The Journey Matters: Twentieth-Century Travel in True Style

Introduction

Chicago O’Hare Airport, 1740 hrs, 9th April 2017

Boarded and fully booked, United Express Flight 3411 to Louisville, Kentucky, operated by Republic Airways on behalf of the United Airlines subsidiary, was at its gate ready for departure. A sky bully came on board the Embraer 170 jet and said four passengers had to give up their seats. The airline wanted these for its own staff. There were no volunteers, even when a first offer of $400 compensation was raised to $800.

In the end, four passengers were selected by computer to be bumped. Three complied, but the fourth, Dr David Dao – a 69-year-old doctor who was flying back to Kentucky to see patients the following morning – was unwilling to give up his seat. So, instead, he was wrestled from it by three baseball-capped operatives. Dragged unconscious along the aisle, his nose and two of his teeth broken, blood trickling down his face, the doctor was taken off the aircraft. Fellow passengers filmed this malevolent scene on their mobile phones. Videos would go viral on YouTube, although not before Dr Dao had managed to re-board the aircraft. This time, the wounded, concussed and evidently distraught medic was dispatched on a stretcher.

Airline staff took their hard-won seats. Flight 3411 departed O’Hare two hours late. A later press statement claimed that the airline had simply been ‘re-accommodating’ passengers, and a leaked internal email said that employees had ‘followed established procedures for dealing with situations like this’. Who could think of criticizing United’s Oscar Munoz, the very model of a modern airline CEO, with years of experience working for AT&T, Coca-Cola and Pepsi? The previous month, PRWeek magazine had named him its ‘Communicator of the Year’. He held an MBA degree from Pepperdine University, a devoutly Christian college near Malibu, California.

The following month, United flew more passengers than it had a year earlier. It posted significant gains in passenger miles flown, and recorded the fewest cancellations in its history. The airline’s share price hit an all-time high. Warren Buffett, the veteran business magnate and a major investor in airline stocks, told Fortune that although United had made a ‘terrible mistake’ over the Dao affair, the public wanted cheap seats. This meant ‘high-load factors’ and, for passengers, a ‘fair amount of discomfort’.

A gun barrel of online US commentators said, in no uncertain terms, that Dr Dao deserved every injury and humiliation that came his way. How dare he delay other passengers and obstruct an all-American corporation going about its lawful business? As for the assault on the doctor, one of his three assailants, the aviation security officer James Long, felt he had been unfairly dismissed as a result of attempts by United Airlines to placate those Americans, including President Donald Trump, who said its methods had been wrong.

Long took legal action against United Airlines and Chicago’s Department of Aviation, claiming that he had not been trained properly in the handling of out-of-line passengers. How was he to know that violence against them was inappropriate and that, in this case, he wasn’t following ‘established procedures’?

‘Drive,’ commented one online reader in response to CNN’s coverage of the story, ‘and, if you cannot, then consider flying in a cramped seat with surly airline employees treating you like animal-cargo.’

When anyone complains, they are reminded – whether by Warren Buffett or fellow travellers – that they cannot expect commercial flight to be as it was in the days of silver service, adequate legroom and well-spoken, Grace Kelly–lookalike stewardesses with impeccable manners.

What has changed is the way in which, as perceived by the majority of passengers, airlines have abandoned, along with common decency, any notion of the romance or poetry of flight. For Michael O’Leary, the never-less-than-controversial CEO of the European budget airline Ryanair, passengers are in cahoots with this change: ‘Most people just want to get from A to B. You don’t want to pay £500 for a flight. You want to spend that money on a nice hotel, apartment or restaurant… you don’t want to piss it all away at the airport or on the airline.’ Of Ryanair, he says: ‘Anyone who thinks [our] flights are some sort of bastion of sanctity where you can contemplate your navel is wrong. We already bombard you with as many in-flight announcements and trolleys as we can. Anyone who looks like sleeping, we wake them up to sell them things.’

