Day One: Reversals

This damn camera.

It was having a hissy fit.  I'd arrived at Great Ayton, my very first station on the Esk Valley Line, and the camera had frozen.  There was a green "on" light, but nothing worked.  Remember when cameras were just a series of mechanical processes so if you pushed a button, it moved something that moved something else and click! you had a photo?  Now you're wandering around with a computer in your pocket, something that could conceivably turn malevolent at any time.  It's not restricted to cameras - my television crashed the other day, forcing me to reboot it.  My television.  I only wanted to watch The Big Bang Theory, not find the Higgs-Boson particle.

After a few moments of panicking, bashing, and swearing, I pulled out my iPhone and took the photo with that instead.

Hence my look of barely concealed tension and frustration.

It had been a bit of a fraught day, all told.  I'd managed to get from Birkenhead Park to Great Ayton despite the Gods clearly disliking the idea.  There were overcrowded trains at Manchester, unexplained halts outside Leeds.  At York, my train - along with every other train north - was delayed due to overhead line problems at Doncaster.  I sat on an Inverness train for ten minutes as it slowly filled with fizzing, frustrated people, like we were sinking into the sea.  Only instead of the carriage filling with water it was being flooded with anger and passive aggressive moans.  I ended up jumping off the train, unable to stand the wait any longer, and instead getting a rail replacement bus to Middlesbrough.  I almost missed that because the staff from First Transpennine Express didn't seem to be in any hurry to tell people which was the right coach, and the boy on the information desk at York station was next to useless:

"Can you tell me where the rail replacement buses go from?"

"I'm not sure.  I've seen a bloke with a First Transpennine clipboard outside so I'd guess it's from out there somewhere."

I was feeling so discombobulated I had a Burger King meal, much to the consternation of the girl behind the counter who tried to put me off ordering with "We've got no drinks, only Tropicana".  She seemed annoyed when I wanted my food anyway.

It was a relief to finally get off at Great Ayton station.  I'd made it!  Just the six hours or so of travelling across country to get here.

I took the photo of the station sign with my phone then set off for the next one, fiddling with the camera.  Finally, in desperation, I popped the battery out, left it for a little while, then shoved it back in.  The camera whirred to life as if nothing had happened.  I hate this camera.  It was my second choice, because I needed to make a quick decision and Currys had sold out of my carefully researched first choice, and now I was deeply regretting it.  It's just a little bit off, just a little bit not good enough in places, not so bad that you throw it away as a bad lot but sufficiently awful to irritate you every time you use it.

There was a woman ahead of me on the narrow footpath, a young pretty girl in tight hiking shorts.  She'd clearly been wandering across the north all day, but she was walking very slowly.  I became aware that I was advancing on her at a disturbing pace.  It's hard to try and overtake young women without looking like some disturbing sex maniac; I put my best "I'm gay, honest" look on my face as my footsteps loomed up behind her, then stepped into the gutter to get past to really underline how disinterested I was in being close to her.

Fortunately I was soon in the village of Great Ayton, away from any potential "sex crime on lonely Yorkshire lane" Crimewatch reconstructions.  The streets were surprisingly busy, filled with couples, families, dog walkers.  I couldn't help noticing they were all walking in the opposite direction to me though.  As I headed round through the houses and then out of the village, I met a dozen people, all coming the other way.  It started to get embarrassing.  I'm not sure what was going on in the next village, but apparently it had just finished and now everyone was heading home.  Although in my twisted mind, all I could think about was the ending of The Mist.

The people petered out as I crossed the river at Little Ayton, then I was on quiet empty roads.  Now and then a cyclist would whizz by, head down, his sleek vehicle whirring efficiently.  The Yorkshire Moors are a place for proper cyclists, people with lycra and ambitions, not your day to day perambulators.  There were hardly any cars.  After a while I was wandering in the centre of the road, unconcerned about being mown down by a passing truck - there simply weren't any.

I could smell September in the air.  The late afternoon was still warm, burning off the day's sunshine, but there was the whisper of Autumn underneath.  A tiny chill mixed with the summer vapours, a subtle hint that the trees would soon be dying.  Fields of hay were stripped back to stubble.  Harvested bales formed long shadows.

I was, technically, on the "ugly" side of the railway.  The border of the North York Moors national park hugs it between Great Ayton and Battersby, and I was in the part that hadn't been included.  To my eyes it seemed just as worthy of inclusion - fine rises of green hills, soft mellow fields, blue forests stretching into the distance.  It was a hard, rugged landscape, uncompromising, inspiring.

