Free On the Slow Train by Michael Williams

Petersburg. How about Istanbul? Vladivostock even? Yes, and I’d like a first-class sleeping berth too. ‘Rapid Travel in Luxury’ was the slogan . ‘Jason fought for the Golden Fleece in mezzotint panels on the dining car ceilings,’ observed the railway historian C Hamilton Ellis, ‘and as you lounged on a splendiferous pew of carved oak and figured plush, the sun, shining through coloured glass deck lights, gave a deliciously bizarre quality to the complexion of the lady opposite.’
    But hold on a minute. Here I am, the only passenger on a utilitarian little two-coach Class 150 diesel train, which has just growled across the Dee through the grimiest part of industrial North Wales along what is euphemistically known as the Borderlands Line. (Badlands might be more appropriate, I speculate.) ‘Not many people get on here,’ says the conductor. Which is just as well since nobody has bothered to change the destination blind since the train left the depot this morning – it still reads ‘Crewe’. ‘It’s them up at the Welsh parliament that keeps us going. You can’t shut a railway in Wales these days, y’know. Too much pride, boy.’
    But in its own way this is the start of a very special journey indeed, for I am on my way from Wrexham to Marylebone, taking, improbably, one of the most luxurious train journeys in modern Britain, with the kind of service last seen in the heyday of the 1930s and almost entirely vanished from the corporate, privatised railway. And this starting from a town that not even the most optimistic would regard as one of the commercial hotspots of Wales, let alone the UK.
    But first we must suffer the two-minute grind over weed-covered track and rattling curves to Wrexham General, the next stop down the line, where I spy something altogether far grander – a gleaming silver Class 67 express diesel loco revving its engines at the head of the 11.33 a.m. Wrexham and Shropshire Railway express to London Marylebone.
    Nearly twenty years down the line, few would disagree that John Major’s privatisation of the railways in 1994 was a botch. Instead of creating competition and choice for passengers, it simply replicated the monopoly of British Railways by carving up the turf between powerful private firms who bid for the franchises. At the beginning of that century you could have got a rival train from almost anywhere to anywhere – which is how the old Great Central put its tanks on the lawn of the Great Western by building its own station here in Wrexham. At that time there were three other rail companies that could deliver you here: you could take your pick from the Great Western, the Cambrian and the London and North Western companies. Now the barons of the rail franchise fiefdoms mostly rule their territory absolutely. Try travelling from London to Bristol or Manchester and asking the booking clerk, ‘Can I have an alternative, please?’ In Scotland and Wales the private companies exert total monopolies, if you exclude the trains that arrive from England.
    Luckily, there was a small get-out in the privatisation laws, which is how I come to be settling back into the cushions of an armchair in this first class Mark III restaurant car – generally reckoned to be the most comfortable ever built on the railway – where I am already being offered a glass of chilled Pouilly-Fuissé. The reason Wrexham got lucky, compared with posh Chester a short ride up the tracks, was a clause called ‘open access’, which allowed the tiny Wrexham and Shropshire Railway to start the service. Who would have guessed that when BR killed off through trains from Wrexham to London in the 1960s that there would ever again be a service to London, let alone four trains a day, with a choice of operators (there is also a daily return trip to Euston, run by Virgin)? Yet the law allows anyone who can spot a gap in the market missed by the