For O’Leary, the romance of flight has long been in the grave, where it deserves to rot. ‘Air transport,’ he told BusinessWeek Online in 2002, ‘is just a glorified bus operation.’ As Alfred E. Kahn, the American economist who became known as the ‘father of airline deregulation’, had said a quarter of a century before: ‘I really don’t know one plane from the other. To me they are just marginal costs with wings.’

Robert L. Crandall, the president and CEO of American Airlines from 1985 to 1998 and a fierce critic of deregulation, called the airline industry ‘a nasty, rotten business’. And Al Gore, back when he was vice president of the United States, stated: ‘Airplane travel is nature’s way of making you look like your passport photo.’

If they (or their employers) can afford it, passengers can, of course, fly in anodyne, faux-posh first class. And yet, to echo O’Leary’s thinking, who – unless they are travelling on expenses – would want to fritter away thousands of pounds on a first-class ticket now that the very concept of ‘first class’ no longer means what it did in decades gone by?

On and off, for more than a decade, I have ridden Liverpool Street to Norwich expresses. These trains have long been busy, to the point in recent years where standard-class passengers who are paying through their noses are forced to stand for long distances. When supplementary fares were available on weekdays, I’d ‘upgrade’ to first class.

It wasn’t so many years ago that these trains offered breakfast, dinner, lunch and tea. Paper tablecloths might have replaced linen at the beginning of the twenty-first century, and silver cutlery may have been a thing of the distant past, and yet there was still something of a half-remembered air of first-class travel in these East Anglian dining cars. By the second decade of the century, the restaurant cars had gone. And so what on earth – or in Greater Anglia – was the point of first class?

When I lived in the Scottish Highlands, I’d drive south to Inverness to take the Caledonian Sleeper to London. The sleepers were time-worn, yet clean and well maintained. The Scottish stewards were cheerful. The bar car was fun, with a varying cast over the seasons of MPs and lairds, fishermen, artists and writers, doctors, lawyers, engineers, oil riggers, architects, and American and Japanese tourists. Although not first class in a contemporary ‘top celebrity VIP’ manner, the Caledonian Sleeper had the charm and elan of a less-bullish era.

But while waiting at Euston for the staff of the return Caledonian Sleeper to let waifs and strays like me on board, the best option was always to perch on a luggage trolley or lean against a column on the bare concrete platform and read. Even on the coldest winter evening, that utilitarian platform was – to me at least – more first class than the Hieronymus Bosch-style ‘First-Class Lounge’.

Many of the journeys I’ve made in Britain and around the world have been by penny-plain and matter-of-fact boats, trains, planes, taxis and hire cars. By foot and on bicycle, too. It hasn’t mattered that a train or ferry has been spartan, if the scenery, people, weather or occasion itself has been special. These, though, have been very different journeys to those made by forms of transport in which passengers are synonymous with cargo, and when our sole interest appears to be to get from A to B as cheaply and as quickly as possible.

One of my favourite books since I first read it in a public library as a child – I then bought a second-hand copy in a Brooklyn bookstore years later – is Charles Small’s Far Wheels. Published in 1955, it evokes the steam railway journeys that Small made while working for the American oil industry in the Congo (the Chemins de fer du Kivu, ‘a 60-mile narrow gauge streak of rust’), Madagascar, Mozambique, Fiji, Jamaica, the backwaters of Japan and blazing East Africa.

I have wanted every place I have been to – whether the Aleutian Islands or Zennor, Doncaster or Dimapur, Lecce or Llandrindod Wells, Zapopan or Arnos Grove – to be particular and special. Far too much twenty-first-century travel is homogenous in character. It is now possible to travel more or less around the world by more or less identical Boeing or Airbus jets from one more or less identical airport to another, to stay at the same chain hotels, and to ride the same high-speed trains on dedicated tracks – as travel by picturesque regional railways declines – and to eat identical food at the same chain restaurants while wearing the same clothes as pretty much everyone else.