Easby was obviously participating in some kind of scarecrow festival; perhaps that was the draw for the villagers of Great Ayton?  I turned right at a Cruella de Vil, her 101 dalmations represented by a couple of photocopied pictures, and passed a mushroom farm and a Union Jack bedecked sign promising Easby Hogs: British Rare Breed Pigs.  All the while the skies closed in, threatening divine intervention.

The line between Middlesbrough and Whitby is actually a Frankenstein's monster of a route, cobbled together from various different lines over the years.  The original Whitby line is now the North York Moors Railway to Pickering.  From Grosmont, on that line, a branch was built off to Picton via Battersby.  Another branch was then built after Battersby north to Nunthorpe, where it connected with the Macclesfield-Guisborough railway line.  You can see the position of the various railways around Great Ayton and Battersby on the North Eastern Railway map at Middlesbrough station:

Do you know how irritated I am that I'll never get to visit Sexhow?  Not to mention Potto.

Various closures over the years, culminating in Oh! Doctor Beeching, cut off branches with the wanton abandon of Leatherface's chainsaw.  The route between Battersby and Picton fell in the process.  That map is actually misleading - Battersby is on the wrong side of the junction; it should be more or less where Ingleby is.

I passed what was once Ingleby station, now commemorated only by "Station Farm" and apparently better known for its cattle these days:

The line to Picton crossed the road and carried on across the fields.  A look to my right, and I could follow the track with my eyes.  More than fifty years since it was removed and nature still hasn't completely claimed it.

In most parts of the country the route would have been appropriated by walkers, cyclists and horse riders.  There'd be a bridleway and gates and finger posts.  Even though you can still follow the old railway line easily on satellite imagery, it's resoundingly closed to the public.  Unfriendly signs put me off any exploration.

I carried on into Ingleby Greenhow, a tidy village settling down for its Bank Holiday Sunday entertainments.  I could hear the men in the Dudley Arms starting to get rowdy.  A little girl leaned out the downstairs window and dropped her doll onto the pavement; a few moments later she dashed out of the front door, threw it back through the window, and ran inside again.  I imagined her mum and dad oblivious to her game as they chatted to their neighbours over pints.  The building next door was a family butchers, a tiny handpainted sign over narrow windows and a van parked outside: Orders delivered locally to meat your needs!

I paused by the parish notice board, always good value.  Anyone in the area might like to know that the village hall will be hosting The Way I See It, "a slide show set to music", on September the 6th.  I've no idea what it entails; I'm guessing it's one of those "light hearted" pieces about why this country's going to the dogs, as you can find in many a local paper.  The now deceased Wirral Champion used to be riddled with them, columns about the terrible state of modern life and how much better it all was in the twenties when we only had rickets and death in industrial accidents and grinding poverty to worry about.  (The BF once managed to get the magazine withdrawn from our local Sainsburys for several months after it published a virulently homophobic piece).

I could be wrong.  It could be a piece of pro-feminist agitprop from the Edinburgh Fringe that wandered south.  If anyone's in the area, could you pop in and let me know?  Tickets are just £4 - light refreshments included.  (Bring your own drinks/glasses).

I headed up the hill out of the village, past ridiculously pretty stone cottages.  Every now and then I was hit with the smell of a Sunday night, the thick meaty scent of roast beef and Yorkshire puddings drifting out through open windows.  I thought back to that Burger King meal and felt like I'd betrayed my country somehow.

Battersby station was once Battersby Junction.  The second half of the name was dropped when the lines were closed, but it still clings on in the odd road sign, and in the name of the hamlet around the station.  I turned left at Tom Roy, Morris Minor Specialist, and took in the hand-crafted station sign.  Very unofficial, very un-corporate, very pleasing.

I hadn't expected there to be anything here except the station, but there were a dozen railway cottages around it.  They formed a triangle, butting up against the old line, and must have once housed workers and engineers.  Judging by the glimpses of front rooms I got from the pavement as I passed, it now seems to be a 50/50 mix of youngsters getting their foot on the property ladder and pensioners who are fond of glass cats and doilies.

Battersby station is now an anomaly.  Even though the trains are meant to go from Middlesbrough to Whitby, they have to do a reverse at Battersby.  This is because of that odd mismatch of lines I mentioned earlier.  The two lines both turn away from each other, trying to go to Picton, and all they can do instead is collide here.

The best way to illustrate this is through highly expensive CGI.

That took me literally moments, I tell you.

