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Monday July 23 2006
If it's a Sunday morning in summer, and you live in, near or around Bristol, Weston super-M or Taunton, you sooner or later have to take a ride on the Torbay Express. Other mandatory West Country summer outings include:
a) a trip on the Waverley or Balmoral,
b) a day at Weston best approached in a spirit of extreme irony,
c) sitting in slow-moving M5 traffic on urgent business while cursing the ignorant grockles who cruise their tin tents in the middle lane.
You get up too early for a Sunday and clamber aboard at Temple Meads laden with picnic stuff and reading matter because there are bound to be longeurs. That is, times when you realise that while you might be being hauled by a venerable GWR loco built in Swindon in 1930 and therefore the ne plus ultra of steam nostalgia is all well and fine, but you're stuck in a carriage and there's not much to admire apart from the hissing and chuffing and the smell and smuts of coal ... Coal imported from Poland, damn you Thatcher!
The Torbay Express is the Hard Stuff, a
massive O/D for those of us who find the likes of the beautiful West
Somerset Railway not enough of
a trip. Sitting in an authentic
1950s or 60s vintage British Rail carriage, you go Bristol - Weston -
Taunton - Exeter - Paignton - Kingswear, with plenty of long stops
along the route to get out and gaze upon 6024 King Edward I and even
clamber onto the footplate. At Kingswear your ticket buys you a place
on the ferry across the river to Dartmouth, where you may sojourn for
three hours before going home again. There are moments when you are
re-living that golden age of seaside holiday travel. Lots of people like steam trains, lots of people love them, but the thing is, nobody actually dislikes them. How can this be? After all, the things are ethically and ecologically kind of neutral, no different from modern diesel or electric locos. Yesterday, the weather was hot and the organisers were wondering if they'd be allowed to run at all in view of the danger of 6024 sparking fires in fields and grass verges.
But if you travel on the Torbay Express, everyone waves at you, loves you; mothers and kids in back gardens, old men with expensive cameras standing in fields, young couples leaning out of bedroom windows ... It's all rather wonderful really and the books and newspapers remained un-read.
The Torbay Express is operated by Past Time Rail with the assistance of a number of splendid volunteers and runs each Sunday (and some Saturdays) in the summer season. It's not exactly what you'd call cheap, but that Polish coal won't pay for itself.