I mentioned the East Anglian main line from Liverpool Street to Norwich. From 2019, its express services have been run not by individual class 90 electric locomotives and their trains of British Rail Mark 3 coaches, but by flavourless – if hopefully efficient – electric multiple units. What I’ll lament when I use these trains is not so much the fact that, in terms of rolling stock, an old order is yielding to new – all things must pass – but a further loss of a regional identity. In recent years I have been spun down this line by trains pulled by Sir John Betjeman – former Poet Laureate, champion of railway heritage and once an assistant editor at the Architectural Review – as well as Vice Admiral Lord Nelson, Royal Anglian Regiment, Colchester Castle and Raedwald of East Anglia.

Some time in 2016, Raedwald of East Anglia – named after the seventh-century Saxon king buried in the ghost of the longship excavated at Sutton Hoo in 1939 – returned from overhaul without its nameplate. When I asked passengers waiting for an express train at Ipswich station one morning if they were sorry that Raedwald of East Anglia’s name had gone missing, most, even if friendly, looked at me blankly. No one I spoke to had noticed. Many had no idea the locomotives had names.

The stories in this book begin in the 1930s, because it was this decade that saw transport raised from a service and engineering skill to something of an art in every which way, from the design of the machines themselves to the posters, promotional films, and associated poetry, architecture and music. The 1930s are commonly thought of as the ‘Golden Age of Travel’.

But later decades offered journeys that have mattered, too. They exist today for all classes of travellers on board Japan’s latest bullet trains, which get better by the decade; for those living on the outskirts of Dresden in Germany, who are served on the way to work or school by characterful narrow-gauge steam railways; and for those who ride the 1930s trams that are still very much a part of the streetscape and civic culture of fashion-conscious Milan.

Aside from its clarion call – all journeys should be special; all journeys should truly matter – this is a book for those who want to know what journeys by the great ocean liners, airships, express trains and airliners were like in decades beyond our reach. It is a book, too, for those in search of the world’s most romantic transport byways, from the Atlantic coast of Donegal to the Red Sea port of Massawa. It shows, I hope – and despite insistent propaganda to the contrary – that not only is the journey far more than a way of getting from A to B, but that today, as it has been in the past, it can be a more rewarding experience than either the point of departure or arrival.

What was it really like to take the LNER’s Art Deco Coronation streamliner from Edinburgh to King’s Cross; to cross the Atlantic by SS Normandie; to fly with Imperial Airways from Southampton to Singapore; to steam from Manhattan to Chicago on board the New York Central’s 20th Century Limited; or to dine and sleep aboard the Graf Zeppelin airship? What did people eat and drink? What did they wear? How did they behave? What were their expectations? How safe were they? What did these journeys sound like? How did they smell? And what about washrooms and lavatories?

Recreating these journeys allows me to explore the history of routes taken and the events – social and political – enveloping them, and to find out what has happened to them since. This book contains the stories of the machines that made these journeys possible, of the people who shaped them, and of those passengers, too, who played key roles in modern history – like Le Corbusier, who flew to Rio on Graf Zeppelin to forge the transatlantic link between European and nascent Latin American Modernism.

The journeys I have written about fall within the period 1932 to 2005. I have connected them to specific dates and told their stories in the first person. The final five journeys are those I have made in real life. The 15 twentieth-century journeys are those that I have dreamed of making, and I have written them as if I had made them myself. I have often lulled myself to sleep in strange hotels, or when my mind is overactive, by imagining what it must have been like to ride the Coronation Scot from London to Glasgow in the late 1930s – from the bus, Underground or taxi ride to Euston and that terminus’s famous Doric arch and Great Hall, to the train itself. What would the food served in the restaurant car have been like, and what about my fellow passengers? What would I have seen from the train’s windows as I travelled through a countryside still farmed by horses and steam traction engines, between fleeting glimpses of smokestacks and coal yards and factories? And what of Shap Fell, free of the scourge of the M6 barging its impolite way alongside the railway; and of the arrival in pre-war Glasgow, where mighty factories built locomotives for export around the world, and shipyards, mightier still, welded and riveted the freighters – alongside opulent ocean liners – that took them there?