As you can see, since there's no connection at the curve between the Middlebrough section and the Whitby section, every train has to pull into Battersby station and stop.  There's a "token" scheme here, operated by the driver, because the line is single track.  This means that only the train with the "token" can travel on the railway, and stops two trains from ending up on a single set of lines.

Normally there's a signalman who would handle the token for you, as an extra safety measure, but Battersby is so isolated and underused the driver himself does all the work.  A cabinet on the platform houses the equipment and a telephone for him to obtain permission to travel onwards.

In an ideal world all this would be engineered out of existence.  A link would be built between the Middlesbrough and Whitby sections and Battersby station would be closed, allowing through services without an inconvenient five minute wait.  It'll never happen though.  The line just isn't important enough for that kind of investment.  Plus, closing a station is an expensive business, and would mean depriving a community of a rail link (okay, only 1500 people use it a year, but that's not the point).  Building a new one to replace it would be an expense utterly out of proportion to its benefits.

Basically Battersby is destined to remain a strange, clunky dead end on the rail network.

I like it.  I would probably find that five minute wait incredibly annoying if I used the line every day, but as an outsider, I relished its quirkiness.  I liked its anachronistic behaviour.  I wondered if the men at British Rail had left it this way out of a secret hope that one day the line through to Picton would be restored.  "Trust us," they'd whispered to local councillors, "we'll reopen it in twenty years time and you'll be glad we left all that track lying there!"  There's even a tiny spur riding on beyond the station, going nowhere except round the corner, but enough to look ambitious and exciting.

Yeah, I can pretty much guess what those "instructions" will be.  Turn back you idiot!

I dumped my bag in the shelter and changed out of my sweaty t-shirt into a clean one; the only advantage of the replacement bus was that I'd not yet had time to check into my hotel, so I still had all my stuff with me.  I sat on the floor, cross legged, and let the quiet station capture me.  Victoria Wood visited Battersby Junction as part of her wonderful Crewe to Crewe documentary, in 1996.  Its silent spell prompted her to say:

What a filthy old world it is.  There's still a few good bits left though.

The BBC still hasn't given me that documentary series, so I had to settle for putting my thoughts on my iPhone.

Come on: 6 x half an hour, 7:30, BBC Four.  I'm better than Portillo.

I was at Battersby for about three quarters of an hour, waiting for the train to come cresting round the corner.  There's not much to see.  The station house has been lovingly preserved, though the owners have put up a small wire fence to stop people sitting on the wall and crushing their petunias.  There's a water tower, rusting idly, long past its usefulness but too much hassle to remove.

The last train of the day finally arrived to take me back to the city.  Two stations done.  Not a bad start.

Dovey Tailing

Hell is other people, said Sartre, presumably while waiting in the queue at Argos.  It's a maxim that's particularly true of rail travel.  All those people, crammed together in a tiny tin tube, breathing in each other's air, smelling their perfumes, listening to their conversations.  Just one bad travelling companion can completely destroy your journey and send you scurrying to the taxi rank.

At Tywyn, there are two tracks, a rarity on the Cambrian Lines, so trains wait there to allow each other to pass.  It meant that for five minutes, waiting for the train to get going, I had to sit across from one of the most negative, miserable, and generally unpleasant women I have ever had the misfortune to be in close proximity to.  She had a bowl of tight blonde hair which looks like it was screwed onto her skull at puberty and hasn't been touched since.  Across from her was her husband, a man with a moustache and the defeated look of a man who's inadvertently chained himself to a Rottweiler for the rest of his life.

She first entered my consciousness as she loudly demanded he repay her for the coffees they'd had that morning.  "How much money have you got on you?"

"I don't know," said her husband.  He pulled out his wallet, one of those ones with a section for coins that are used exclusively by the emasculated, and she snatched it off him.  She rifled through it, pulling out a fiver and dumping a load of coppers from her own purse into it.  "Are you giving me all that change?" he said.

"Yes," she said.  "I'm sick of carrying it around.  I'm taking this five pound note.  You can pay for the drinks tonight.  And the Radio Times, when that's due."  A look round the carriage, her face contorted into a sneer, and then she complained that the train was on time.  How dare it be efficient!

As we take off, the guard appears, a chirpy girl they recognise and call Nellie.  "It's a bit quieter than the last time you were on here!" said the guard.

"Yes, thank God.  It's not that the children were shouting.  There were just far too many of them."

