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2 Responses to “Trains! XV”

1. Rueful Red Says:
   April 7th, 2008 at 10:04 pm

   I’ve done numbers 4 and 6. If it’s fenland you want you couldn’t beat the old Selby to Ely train - Doncaster, Gainsborough, Lincoln, Sleaford, Spalding, March, Ely. Spectacular in the tulip season, and the very best view of the world’s most beautiful cathedral, Lincoln.

   I’m surprised Robinson doesn’t mention the trip from Hull to Doncaster (and then on to London). It has the most evocative of all railway poems written about it, by Philip Larkin - here are the first couple of stanzas:

   The Whitsun Weddings

   That Whitsun, I was late getting away: Not till about One-twenty on the sunlit Saturday Did my three-quarters-empty train pull out, All windows down, all cushions hot, all sense Of being in a hurry gone. We ran Behind the backs of houses, crossed a street Of blinding windscreens, smelt the fish-dock; thence The river’s level drifting breadth began, Where sky and Lincolnshire and water meet.

   All afternoon, through the tall heat that slept For miles island, A slow and stopping curve southwards we kept. Wide farms went by, short-shadowed cattle, and Canals with floatings of industrial froth; A hothouse flashed uniquely: hedges dipped And rose: and now and then a smell of grass Displaced the reek of buttoned carriage-cloth Until the next town, new and nondescript, Approached with acres of dismantled cars.

   As you’d expect, Larkin also did the journey in the opposite direction:

   “Here”

   Swerving east, from rich industrial shadows And traffic all night north; swerving through fields Too thin and thistled to be called meadows, And now and then a harsh-named halt, that shields Workmen at dawn; swerving to solitude Of skies and scarecrows, haystacks, hares and pheasants, And the widening river’s slow presence, The piled gold clouds, the shining gull-marked mud,

   The remainders of both these poems are well worth reading too….

2. Brett_McS Says:
   April 7th, 2008 at 10:25 pm

   I’ve done number 7, Manchester to Derby. London to Crawley (and Bognor Regis) didn’t get on the list, for some reason. The Northern Belle sounds a good un.

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