True enough, it is as hard to associate Doncaster with the continuing glamour of Flying Scotsman as it is to believe that Diana Rigg — svelte star of The Avengers — came from there. Michael Parkinson said Rigg “radiated a lustrous beauty”; the same cannot be said of modern-day Doncaster, so close to prosperous and pretty York, one stop north on the East Coast Main Line. When it comes to the North-South divide, the latter, cosseted by tourism, doesn’t really have a dog in the fight, whereas Doncaster seems emblematic of all that has gone wrong in recent decades.

The Flying Scotsman symbolises happier times for Doncaster. It owes its existence to what a recent Doncaster Council document described as “the most significant example of levelling up in Doncaster’s history”. In 1849, the town’s Tory MP, Edmund Beckett Denison, persuaded the Great Northern Railway to extend its line north to Doncaster, and to move its works there. By the turn of the century, those works — known as “the Plant” — occupied 200 acres and involved 60 miles of sidings, some tangled with the mineral lines serving nearby pits. The GNR was not exactly philanthropic, as Rowntree’s in York was, but it did reach out to the town. It built two schools for its workers. It helped pay for the construction of Station Road, a handsome thoroughfare along which arrivals by train might saunter into town, past the Oriental Chambers and the Grand Theatre.

In those days, London needed the North. Coal trains left Doncaster hourly for the capital. And the town was a destination, not just a resource. Tourists came for the races, and ambitious young men came from all over Britain to take up apprenticeships at the Plant, including W.O. Bentley, who would use the skills he learnt building fast trains to build fast cars. In 1911, a large, intimidating Scottish aristocrat called Nigel Gresley arrived at Doncaster as Chief Mechanical Engineer of the Great Northern. He designed the star product a new class of unprecedentedly big express passenger locomotives, built to haul heavy, luxury trains at speed along the East Coast Main Line. It was named Flying Scotsman.

The engine is often described as symbolising all that was best in British engineering, but it also represented an early flowering of the nation’s Public Relations industry, becoming a pin-up in many beautiful posters. There would be Flying Scotsman paperweights, jigsaws, ash trays. The loco regularly hauled the train named The Flying Scotsman between London and Edinburgh, and anyone who turned up to find a different engine at the front would feel short-changed, as when an understudy takes the star’s part in a play. The Flying Scotsman had luxury carriages, including the Louis XIV-style first-class restaurant car, a cinema carriage and a barber’s shop, in which shaves with a cutthroat razor were offered and accepted — a tribute to the train’s smooth riding. All these trappings were created in the Plant.

Why all this manufactured glamour? Mainly because of competition for the lucrative London-Scotland rail market, but also because of automobile competition. In the Thirties, people would be unlikely to drive from London to Scotland, but they might take a charabanc from York to Scarborough, and the LNER hoped its mainline publicity would add lustre to its local services, for which it adopted the tell-tale slogan, “It’s Quicker by Rail”.

While they were nationalised, in the second half of the 20th century, our railways were increasingly menaced by the rise of the automobile. Investment would be followed by retrenchment, indulgence by hangover, and in 1958 British Railways fell into the hands of a Transport Secretary succinctly described by Christian Wolmar, in his history of BR, as “a car man”. Ernest (‘Ernie’) Marples drove a Jag. He co-owned a company that built roads. He appointed Dr Richard Beeching, a physicist, to take a “scientific” approach to BR, which, not very surprisingly, turned out to mean cutting the network by a third.

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Diesel and electric locomotives would be outshopped from Doncaster over the next 30 years, but trains had lost their primacy. The propaganda surrounding the Beeching cuts characterised railways as a second-class mode. They lost their sheen and so, therefore, did Doncaster. Marples was a Conservative, but Labour was half-hearted in opposition to his policies. In the late Sixties and early Seventies, Doncaster’s Labour Council capitulated to the motor car, just as similarly-hued councils did in Leeds, Sheffield and Bradford. If you emerge from Doncaster station today, you see an artwork celebrating the town’s locomotive-building history, but all you can hear is the traffic of the town’s inner ring road, constructed in 1970, which creates a barrier between the station and the town.