The train carries on, as does Helmet-Head's monologue to the guard about children, noisy trains, the inconvenience of train travel, the inconvenience of her friends for living away from Tywyn, the inconvenience of having to pack a bag when you stay overnight.  A pause at an open gate leaves her fuming at the farmer at the side of the line.  "Dickhead!" she shouts, as though he can hear her.  "Now he's held up the train."

"They have to be careful," says Nellie.  "You don't want to accidentally hit some one.  That can traumatise a driver."

"I know," says Helmet-Head.  "You hear about these suicides throwing themselves on the track.  It's so selfish.  I mean, I've been depressed, but I got over it.  You just need to pull your socks up."

Fortunately we stopped at Aberdovey before I had time to finish crafting a rudimentary garotte out of the straps of my backpack.  I stepped onto the platform lightly and with genuine pleasure at the idea that I wouldn't have to sit across from that woman all the way to Newtown.

Perhaps the escape made me especially generous to Aberdovey station.  I don't think so.  It was in a charming spot, close to the sea, with a bowling green behind it.  The station building had been turned into a private residence, but it wasn't fenced off from the platform, and it still gave the halt a sense of importance.

It also had, as you can see above, a Harrington Hump.  These are ramps built onto a station to avoid the expense of raising an entire platform to modern train heights: typically they occupy the centre and mean that it's easier for less able passengers to board.  I just love that they're called Harrington Humps; it's from the same world as Belisha Beacons and zebra crossings, eccentric names for something boringly practical.

The sun had decided that yes, it would grace us with its presence, after a day of being ambivalent about whether it was needed or not.  It meant that there was something approaching a pleasing warmth as I walked down to the main road for the sign shot.

Aberdovey has two stations, which is quite ridiculous for a town of its size, but handy for me.  They were either end of the main street, so I followed it into the centre.  Above me on the clifftops were white villas with sea views; they looked almost exactly like somewhere a vindictive colonel would be murdered by his despairing family in a lesser Agatha Christie.

In fact, Aberdovey had a general Christie-ness about it, a gentility and elegance that you didn't expect from a seaside resort these days.  Perhaps it's because it's still a working harbour, rather than just a tourist trap, but there was a sense of authenticity to it you don't often get.  The promenade curves round the bay, lined with eighteenth-century houses painted bright colours, while behind it are tiny Georgian streets that intersect at wild angles.

I was disappointed to spot a Fat Face in the town square, though.  That shop instantly marks the town as a place where it is acceptable for men to wear both three-quarter length trousers and Breton shirts; the hipsters had discovered it.  Fortunately they all seemed to be out of town during my visit - presumably they were all in England.

I did a couple of circuits of the centre before going into the Dovey Inn.  It had caught my eye with its carved board near the roof:

This house was built by Athelstain Owens Esqr.  

Ano Dom 1729

I was disappointed to find that inside it had been modernised within an inch of its life.  Not in an especially ugly way; in fact it was inoffensively tasteless, all blonde wood and frosted glass.  As I sat down in a corner with my pint of Milkwood, though, I wished it still felt like a three hundred year old inn, rather than a Wetherspoons with a nice frontage.

I watched the light bouncing off the sea for a while, glinting among the wavelets, and slowly knocked back my pint.  I could live here, I thought.  I could live in one of those houses, overlooking the bay, watching the fishermen leaving in the evening for their catch.  Drinking a beer on the balcony while I listened to the sea below me.  Then wandering down into town to find a nice quiet restaurant for the evening.  The slow life.

Of course, it would drive me mad in reality, the moment I realised I'd have to go fifty miles to get that brand of toothpaste I like, or when all my friends suddenly started trying to use my house as a free hotel.  It was nice to dream for a while.

I carried on through the town, feeling vaguely as though I was in a pirate cove, striding among the close fit houses and the sea walls.  The presence of a Literary Institute, with signs advertising both a "News Room (Visitors Welcome)", and a billiard room, did nothing to convince me I was in the 21st century.

Soon I'd reached the other end of the town, close to Penhelig station, and I realised it was a lot smaller than I'd planned for so I still had a while before my train.  I picked another pub close by, the Penhelig Arms, to kill time in.  It was built into the rock face behind the town, with no pavement outside and the railway bridge overhanging it, and I was pleased to find it was a much more old-fashioned pub than the Dovey Inn.  There seemed to be a "posh bit" upstairs, with a terrace, but I'd wandered into the slightly more threadbare lower bar, the place the locals frequented.