I cannot be sure, of course, of who exactly I would have been had I been born shortly before the outbreak of the First World War, although I have a feeling that one way or another my historic persona might well have been involved in the development of military aircraft between the wars, fought in the Second World War, and then led a busy life as the economies of the free world boomed and new technologies offered journeys to the Moon and looked to the stars.

Although certain ways of seeing the world – along with language, dress, measurements and manners – have changed since this past self rode the Coronation Scot and flew on Graf Zeppelin from Germany to Brazil in the 1930s, his enthusiasms are very much my own. I have tried, as far as possible, to avoid hindsight, so that the narrator can only ever have an inkling of what the future might hold as he journeys through Europe, Asia and the Americas, during eras of both optimism and nagging fear.

My narrator shares journeys with characters drawn from my imagination. He also meets real people – I have tried to imagine what it might have been like for example to meet the American industrial artist Henry Dreyfuss on board the peerless 20th Century Limited, for instance, and I have brought historical characters onto trains and planes and airships who may or may not have been on that exact trip at that precise time. They allow me to explain more fully why certain journeys mattered technically, socially, aesthetically, commercially and politically.

There are many other journeys I have dreamed of making – and, equally, many more I have taken and plan to go on. But, if told here, they would burst the finite boundaries of a book as they raced out to all points of the compass, in plumes of steam and vapour trails, the surge of spirited machines ‘coming on cam’, and the steady pulse of ships’ engines under skies near and far.

*

NB: I use metric measurements only when an Englishman of the times would have.

ONE

Londonderry to Burtonport: Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway

4th–6th October 1932

China has been all the vogue this year. Shanghai Express, starring Marlene Dietrich, set the pace in the popular imagination, while my fellow undergraduates Alec and Archie have just returned from a summer in Manchuria, which is pretty daring of them, not least because the Japs have created a puppet state there they call Manchukuo. I learn of Alec and Archie’s adventure over a teatime meal in Soho at the Shanghai Restaurant on Greek Street. Over plates of crab fried rice and what the menu calls chup suey, washed down with a bottle of rice wine and pots of oolong tea, we wonder if any of us has been anywhere more exotic than Manchuria.

‘Well, I’m off to Burtonport tonight,’ I say.

‘Where they brew Burton beers? Sounds very exotic,’ snorts Archie.

‘No. Burtonport, a fishing village on the far Atlantic coast of Donegal, the last stop on the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway.’

Between us, we know countries as far flung as India, Ceylon and China, yet agree that surely nowhere could possibly be more exotic than Burtonport, and that I am to report back its wonders over Guinness and Jameson.

I walk up to Euston only just in time to board the Stranraer sleeper. By chance – or good luck – I have a third-class berth to myself, in a comfortable former London and North Western Railway 12-wheeled sleeping car. Even though we set off just before 8 p.m., I am fast asleep soon after the gently swaying train has passed Watford, and only wake up when we pull into Carlisle in the early hours of the morning. Keen to find out which locomotive has taken me this far, I slip my coat over my pyjamas and my bare feet into brogues, and walk between pools of lamplight and wafts of steam from the train’s heating pipes towards the bulldog silhouette of 6122 Royal Ulster Riflemen. Built five years ago at the North British Locomotive Works in Glasgow, this is one of the London Midland and Scottish Railway’s (LMS) powerful Royal Scot 4-6-0s. Her large boiler, crowned with the squattest of chimneys, gives her a truly massive, hunched-up appearance.