Doncaster, like most Northern towns, is uglier than it used to be. Elegant Station Road was obliterated by the construction of a huge shopping centre with five levels of parking above it. The only survivor is the Grand Theatre, which stands derelict opposite the station, a great white haunted house. Along the pedestrianised High Street, formerly the Great North Road, attractive premises that once housed grand banks and coaching inns are occupied by fast-food outlets, charity shops, barbers’ shops offering “Haircut £6”. In Doncaster’s most beautiful building, the Minster, I spoke to a local man in his eighties.

“There aren’t more than a couple of really good shops left on the High Street. Fifty years ago, they were all good, and you had some railway first class menswear shops and tailors.” (He was very well-dressed.) When asked how long times had been hard, he said: “I’d date it back to the pit closures.”

Unlike many other places that started to lose their mines in the late Eighties, Doncaster had railways to fall back on. But it suffered a more complete loss of machismo after it made its last loco in 1987. Today, the town retains what the council calls its “diverse railway cluster”, which employs 7000 people, 2000 more than the old Plant. But whereas everyone knew what went on in the Plant, the cluster is mysterious. No one person seems to have the complete list of its tenants. There’s the iPort, for example: an “intermodal rail terminal” signified by a mass of containers visible a couple of miles south of Doncaster on your right from northbound trains. Some containers are brought from abroad including, it is rumoured, by a train that comes via the Chunnel from China. Near the iPort are giant, blank-faced warehouses: Amazon distribution hubs. Doncaster has the dubious honour of being the only place in the UK to have three of these. A woman who works in a Doncaster café said to me: “Today, Donny is a distribution hub — don’t ask me what’s being distributed.”

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Admittedly, there is a good deal of railway-related activity within the cluster. But this being modern “British industry”, many of the names are foreign. Wabtec Rail, an American-owned firm, refurbishes rolling stock at Doncaster. And there’s Volker Rail, a Dutch railway infrastructure company. The foreignness of the cluster is typical: of the 30 or so train operators in Britain today, only half a dozen have British owners. Professor Paul Salveson, a railway expert, says the Doncaster scene exemplifies “the willingness of British governments over the last fifty years to relinquish engineering — the idea that we don’t need to make things”.

Was this an ingredient in the overwhelming support for Brexit? All the towns in Yorkshire except the three most prosperous — York, Leeds, Harrogate — voted to leave the European Union, Doncaster by 69%. In a pub in the city centre, a local explained that people supported Brexit “because they thought something might change”. When asked what had changed, he said: “Nowt.”

But Doncaster’s economy was actually growing faster than the regional average pre-pandemic. Construction — some undertaken on the territory of the Plant — played a part: Doncaster is being regenerated. And it remains an important railway centre, both for passengers — six lines radiate from the town — and the industry. But the glamour is gone. As for the Scotsman, it pursues its whimsical afterlife. Having been saved from scrapping in 1962, it was owned by a succession of rail enthusiast-millionaires — two of whom it bankrupted. They ran it all over Britain until 2004, when it was acquired by the National Rail Museum — located, of course, in lucky old York.

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British Rail must take back control

By Ian Martin

In his book, Parallel Lines, Ian Marchant wrote that there are two railways in Britain: the railway of romance and the railway of reality. The latter, he added, was “largely shit”, and here might lie an opportunity for Doncaster. Our privatised railway is fragmented, with its separation of track and train operators, its multiplicity of ever-changing brands and liveries. Unlike The Flying Scotsman or the LNER, it is unknowable, and this is reflected in the anonymity of the Doncaster railway lands.

