Free On the Slow Train by Michael Williams Page A

big firms to apply to the regulators to run their own competing trains. Hull and Sunderland – cities down on their luck like Wrexham – have also been put back on the main line map in this way.
    The key to success for these small companies is quality of service. On my 11.23 to Marylebone, the approach is decidedly upmarket, with proper china and cutlery on the tables – a deliberate harking back to the days when trains were unhurried, the staff attentive and the styrofoam cup had not been invented. Unlike Wrexham Central, the General station is full of sleepy Edwardian charm, virtually unchanged since it was built in ‘French pavilion’ style by the Great Western Railway in 1912. You might imagine John Betjeman enjoying a buttered Welsh cake in the tearoom here, where there are real flowers in vases on the tables. At the end of the platform an ivy-covered goods shed slumbers into dereliction. To add to the air of history, this is the last station in Britain to retain the title of ‘General’, once an epithet sported in many towns, including Cardiff and Reading. Most of the stations once entitled ‘Victoria’ or ‘Halt’ or ‘Road’ have now been consigned to the bin of the modern corporate railway, although a few survive. Even the train itself, though modern in concept, is a throwback to a less standardised age, when retired express engines would be relegated to secondary duties with a handful of elderly coaches which may have done service on the main line a long time ago, but are now deemed fit only to creak along secondary routes.
    Our Class 67 locomotive, No. 67012, elegaically named
A Shropshire Lad
, is one of the most modern on the system – built in 2000 and designed to run at 125 mph. Yet it too is already an anachronism. Commissioned from Alsthom in Spain to speed fast mail trains across the system, the class was made redundant when the Post Office transferred the mail to the roads in 2004. There’s not much use for the 67s these days. Two are dedicated to the royal train. Others trundle sleeping cars over the Highland lines in Scotland. But the rest potter round the system looking rather lost, without much else to do. There are only three carriages on the train, all still in the British Rail Inter-City grey and blue livery of the 1980s. Once they operated on crack Anglo-Scottish expresses from Euston. But, retired from front-line duty, these well-appointed coaches are modern antiques more highly regarded by many passengers than the Pendolino trains that replaced them, and are especially suited to their present, gentler task. Their expansive legroom, wide windows and – luxury of luxuries on the modern railway – seats that line up with the windows will do nicely to ease us on this May afternoon through some of the best of rural Britain – weaving across the border of England and Wales, through the heart of the Midlands, surmounting the Chilterns into Betjeman’s Metroland, and on through the tunnel beneath Lord ’s Cricket Ground into the red-brick and terracotta Marylebone station.
    There is probably no line in Britain more evocative of the secondary railway of yesteryear than this one, heading south through the Welsh Marches, passing through rolling countryside with splendid castles and towns steeped in history. It has a special place in the hearts of railway enthusiasts since it was on the bottom leg of this line, from Hereford to Newport, that steam returned to the British Railways main line in 1971, three years after everyone thought it had gone for ever. The run, by the Great Western Railway’s most famous locomotive
King George V
, heralded a revival of steam which culminated in 2009 with the completion of the
Tornado
, the first brand new steam express locomotive built in Britain since 1960.
    Heading south from Wrexham, there are wooden signal boxes and traditional semaphore signalling, where signallers still pull wires on