If he had been able to get his own way, Henry Fowler, chief mechanical engineer of the LMS would have built a longer – if only slightly leaner – class of four-cylinder compound Pacifics, based on the latest French practice, instead of the three-cylinder Royal Scots. Fowler’s Pacific, which never got beyond the drawing board, was seen by management as being too expensive a proposition, and probably a little too exotic for the conservative tastes of Derby works. The Royal Scots were built instead, and in a rush, by North British – in association with Herbert Chambers, the chief draughtsman at Derby. They might not be Pacifics – nor, I gather, as efficient as the latest French compounds – but the Royal Scots are potent and reliable machines.

As Royal Ulster Rifleman steams away to be serviced at Upperby shed, I watch a pair of smaller locomotives, coupled together, backing towards the sleeper. The train engine is 40936, a brand-new LMS 4P class compound 4-4-0 – resplendent, like Royal Ulster Rifleman, in gold-lined crimson lake paintwork. The compound’s pilot, in the same livery, is an engine new and exotic to me: 14672, a lithe and handsome 4-6-0. Her works plate tells me she was built in 1911 by North British, for the Glasgow and South Western Railway. I have to ask her driver, amused to see me on the platform at this unsocial hour, what this elegant engine is. One of Mr James Manson’s express locos, this is her last month in service. The engine is in fine shape, but the LMS is standardizing its fleet.

Unable to get back to sleep, I open the ventilator above my window to listen to the locomotives as they pound northwest from Carlisle, over the border and on through Dumfries, Castle Douglas and Newton Stewart, on the undulating line to Stranraer, 73 miles away, where we pull in at 6 a.m. The ferry across the Irish Sea to Larne is berthed right alongside us. On the platform I observe my fellow passengers. They include a sizeable contingent of what must surely be businessmen, politicians and civil servants, some hanging on to their hats and dignity as the wind scudding across Loch Ryan blows away morning cobwebs and English trilbies and bowlers. This is the shortest of the Irish Sea crossings – just 45 miles and two and a half hours – and much the favourite for those lacking sea legs.

Our ship is the handsome new Princess Margaret named after the younger daughter of the Duke and Duchess of York. I have details of her – the ferry, that is – in my bag. Here they are. Built by William Denny of Dumbarton for the LMS and launched last year, she weighs 2,523 tons and can carry 1,250 first- and third-class passengers, 236 cattle, 37 horses and a sizeable amount of cargo. I think the cattle must come from Ireland as I don’t see any boarding here at Stranraer. No horses either. Princess Margaret, I read, is powered by a pair of Parsons steam turbines producing a combined 7,462 shaft horsepower at 269 rpm. Her top speed is 21½ knots.

I make my way to the cafeteria for breakfast, as members of parliament and officer ranks of the Civil Service remain tucked discreetly behind the doors of their first-class cabins. We slip anchor at 7 o’clock – sunrise – steaming smoothly from the loch. On deck, I listen to the stern hiss of water along the sides of the ship as she cuts into the Irish Sea. At her stern, I watch water churned into furious channels of foam and spray.

I find myself inwardly singing along with Bing Crosby’s ‘Where the Blue of the Night (Meets the Gold of the Day)’, which somehow segues into Duke Ellington’s ‘It Don’t Mean a Thing (If It Ain’t Got That Swing)’. The sea certainly swings, turning decidedly choppy. I retreat to the dining room. A well-dressed, unfazed English family at the next table tucks into an ambitious breakfast. The son is engrossed, between mouthfuls of scrambled egg and bacon, by the latest copy of The Magnet, and its slightly incongruous stories of Billy Bunter on the one spread and exotic travels through the empire on the next. I can’t help noticing that the cover features an illustration of the Great Western Railway’s Cheltenham Flyer, the world’s fastest scheduled train.

