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How the Cornish Riviera Express will look in the 1950s.
By Matthew Loukes. Close to midnight, under the soaring cathedral of Brunel’s train shed at Paddington Station, the last drunken commuter has grabbed his pasty and Standard for the journey. The reheated and the obnoxious combining in newsprint and greasy pastry. A few people stare forlornly at the departures board, facing a five hour wait and some cold stone to sit on. But we are standing on a remote platform, tucked to one side, outside some sadly dark offices that once had been waiting rooms. I can see these rooms filled with smoke, steam, tannin and well-buttoned passion. Now they contain blue crates and have tape on the windows but that doesn’t stop my imagination chuffing off up the track, imagining Albert Finney bellowing “Stop That Train!” or Marilyn doing a sidestep in front of a dragged-up Curtis and Lemmon. My reverie is broken by my wife nudging me in the ribs as a guard beckons us towards the open door of a carriage that looks more Leyton than Orient. This is the Riviera Express to Cornwall, a sleeper service to Penzance that has run, if that’s the right term, since 1904. The man greeting us wears a peaked cap matching his dark blue jacket, a fine collection of enamelled badges and regulation 1974 sideburns. His face is a nice shade of post-box red, burnished by the rushing wind through train windows and, perhaps, the odd glass of Pale Ale at the end of a shift. The look is a little bit like Bernard Cribbins in the Railway Children, if he’d been a Teddy Boy. Our guard shows us to a twin berth, which lies behind a brown wood-effect door trimmed in polished metal set into a corridor made from what looks like white Formica. I try not to look disappointed. Not because the interior isn’t the polished wood of the Wagons Lit to Istanbul but because what I’d been hoping for was the royal blue plastic with ‘atomic’ cross hatching that was so widely used on 1950’s rolling stock. But before we get the full tour of our quarters the guard takes us up the corridor and into what he calls “the lounge”. This is a carriage done out with comfortable chairs and a bar in one corner. It’s not anything.
like ritzy, having an atmosphere somewhere between a dole office, a singles bar and a crosschannel ferry, but just seeing a train carriage with furniture that isn’t in rows seems to me to be impossibly exotic In the twin berth, private accommodation, our man shows us the ladder for reaching the top bunk, the chrome light switches, the red plastic heating control and the coat hooks; all of which are worthy of mention in any decent design history. We also get directions to the bathroom and, of course, the sink hidden under another slab of white industrial plastic (what’s wrong with the blue?). The bedclothes comprise heavy blankets in something nervously approaching tartan, pillows slightly thinner than an after-dinner mint and sheets that squeak with cleanliness and starch, like a Conservative’s wife. The “what do you do in the middle of the night” question has to be addressed, I suppose. All I will say is that one would need to be either male and taller than five feet six, or a considerable gymnast, to think about it with any degree of seriousness. Back in the bar – sorry – the lounge, with the train still some twenty minutes from departure, the scene is not exactly one of abandon. The collection of holiday makers and people who take this journey as part of their job are forging some uneasy alliances. A couple of what used to be called commercial travellers are making talk small enough to need a microscope, trying to ignore the family beside them who clearly haven’t told their teenage children quite what they meant by “Riviera”. I’d love to ask the two men if they are sharing, but can’t quite think of the way to express it. Sadly, the operating companies are well on the way to removing this relic of different times by phasing out the “single berth” ticket where one would share the tiny sleeping space with a stranger of whom the train company would only guarantee they would be ”of the same sex”. I think when it came to choice of bunks a coin was tossed. In the privacy of the cabin, after some smuggled drinks and sandwiches, bed-time coincides with the slow pull out of Paddington. I take the top bunk,
which has some faintly alarming straps to keep me from falling, and immediately feel the need for the corridor facilities. After a couple of short ladder climbs and longer walks up the corridor, dressed in a way that would get one removed from a branch line, I lie under the prickly wool and cold cotton and dream of a night’s rest, before emerging into the Western world of Barbara Hepworth and brilliant light. After an hour of wobbly progress the train stops in a siding. Through a plastic ventilation slide I can make out some words on a white board. Slough at night has much to recommend it, in that one can’t see much of what drove the Poet Laureate to call for the B-52’s and it tickles me to think that is where the Riviera Express pauses for an hour or so, to push the passengers over into the arms of Morpheus. It might work better in daylight, though. Six hours or so later, and an hour outside Penzance, the man with the sideburns slides us in a tray of tea, coffee and biscuits. The charm of this is hard to overstate. Yes, the tea is too strong, the coffee too weak to defend itself and the biscuits wouldn’t trouble any infant dentition but so what? There was an early Great Western Railways poster campaign for the sleeper service where the tag-line talked of experiencing one’s “own country” because Cornwall and Italy had “similar shapes”, “climate” and “natural beauties”, illustrated with a pair of women in modest traditional dress, with the West Country beauty winning the day with a racy pair of bare feet. The feelings evoked by this poster live on – in Paddington, in a Slough siding and in the utterly British tea-tray. The attempt at being exotic fails totally, of course, but that’s precisely what gives it so much charm. Bravo, as they probably don’t say on the Riviera. Estrella Damn by Matthew Loukes is published by Soul Bay Press.
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