It’s totally gripping and eerie and surely too adult and atmospheric for TV. One would think for that era, anyway. Denholm Elliott is best known for his role as Dr. Marcus Brody in the Indiana Jones movies, but he was more than capable of going proper convincingly nuts in a Gothic horror.
This is Charles Dickens done right.
Here we are:
The Shangri-La.
I try to avoid my former place of work these days because the experiences – which belong to what I refer to as the East Coast Epoch 2010-2012 – were so epic. Not epic like a Wagner-infused helicopter attack in Apocalypse Now (1979), but something a little bit more transcendent – the comedy and the banter. And I’ve never seen so many fruitcakes in all my life. Public spaces involving transport are microcosms of society. People are nuts.
My fondness for The Waverley is probably nostalgia, pretending in retrospect it was more enjoyable than it was. But it’s like that with most memories; time adds gloss to the mundane. I do, however, know more about trains than any topic aside from the drug and dietary habits of Adolf Hitler. So there’s always that.
“HS2 will change things.”
I remember the chat well. This was eight years ago when I was doing soul-destroying manual labour/customer service in Edinburgh Waverley train station. The job was well paid and a laugh – colleagues were cracking banter and all hit the sauce like pros – but the “civilians” who ventured into that station. Fucking hell. Never again. Members of the general public are the dregs of humanity.
Anyway, I heard this HS2 topic daily, a colossal event on the horizon. The railways in Britain are a shambles. No-one knows why and not a soul has a solution. It’s been like this for the past century. No-one knows why. HS2 is meant to be the panacea for the chaos.
HS2 trains, expected to be operating by December 2026, will be 400 metres long, travelling at up to 250 mph – the fastest in Europe, apparently – and able to hold 1,100 seats, the initial line between London and the West Midlands. Following this, ‘Phase 2’ will connect Birmingham to Manchester and Leeds.
The new lines will connect to existing standard-speed lines, with ‘classic compatible’ trains running on both high-speed and classic lines. The idea is that classic lines will benefit from HS2. The London to Edinburgh journey time, for example, will be 3:38 hours instead of 4:23.
Guaranteed they will still cost a fucking fortune, though.
I can get a flight to Dublin for £6 but a train to London King’s Cross is £194. And this for the privilege of being sat on some rickety rocket chock-full of intoxicated bairns.
Trains are torture.
Further reading:
https://www.globalrailwayreview.com/article/77763/hs2-route-uk-cities-development/
Here we enter the circus, a veritable Looney Land. I used to work here in my ‘Wilderness Years’ 2010-2012 and the shit I saw is more than enough material for the basis of a manky neo-gothic crime drama set in the early twenty-tens. Ah, those were the days – before Trump, Brexit, and fidget spinners being habitually revered as the panacea to Autism. My highlight in ‘Stalag EH1 1BB’ was a disgruntled passenger throwing punches at a rail cop because the vexed customer didn’t like the quality of alcoholic beverage he was served in the bar – it didn’t meet his esoteric ‘standards’.
I highly recommend a day trip to The Waverley. Bring a packed lunch and a Polaroid.
A wee trip back into the luxury high-end voyages of the past here, with Hercule Poirot actor David Suchet doing the Orient Express thing sans the Agatha Christie plot mechanisms. Nothing matters outside the train, the roving slice of the Victorian beast a world unto itself. It’s a charming doc. And I’m never travelling with ScotRail again after viewing this.
5,772 miles of line connecting Moscow to Vladivostok, traversing seven time zones, and now 100 years old this year, spanning the Tsarist, Soviet, and … Putin eras of Russian history, the Trans-Siberian Railway remains the bucket list journey.
In an age where a return flight from London to Tokyo will set you back £500, and with the soaring volume of airline bargains out there – I managed to nab a Bangkok to Oslo flight for £162 – it says a lot about the lure of antiquated travel that the Trans-Siberian and other such lengthy train journeys are as popular as ever, holidaymakers forking out big money for the ‘comforts’ of the railway.
There is indeed something romantic about this epic quest across Eurasia – the getting from A to B a jaunt to experience in itself. Perhaps in our age of hyper-terrorism it’s a safety thing, or a longing for the charm and simplicities of the past amidst the grotesque tedium of air travel, the fuselage the preserve of martinets in tacky uniforms and lunatics with imaginary friends.
Construction of the track. Siberia, 1899. Photograph by I.R. Tomaskiewicz.
Further reading:
Wanderings and ... wonderings. 