His sister is reading The Girl’s Own Paper, and their mother, dressed in well-cut tweeds, lights a cigarette. On the table, she has a copy of Cold Comfort Farm by Stella Gibbons, a novel published last month that’s said to be very funny. If I hadn’t fallen asleep, my own reading for the Stranraer boat train was to have been Freeman Wills Crofts’ Sir John McGill’s Last Journey, the story of a Northern Irish industrialist murdered, apparently, on the Stranraer sleeper. A part of the attraction, for me, is that Crofts is a retired civil engineer with the NCC (Northern Counties Committee, the Northern Irish division of the LMS) turned detective fiction writer.

I very much enjoy bobbing about on water, but Stranraer and our Charlie Chaplin’s Gold Rush–style meal, our plates sliding from one side of the table to the other, are soon memories as we head into harbour at the head of Lough Larne. Out on deck, I can see gulls screaming, terns wheeling and cormorants skimming across the waters. I glimpse emerald fields over the rooftops of terraced dockside houses, as well as railway yards, cranes, warehouses and squat, glum-looking churches.

And there, on the other side of the NCC tracks for Belfast, is, to my English eyes, a wonderfully exotic sight. A purposeful 2-4-2T narrow-gauge tank engine, crimson lake liveried, is waiting at the head of a train of three corridor-connected coaches that look like the latest LMS main-line designs shrunk to fit the NCC’s narrow-gauge lines. I beetle down to this train from Princess Margaret as quickly as I can, as do those few businessmen and civil servants not heading for Belfast, and the English family.

What a fine and unexpected train this turns out to be. Aside from its compelling engine, 104 – a two-cylinder compound designed by Bowman Malcolm, locomotive superintendent of the Belfast and Northern Counties Railway and built at York Road, Belfast in 1920 – it is very smart indeed. The four-year-old carriages boast steam heating, plush upholstery, and lavatories, too.

This is the Ballymena and Larne boat train. With three stops along the 3-foot gauge line, we’re scheduled to run the 25 miles to the junction for Londonderry at Ballymena in 64 minutes. While the Cheltenham Flyer takes only a minute longer to run the 77 miles from Swindon to Paddington, the narrow-gauge Irish train is not slow considering the terrain. After easing our way around the harbour and then away from the stop at Larne Town, 104 gets quickly into her efficient compound stride. The first 12 miles of the trip prove to be an arduous climb through beautiful green farmland fringed with purple hills with gradients as steep as 1-in-36. We crest the ascent at Ballynashee, 600 feet above sea level.

Accelerating rapidly, we are now running at over 30 mph as we head south-west to Kells – and, from there, north at a clip to Ballymena, where we join the main line from Belfast to Londonderry. At Ballymena, our driver tells me that we’re lucky to have 104 on the run today. The boat train is very often in the hands of one of the ungainly Atlantic tanks built by Kitson & Co. of Leeds in 1908. Nominally more powerful than the compounds, these are prone to slipping – making something of a misery of the long climb up from Larne in wet weather, which is commonplace here, of course. One of these 4-4-2 tanks is at work shunting a string of goods wagons while we chat. The rest of the compounds run the Ballycastle to Ballymoney line further north. ‘But,’ says the driver, ‘we’d sure like them back on the Ballymena.’

I can’t help noticing that the English children waiting on the Londonderry main-line platform are eating Mars Bars, a new tuppenny chocolate bar made in a factory in Slough passed every day, at speed, by the Cheltenham Flyer. But here comes our Derry flyer heading into Ballymena station, a smart seven-coach corridor train led by a brightly polished NCC 4-4-0. This is U2 class No. 74 Dunluce Castle, one of the ‘Scotch engines’ built in 1924 by North British of Glasgow. She is clearly modelled on a Midland or LMS 2P 4-4-0, although William Kelly Wallace, locomotive engineer and civil engineer of the NCC from 1922, supervised the design. Only recently, Mr Wallace introduced colour light signalling – the first in Ireland – at Belfast York Road, the terminus from which Dunluce Castle departed earlier this morning.