Great British Railways, the state-owned body expected to take over the nation’s industry, will supposedly fix this problem, providing a central “guiding mind”, and a more integrated network. What with the energy crisis and the recent political turmoil, the Bill to create GBR has been postponed. But the location of its headquarters is expected to be announced in 2023 even so. Doncaster made the shortlist — and it seems by far the most deserving candidate among Birmingham, Crewe, Derby, Newcastle and York.

There is no grand panacea for the sites of former industry. Steps to a better future will mostly be incremental. But occasionally there will be strides. Victory for Doncaster might top even the arrival of the Great Northern Railway as an instance of real levelling up. The city would unequivocally be a railway place once again — an even better thing to be in 2023 than in 1923, perhaps, given the newly recognised environmental kudos of rail. Skilled workers would flock there once more. There would also be intangible benefits: restored pride, an escape from the melancholic retrospection. And perhaps the starry locomotive will have assisted. Doncaster’s pitch for the role contained a killer line: “We built Flying Scotsman”.

Dungeness is an odd sort of place, to put it mildly. To get a sense of what it is like, think of an artists’ community in a near-desert of shingle, consisting of houses built from driftwood and old train carriages, all on a storm-battered headland in Kent, with a globally unique ecosystem, a tiny steam railway, and of course those two gigantic nuclear plants dominating the view to the south.

Its remoteness and unique atmosphere has proved irresistible to artists, most famously the film director Derek Jarman, who moved to a cottage there after falling ill with AIDS in the 1980s. One of my favourite painters, Eric Ravilious, executed a striking picture of the old lighthouse in 1939. The year after that, Dungeness Point was the scene of a darkly comic vignette of wartime history: two Nazi spies who were landed there blew their cover by attempting to buy alcohol before noon at a pub in nearby Lydd, and were later hanged.

Had there not been a war on, it is easy to imagine that the landlady who reported Herr Meier and Herr Waldberg might not have been such a stickler. Romney Marsh, of which Dungeness forms the southern boundary, had for many years the reputation of a place where the law’s writ ran a little unevenly.

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In the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries smuggling was rife. It is one of the closest points to the continent on the whole English coast, conveniently furnished with numerous gently sloping beaches, and in past centuries was inaccessible and hard to navigate for the stranger. Rudyard Kipling, who lived not far away, at Burwash on the Sussex Weald, contributed to the image of the Kentish smugglers as charming rogues with his famous poem ‘A Smuggler’s Song’:

“Five and twenty ponies,
Trotting through the dark —
Brandy for the Parson, ‘Baccy for the Clerk.
Them that asks no questions isn’t told a lie —
Watch the wall my darling while the Gentlemen go by!”

Another builder of the romantic legends was the author Russell Thorndike. He wrote the Dr Syn series, splendidly preposterous old-fashioned swashbucklers about a mild-mannered Church of England cleric, the Vicar of Dymchurch, who moonlights as The Scarecrow, feared chief of a gang of smugglers. They lead the Revenue a merry dance over the course of seven novels. I was introduced to the books by my father, who is himself a mild-mannered Church of England cleric living on Romney Marsh, but not as far as I am aware a notorious brandy smuggler.

People who have heard of the Marsh are often familiar with its two most famous institutions. Firstly, the Romney breed of sheep, which is now farmed all over the world, from South America to New Zealand, where it makes up more than half of that country’s 40 million-strong flock.

And secondly, the narrow-gauge Romney, Hythe and Dymchurch Railway, the 1920s brainchild of millionaire enthusiasts Captain Howey and Count Louis Zborowski, and now a popular attraction for tourists from all over the world. Its fame has spread considerably — there is a Shuzenji Romney Railway in Japan, closely modelled on its English namesake. During the Second World War, a special armoured train ran on the railway’s line, acting as a sort of mobile anti-aircraft unit; it scored only one success, but certainly looked good in propaganda newsreels. Indeed, the entire line was taken over for military purposes, which was hardly surprising given that the enemy lay less than 30 miles away.

