rolling hills and over-grown grass where cows graze and insects dance in the air. A place where dark, tree-shaded rivers wind their way slowly along the outer edges of lush pastures. A part of England locked in time, untouched by the forward march of hideous progress.
If commuter trains have slowly drained all the romance from train travel, The Wrexham and Shropshire is doing it's best to single handedly put it back.
A few months back, the line survived a legal battle against the financial might of Virgin for control of the service between London and Wrexham. A real broad-gage David and Goliath story. Thankfully...David won again, and for a while the Wrexham and Shropshire became the most talked about line in the land.
Here are a few of Ian Jack's words about the line taken from his column in the Guardian:
April's morning in the hour after daybreak. A kipper is brought to the table, with toast and marmalade and a pot of coffee. Through the carriage window, blossom shoots from the hedges like upward-growing snow. Gymkhana fences and allotments lie idle, waiting to be jumped over or dug. A woman in a headscarf walks two terriers towards some woods. We are on-board the Wrexham and Shropshire line train to Wrexham.
Steadily we moved north through the Chilterns. The carriages smooth- and quiet-running 30-year-old bogeys and as steady as a rock. The cutlery refused to rattle and the coffee never escaped its china. "The full English or the full Welsh, madam?" the steward asked of the woman behind. "What's the difference?" "No difference, just served with a different accent."
Not a new joke, one suspects, but lets be honest, new is not really what you're after on a journey like this.
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