The other thing I can’t help noticing is the width of the NCC track. Irish main lines adopted the 5-foot, 3-inch gauge, rather than the standard 4-foot, 8½-inch mainland gauge. I find this particularly interesting because I attended a lecture in Oxford earlier this year given by a Harvard archaeologist who has been researching the paved and grooved trackway the ancient Greeks engineered across the Isthmus of Corinth in around 600 BC. This trackway enabled ships, and perhaps even fighting triremes, to be pulled for five miles overland between the Ionian and Aegean seas, saving a great deal of time. This early form of railway was in use for 650 years, and Aristophanes refers to it in his comedy Lysistrata. The distance between the grooved tracks was exactly 5 feet, 3 inches. Irish railways have a classical pedigree.

The Londonderry train gets into a 60 mph stride before stopping at Ballymoney, where I lean out of the window to watch a pair of 3-foot-gauge S class compound 2-4-2Ts at work. Our next stop is Coleraine, where passengers can change for Portrush and the Giant’s Causeway Tramway. I would do so if I had another week in hand, but exotic Burtonport calls, and it’s still a long way off. It’s midday now as we cross the River Bann, and, as if by sleight of hand, the scenery changes from the engagingly bucolic to the stirringly romantic. It’s as if the poet Coleridge were in charge of the landscaping. Skirting the left bank of the Bann, we steam towards Castlerock and between the two tunnels – the longest in Ireland – passing below and through the former estate of the eighteenth-century Lord Bishop of Derry, the Suffolk-born Frederick Hervey, Earl of Bristol.

Between the tunnels, I stretch my neck up to see the Mussenden Temple, an exquisite classical rotunda overlooking the North Atlantic. I know from my interest in architecture that its design is based on Bramante’s Tempietto in Rome, itself based on the Temple of Vesta at Tivoli, which I cycled to along the Via Appia only last year. The architect of Bristol’s Irish tempietto was most probably Michael Shanahan, who accompanied the eccentric and philanthropic earl on at least one of his many visits to Italy.

The tempietto is, in fact, a library, commissioned in 1783 as a wedding present to Bristol’s favourite cousin, Frideswide Bruce, who married Daniel Mussenden, an elderly London banker. Said to be Bristol’s lover, she died in 1785. The inscription around the building, which I know – but cannot possibly see, of course, from the train at 30 mph – reads:

Suave, mari magno turbantibus aequora ventis

e terra magnum alterius spectare laborem

[’Tis pleasant, safely to behold from shore

The troubled sailor, and hear tempests roar]

I know, from Latin classes at school, that this is a quote from Lucretius’s De Rerum Natura, but what it means here on the Atlantic coast of Ulster, I have no idea.

We canter down to the white sand beaches of Benone Strand, our track right by the rolling, white-horse ocean – I see either dolphins or porpoises revelling in the swell of the sea – and with the long looming crags of Binevenagh Mountain shadowing our progress inland.

Cutting off Mulligan Point, we lope past Bellarena station and find ourselves alongside water again, crossing a bridge over the River Roe and skirting Lough Foyle. On through farmland, we rumble over a further bridge across the River Faughan, and – following the curves of the banks of the River Foyle into Londonderry – come to a stand under the glazed roof of the NCC’s Waterside station, a sandstone building designed, my notebook tells me, by John Lanyon, a prolific railway architect and engineer. Dominated by a muscular Italianate clock tower, it opened in 1875.

Now my naivety shows. I have come this far, and without lunch, without knowing where the Londonderry and Lough Swilly Railway terminus is, nor the times of trains to Burtonport. I ask at the stationmaster’s office. There is an afternoon train to Burtonport, I’m told, leaving at 4.45 p.m. The Swilly’s Graving Dock terminus is a mile or more’s walk north, on the other side of the Foyle. The timetable says it arrives in Burtonport at 9.20 p.m., but what with uncertain weather and