The proximity of Europe has been pivotal in the Marsh’s history. Those original continental troublemakers the Romans had a port at Lympne, a village which now lies some distance from the shore following the retreat of the coastline. You will still occasionally hear the chauvinistic local legend that William the Conqueror initially attempted to land near New Romney, but was seen off by the hardy locals, and only then tried his luck further west at Pevensey, where he made his successful landing against the (by implication) soft and irresolute Sussex men. The tale has a kernel of truth: it seems that some of the Bastard’s men did disembark at New Romney by mistake and were rebuffed, but it was a small scale engagement.

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The village that imagined a godless world

By John Gray

Long after the ructions caused by the Normans, the French continued to be a source of unquiet, as well as informal duty-free booze, on the Marsh. From 1800, the coast was heavily fortified against a feared Napoleonic invasion, with the building of the Royal Military Canal at the foot of the surrounding hills to delay any invading French army, and a chain of small gun-emplacements called Martello towers, alongside larger forts at Dungeness and Hythe. Later, the district was expected to be one of the sites for a Nazi invasion; inspection of captured plans after the war confirmed that this had indeed been the enemy’s intention. The field next to my parents’ house contains a concrete bunker dating from this time, presumably intended to defend the road into town from the beach.

Romney Marsh is not nowadays marshland as most people would imagine it. There is no great Grimpen Mire waiting to entrap the incautious traveller, and no squelching bog. For some centuries, most of the Marsh has been grazing pasture. This has not always been the case: well into the second millennium AD, what is now the Marsh was a mix of shallow tidal lagoon and true marshland, with the River Rother snaking through the southern parts.

The lay of the land was radically altered by a series of fierce Channel storms in the second half of the thirteenth century, culminating in the notorious Great Storm of 1287. Old Winchelsea, a substantial place with an estimated population in the thousands, was entirely obliterated and most of the island on which it stood submerged, Atlantis-like, by the surging sea. The modern town of Winchelsea, founded by the survivors of this event, stands on top of a hill: they weren’t taking any chances (although their eventful history wasn’t over — Winchelsea suffered French and Spanish raids during the Hundred Years War and was burned by the French in 1360).

The aftermath of the Great Storm was tough for the place in which I grew up, New Romney. Not only was it severely damaged but, having been a thriving port at the mouth of the Rother, the town’s economic fortunes also declined rapidly after 1287, as the course of the river had shifted well to the south, rendering the harbour useless. Whether the storm itself was directly to blame, as local folk history suggests, or whether the lower Rother and the harbour had become gradually choked with silt and shingle over many decades, and the storm was simply the last straw, the town became something of a backwater.

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The fluctuating shape and extent of the Marsh, and changing patterns of land use, have resulted in numerous once thriving communities being abandoned. Within a day’s walk of my parents’ house, there are at least four ruined churches situated far from any modern settlements. One such example is the dramatic All Saints, which served the long-extinct parish of Hope.

Not all these lost communities vanished as suddenly and dramatically as Old Winchelsea. Broomhill, close to Dungeness, gradually became uninhabitable due to the encroachment of the sea in late medieval times. Many villages and hamlets were badly affected by the Black Death or by the malaria which seems to have lingered well into the eighteenth century.

Other relics reflect the more recent past. Close to the trackbed of the partially dismantled Appledore-New Romney branch line, a casualty of the Beeching Terror — the rails remain in place as far as Dungeness, for the sole purpose of transporting spent nuclear fuel — stand three very strange concrete structures. One is a large convex vertical wall, measuring about 200 feet from end to end. The other two resemble giant satellite dishes, set in sturdy stone bases. One is about 30 feet in diameter, the other about 20 feet. They are acoustic mirrors, the legacy of interwar experiments with creating an early-warning system for enemy aircraft crossing the Channel. Similar installations survive at Hythe, and on the cliffs near Dover, but they were never used in anger, having been superseded by radar by the mid-1930s.

