The slow train

Having Parkinson’s is like riding a railway train that starts out as an express but then stops at every station. You’ll get there eventually, so just enjoy the ride.

It’s the late 1930s and two young people from a generation denied the opportunity of university education are travelling home by train from evening classes. The young man asks the young woman:

“What on Earth are you staring at?”

She replies:

“Sorry! I couldn’t help noticing you’re wearing odd socks!”

Then she gets off at the train at her station.

The following week the young man repeats his sartorial error, and in his lunch break nips out to a gentleman’s outfitters to buy matching socks, just in case he meets the woman again. He does. She is impressed, and the conversation moves off the subject of socks. The Wednesday evening train journey becomes a regular date.

So begins the first exchange between the two people who would later become my parents.

Nostalgia

Perhaps this connection is why I have a nostalgia for old railway trains. I see a steam train on the TV, and I can smell the coal. To the irritation of my nearest and dearest I cannot resist the temptation to yell out “wooh-ooh-wooh!” I love to hear that lonesome whistle blow.

When I was seven, my mother could put me on the train at Gordon Hill with strangers and send me four stops up the line to Hertford North where my Nana would meet me. You’d probably be arrested for doing that now, and in any case, British Rail phased out Ladies Only compartments in 1977.

Brief encounters

Such is my love of steam trains that when Robin and I got married we had our reception on the Watercress Line in Hampshire, pulled by the locomotive Franklin D Roosevelt. [USATC 2-8-0 S160 class number 3278, you can hear its whistle blow at about 0:19 into this clip]. We posed for snaps in front of the loco, but eventually we were moved on by some proper trainspotters who wanted to take proper pictures.

As we left for home the steam whirled around under the station canopy in the cold January air. If Celia Howard and Trevor Johnson had pitched up with their flettened vahls and a pianist playing Rach 2 in the background, I wouldn’t have been at all surprised.

Our funniest steam experience was standing on Platform 2 at Penrith station when the newly refurbished Flying Scotsman went through. Enthusiasts, photographers and families were on Platform 1, where it is true that in general you get a better view of the approaching northbound train. They hadn’t reckoned with the 12:49 Trans Pennine Express to Manchester Airport. They saw nothing but a cloud of steam and some rather smug people (oh yes we were!) on the opposite platform.

Signalling failures

My brain is wired like an intricate rail network. Parkinson’s is the evil Dr Beeching who has cut off many of the connections. Some remaining lines are “operating a good service”, although when I see this message in London Underground stations I want to say “Yeah, let me be the judge of that!”

Other lines are hampered by the unpredictable – in the rail network these would be the wrong kind of leaves, signalling failures in the Sandwell and Dudley area or a body on the line at Tooting Broadway. I process what you say, but I never know, when a message starts out from my brain, if it is going to reach my limbs in time. Am I going to twirl these noodles and get them to my mouth in one hit? Who knows?  

For people with Parkinson’s and their supporters, the key is patience – not to be frustrated when things don’t happen as quickly as they used to. Watching the clock and trying to hurry things up just fuels anxiety, which in turn makes my symptoms worse. The best connections are the slow ones where I am just puffing along nicely, and I know where I’m going. It doesn’t matter when I get there because I will have sorted out the noodles by then.

Last journey

When it’s time for me to meet my Nana at Hertford North again, I’d like my ashes to be shovelled into the firebox of a heritage locomotive as the whistle blows “wooh-ooh-wooh!” But as I intend to go on a lot longer, we’ll probably have run out of coal by then. There is pressure on heritage railways to cut carbon emissions, although as Chris Price, General Manager of the North York Moors Railway and Deputy Chairman of the Heritage Railway Association points out: 

“Burning coal in the heritage railway sector produces a carbon output similar to approximately 300 single flights across the Atlantic and there are over 84,000 such flights across the Atlantic every year!”

Three hundred flights is still a lot of carbon.

Play > The slow train > Flanders and Swann

Dr Beeching’s cuts to the railway service in the 1960s were short-sighted and vicious, especially in the northern Lake District. Once you could travel by train from Penrith to Cockermouth via Keswick. Now the area is full of cars, and we don’t venture out on a bank holiday because the traffic is so bad.

This song is a gentle and nostalgic inventory of closed stations around the country. Places like Dog Dyke, Tumby Woodside and Trouble House Halt.