On the Slow Train by Michael Williams

Gregory Peck and Audrey Hepburn – riding side saddle – on their Vespa buzzing through the streets of Rome in
Roman Holiday
.
    But now we’re heading through the 391-yard tunnel to Ryde St John’s Road. We must be thankful for the tunnel. Its small diameter is partly responsible for the railway becoming a kind of working museum, since it’s always been difficult to find trains to fit the line. It also explains why the Tubes were such a godsend. Their arrival allowed engineers to raise the floor of the tunnel so that it would flood less frequently at high tide, although there is still an operative pumping station near the Esplanade.
    Lucky old Ryde. It is one of the smallest towns in Britain to have three stations of its own, and St John’s Road is the nerve centre of the railway – the Crewe, the Doncaster and the Swindon of the island, rolled into one. Literally, since almost all Britain’s great Victorian railway works of the past have been closed or sold off, and Jess Harper and his engineering team at Ryde – the works building still bearing the insignia of the old Southern Railway – are the last on the national network still maintaining their own rolling stock. And they reckon they know more about old Tube trains than even the people at London Underground; after all, they have been keeping them going for forty-five years.
    Back in 1963, when Beeching proposed closure of the entire Isle of Wight network except for the section between the Esplanade and the ferry terminal at the end of Ryde pier, he was mainly influenced by the fact that the rolling stock on the island was ancient and would have to be replaced. The carriages dated from before the First World War, cast-offs from the London, Brighton and South Coast and London, Chatham and Dover railways. The little Victorian O2 Class 0-4-4 tanks were already hand-me-downs from Waterloo suburban services when they were transferred from the mainland by the Southern Railway in 1922. Although the little engines ran what in 1966 was the most intensive single-track service in Britain, hauling holiday trains up to ten coaches long, they were literally worn out, with cracked frames and wonky bogies, and the pumps that operated the Westinghouse brakes had to be encased in metal sheets to stop them spitting scalding water on unwary passengers. The Isle of Wight lines might have been a paradise for transport enthusiasts, who flocked there from all over the country, but there was a simple answer for Beeching as to what to do with all these geriatric trains – eliminate them.
    But Beeching didn’t get his way entirely, and it was announced in 1964 that the busiest part of the line, from Ryde to Shanklin, was to be saved. Miraculously, the old Southern Region decided to electrify it and bought a job lot of redundant London Tube stock from the 1920s at a cost of between £120 and £200 a carriage. These elderly trains, of a design which ran over the Piccadilly, Central and Baker-loo Lines and ended their London lives on the old Northern City Line from Moorgate to Finsbury Park, were not much younger than the trains they were replacing, and it is instructive that as the first cars were being sent to the Isle of Wight one of their sister coaches went on display at the Science Museum in London. These early Tubes have now gone to the scrapyard, being replaced by ‘young things’ from 1938, which have operated the Ryde line since.
    Ryde St John’s Road is a cheery place where many of the old Victorian buildings survive and the cast-iron spandrels supporting the canopies bear the monogram of the original Isle of Wight Railway, opened in 1864. There is a handsome Victorian signal box, which controls the whole line, festooned with tubs of flowers. On the up platform is one of the most prolific displays of colour -coordinated flowers I have ever seen on a railway station – I have to touch the giant red lilies, begonias and busy