The mirrors contribute to the somewhat eerie beauty of the Marsh, with its long unimpeded views and big skies. Perhaps too the precariousness of the Marsh’s existence adds a certain drama and savour to the contemplation of its landscape. After all, most of the land between the Royal Military Canal and the Channel is at or below sea-level: everyone who lives on the Marsh depends on the coastal defences. In the Dr Syn books, Russell Thorndike quotes a fictional though highly apt motto for the Marshfolk: “Serve God, honour the King, but first maintain the Wall.”

It’s hard not to draw lessons for what we might think of as our uniquely modern dilemmas: the inescapability of some kind of entanglement with our European neighbours, however secure we may feel in our island redoubt; the imperative for humility and flexibility in our dealings with the inexorable forces of nature; and the need to accept inevitable change to maintain the broad shape of a way of life.

Such is the inherent safety of rail travel that Boris Johnson’s three most recent predecessors as prime minister all served their entire time in office without a single passenger being killed. Indeed, it is a tribute to recent advances in design that only one person died at Grayrigg, a very serious accident in which several carriages fell down a high embankment.

Trains are an extremely safe way to travel. Safe, environmentally friendly and, in many ways, more civilised, yet our system is still geared towards the car and rewards its use, and has been at least since the 1960s when the then Conservative government commissioned huge cuts to the rail network — the infamous Beeching Axe.

The “Axe” was seen as inevitable and forward-thinking, yet half a century later the tide of expert opinion may be shifting, and with it the serious possibility of undoing some of the cuts. It is an idea with serious merit, and growing in popularity as the problems of a car-dependent society become clearer. Only recently, former transport secretary Lord Adonis, a man who probably knows more about trains that anyone else in Britain, laid out how part of the Beeching Axe could be reversed, with a special focus on the revitalisation of regional economies.

It’s not just about the deaths, injuries and illnesses that result from car accidents, pollution and sedentary lifestyles; cars also distort urban environments and make cities and towns worse places to live, damging communities and the economy. As car numbers have increased and population density risen, the external costs of car use have increased each year.

I’m not sure anyone really likes driving. I don’t mean driving as it appears in adverts for flashy 4x4s, where a square-jawed male model speeds effortlessly through the Highlands on deserted roads in the light of a perfect sunset. I mean actually existing driving, the kind that we motorists spend most of our car miles doing; pottering along urban clearways to get to Tesco or pick up the children; stop-start progress on ring roads and one-way systems to get to work; cursing silently as we see a huge sea of brake lights ahead of us on a congested motorway.

And there is no escaping that cars are bad for us, a major source of urban air pollution, and a threat to health and wellbeing. Air pollution can seriously damage memory in later life, has been shown to worsen children’s health and is even linked to low achievement at school.

There is some evidence that the dominance of public space by cars makes children and the elderly less likely to get out and about, while Britain has some of the worst traffic congestion in Europe.

On top of the thousands killed in road accidents since 2007, hundreds of thousands have been hurt, and this is with road deaths at historic lows — between 1,700 and 1,800 per year. In 1926, when records began, there were almost 5,000 road fatalities, at a time when car ownership was still very low, and the population about two-thirds of its current level. This had increased to just over 7,000 by 1930, reaching its nadir in 1966 when 8,000 people in Britain were killed by cars, the worst peacetime year for road deaths (road deaths during the war were even higher, due to the blackout).

Since 1900, a staggering 400,000 people in Britain have been killed by motor vehicles, while total fatalities on the railways since their introduction in 1830 are are less than one per cent of that number. Even if you look at deaths per passenger mile rather than raw numbers, trains do far better than road vehicles, especially cars.