The bar was so authentic, they'd not even bothered with levelling the floor for the tables, and I managed to spill a centimetre of beer right instantly.  I mopped it up with my handkerchief while I listened to the barmaid tolerating a regular talking about his day.  He'd been up until 4am watching a documentary about Burt Bacharach; "do you know he made Cilla Black do 19 takes of Anyone Who Had A Heart?"  I was going to suggest that Burt should have made her do a few more, but instead I stuffed my beer-soaked hankie into my pocket and relaxed.

A heavy clock over the fireplace noisily ticked away, knocking down the minutes until my train.  The barmaid perched on a sttol, turning the pages of her Western Mail, enjoying a moment's silence while John regathered his thoughts.  Suddenly he exclaimed: "I don't care what anyone says; I like sprouts."  She took the non sequitur in her stride, and joined him in a chat about which green vegetables are best (the winner: broccoli).  I heard the Pwllheli train rattle past, and realised it was sadly time to go, before I could stir things up by chucking kale into the equation.

Penhelig station was just across the street, with a metre of pavement giving me space to stand and take the sign picture.  Above it was a narrow staircase taking you up the embankment to the platform.  No wonder they put in a Harrington Hump at Aberdovey - this is very wheelchair-unfriendly.

The station is built in the brief gap between two tunnels in the rock.  The train has just enough time to emerge from the darkness and stop before it's back inside for another underground trip.  The Welsh version of the Colour Tsars had struck again, painting the little wooden shelter red, green and white.

It was probably the two pints of beer, but I found the little hut charming, even more so when I found that the local graffiti artists were clearly as OCD as me.  There was a window in one wall of the hut, but not the other, so someone who deeply values symmetry had drawn one in:

It could have done with a ruler and set square to get the angles right, but well done you.

My train turned up and, even better, stopped for me (I was worried that the driver wouldn't see me in the time it took for him to come out of the tunnel).  My next stop was the famous - almost legendary - Dovey Junction.  Even the guard seemed to recognise its special place on the line: "Ladies and gentlemen.  This... is DOVEY JUNCTION," pausing for it to sink in as though it were a headliner at the Las Vegas Hilton.

As I've said before, the Cambrian Line is in two parts: the Main Line heads south to Aberystwyth, while the Coast Line heads north to Pwllheli.  The point where the line splits is at Dovey Junction and, for reasons best known to themselves, the line's architects constructed a station here.  Now it's one of the least used stations in Britain, and as such, on Robert's list for his Station Master blog (but I've beaten him to it, ha ha).

I was the only person to get off.  Most people who want to change trains will stay on until Machynlleth, further up the line, which at least has a station building and somewhere pleasant to sit and get a Coke.  I dropped my bag off in the shelter (who was going to steal it, a vindictive otter?) and walked down the ridiculously long Aberystwyth platform.  There's been talk about restoring London services to this line, and this is reflected in a platform built for Voyagers.  A refurbishment in 2011 also raised it above the flood plains and gave it new tarmac - it has the unfortunate effect of removing any old-world charm the station might have had.

It was a mile and a half from the station to the nearest road; a map advising you of where to catch a rail replacement bus was more or less just an arrow saying "walk this way".  The road passes through high reed beds - it's a protected wildlife area - until you reach the "Station House", and with it, the main road.

In a further blow to Dovey Junction's image as an isolated spot, the main road was undergoing a major upgrade.  There were diggers, trucks and steamrollers loudly hammering at the rock face, while workers crawled all over the site.  The noisy jackhammers echoed throughout the valley.

Up the nose shot taken, I turned round and went back the way I came, pausing only to pee.  I now had an hour to kill until the train back to Barmouth.  The services aren't even aligned to help with the interchange; two eastbound services pass within ten minutes of each other, then it's almost two hours before the next westbound train.

To pass the time, I decided to make a little video.

Even during the course of that video, my attitude to the station was changing.  I'd been let down at first.  It was, after all, the famous Dovey Junction, and yet it wasn't that isolated and it wasn't that pretty.  Look beyond the drab Arriva Trains Wales corporate colours and the easily maintained pebbles and you realise how lucky you are to be here; in the centre of a wide expanse of natural beauty, with no-one but yourself and your thoughts for company.  Out there - beyond the platforms - out there was the world to explore; Dovey Junction was just a means to get there.  Its magic is its surroundings, not the station itself.

I got back on the train and settled into my seat, taking just a moment to perv at the hot conductor (hello Alex!).  It was finally time to return to Barmouth, to a shower and a drink and a sleep.  Day one: done and dusted.