IN ONE of his madder incarnations, Myles na gCopaleen used to pose as an obsessive railway veteran with such an encyclopedic knowledge of steam engines – and such an epic lack of perspective – that he thought the year 1921 was historic in Ireland mainly for the introduction of the “Manley superheats”.
Here’s a typical column entry on the theme, from the 1940s:
“I took a trip to Belfast the other day on business of a kind that cannot be discussed here or elsewhere. I was not five minutes in the train until I realised that the engine driver belonged to the ‘full regulator, short cut-off school’. In my own railway days I used to work the locomotive as a high-pressure simple (indeed the design of the steam chest made no other course feasible), with cut-off as high as 60 per cent. That was before the days of the de Glehn compound or the Walshaerts gear.
“(I knew Walshaerts well. He was the best of fellows and a prince among steam men.) I am not criticising the GNR Driver. He knows his ‘car’ better than I do. It is true, nevertheless, that the modern, low pressure cylinder is not there for nothing. Where you have ‘hard steaming’, short cut-off with full regulator will nearly always lead to a disparity in pressure readings between boiler and steam chest. They tell me that modern research at Dundalk has shown otherwise, but that is all my eye and Betty Martin.
“At Belfast I noticed that the valve rod had lost adjustment and nobody was less surprised than myself. I hate to see machinery tortured.”
I was reminded of Myles’s steam man by the latest bulletin from the Centre for Cross-Border Studies, which laments the sad state of the Great Northern Railway’s latter-day descendant, the Dublin-Belfast Enterprise service.
There is no suggestion in the bulletin that the Enterprise is being tortured, I’m glad to say; although Myles would not be surprised to learn that the modern American engines used by the train “have always been temperamental”. He would be less concerned that the French carriages introduced in the mid-1990s are now “increasingly shabby”. The comfort of passengers was only a secondary consideration for steam men.
But Myles would surely be taken aback by the main point of the article, which is how slow the modern service is. According to the author — the centre’s director Andy Pollak — the train still takes up to 130 minutes to complete the 113-mile journey.
He compares this with a recent rail trip he made between two smaller Spanish cities, Seville and Malaga: 160 miles apart but connected in 115 minutes: and that on a slower regional train, nothing like as fast as the expresses now skimming the rails between Madrid and other cities at 220 mph.
It’s not just with contemporary Spain that the Enterprise compares badly, however. It barely holds its own against 1940s Ireland. Writes Pollak: “A railway history enthusiast told me recently that Belfast-Dublin on the fastest non-stop Enterprise today takes just five minutes less than it did 61 years ago, in the age of steam [...]!”
Not everybody would lament this statistic, I suppose. Only yesterday, we were talking here about the forthcoming Slow Down Festival in London, which seeks to reverse a 150-year-old trend in western society towards making everything faster. The people behind that event might well support the Enterprise’s apparent refusal to worship at the altar of the cult of speed.
But then again, even fast-moving trains are more compatible with the wider principles of the slow movement (which also embraces environmentalism), than any other form of mass transport. And while the Enterprise has been idling, its main competition — the Dublin-Belfast road — has been steaming ahead.
The M1 has already greatly shortened the drive between the two cities. But when the Newry ring road joins the dual carriageway near Banbridge soon, the journey will take less than two hours. Indeed, thanks to the revolutionary system under which Northern-registered cars ignore speed limits south of the Border, while Southern cars do likewise in the North, that timetable may already be possible in good conditions.
The sad thing is that whatever hope there was of another upgrade of the train service before now, the crash of 2008 has probably put paid to it for the foreseeable future: a point plaintively acknowledged in the bulletin. And as for another of Andy Pollak’s rail-based concepts, the prospects must be even more bleak.
Only a year ago, I seconded Pollak’s lovely idea of a Dublin-Paris train service, running – counter-intuitively – north from Connolly Station to Belfast, taking the shortest sea crossing between Ireland and Britain via a bridge near Larne, continuing to Glasgow and eventually plunging south through London and the Channel Tunnel, before emerging in the Gare du Nord.
By 2030, in line with Europe’s high-speed rail revolution, such a trip could take under eight hours, meaning you could have supper somewhere near Dundalk, retire to your sleeper for the night, and be on the Champs Élysées for breakfast, without ever seeing an airport. The plan was fanciful at the time, I suppose. But now alas, as Myles would say, it’s all my eye and Betty Martin.