There are other, less material, issues involved. It is often said that trains are the most civilised means of transport yet devised, and it is hard to disagree. Trains can incorporate restaurants, bars and beds. You can get up and wander about. You can write. You can look out of the window and have a sense of being part of the landscape in a way that just isn’t possible on a motorway or on a plane. By comparison with, say, a six-lane motorway, train lines cause relatively minimal disruption to the environment, and are responsible for far less noise and light pollution.

But railways have often had a bad deal from policymakers, stretching back a century. For instance, competition from road freight became a serious problem for the train companies in the years after the First World War, not least because railways were legally obliged to accept all freight at unprofitable fixed prices, under what is sometimes called the “common carrier” rule.

Road haulage companies were not bound by this rule and so could cream off the most profitable work. Road freight operations also received a heavy indirect subsidy from local and national government in the form of high spending on road infrastructure and almost no taxation on roads.

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After the Second World War came nationalisation. British Rail was not itself run badly, but for much of the latter half of the century government policy heavily favoured cars. Parking was cheap or free, and roads free at the point of use, with the cost of building and maintainance exceeding the income from motoring-related tax.

Urban populations declined, cars were considered icons of freedom and success, and any interference with “motorists’ rights” was opposed with great vigour. By the 1970s around 90% of all journeys were made by car, and rail journeys had fallen to half their 1913 levels.

Dr Beeching, the industrialist whose 1963 report recommended a huge programme of closures on the British rail network, has always been a bête noire to rail romantics like me, people who regret the loss of charming branch lines and once-famous routes. But in the political-cultural context of the post-war period, the belief in the inevitable death of the dense traditional city, the mania for Le Corbusier-style “modern” urban centres dominated by wide multi-lane roads, and the seductively misleading idea that the car brought freedom — it made a sort of sense for Beeching to slash railway lines.

Of course, this conventional wisdom was wrong. The city was far from over; the worst insanities of Brutalist urbanism have passed; the car eroded freedom and quality of life in important ways. Rail did, after all, survive and thrive. Passenger journeys have more than doubled since privatisation, returning to their 1913 peak.

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By Paul Embery

Today some high-profile Beeching casualties are effectively having to be built all over again: HS2, with a price tag of around £100 billion, is in many ways a resurrection of Sir Edward Watkin’s Grand Central Main Line (the world’s first dedicated high-speed line). The planned new route between Oxford and Cambridge is a recreation of the old Varsity Line, the destruction of which is one of the most incomprehensible transport policy decisions of the post-war era.

And it is not just these high-profile lines whose closure now looks remarkably short-sighted. The loss of some smaller regional routes may have been equally foolish, given the issues facing modern Britain, one of which is the increasing concentration of high-skilled, high-status jobs in a small number of large cities and the economic falling behind of the regions.

The best hope for many mid-sized towns within commuting range of large urban centres lies in fast, reliable transport connections, but the cuts to rail infrastructure in the second half of the last century have made this more difficult.

Research suggests that areas affected by the Beeching cuts suffered permanent population decline afterwards, especially of skilled workers. The attempt to replace train routes with buses didn’t work, since road congestion and circuitous routes meant buses were slower and passengers gave up on them.

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The pulling power of Tyneside's great steam train

By Allan Mallinson

One needn’t be a reactionary standing athwart history yelling stop to think that it may have been a mistake to close hundreds of miles of railways around Manchester, Birmingham, Leeds, Liverpool, and Cardiff. It is indeed possible to maintain an extensive network of railways serving relatively small population centres in a modern developed economy; in Japan, small private railways support almost every tiny village in the country.

Partially reversing the Beeching Axe is not some romantic eccentricity, a quixotic return to a real or imagined golden age of steam trains, rural branch lines and avuncular stationmasters. There is a real, practical need to reduce road usage in general and private car use in particular, and there is a hard-headed business case for better rail links.

Excessive dependence on roads is harmful to individuals and communities, to the fabric and aesthetic appeal of our cities, and to the economy. It is increasingly hard to deny that the governments that chopped the railways chose the wrong future. Perhaps it’s time to think again.