Imagine you were really, really foreign for a moment. Imagine that you were from Dumfries. Or Frankfurt. How would you explain the Epping Ongar Lights Express if you saw it? How would you explain this hysterically festive train in January?
I don’t know if other countries “do” heritage railways. Maybe they do. Maybe in Cambodia, in a workshop outside Battambang, there is a team of harried volunteers tweaking the cylinders and toiling over the pistons of a resurrected iron horse so that it can painfully yet triumphantly ride the tracks once again to Phnom Penh. But even then, it wouldn’t really be able to compare with the full-bore precision, capital-H Heritageness of the Epping Ongar Light Express train.
“Do you still get people after Christmas?” I ask one of the volunteers at the station on a freezing night in early January. Ongar used to be the most remote stop on the London Underground but it closed in 1994 because there were not enough passengers. You can see why they dried up when you walk around the village.
Even at night you can tell Ongar is proper prosperous Essex territory. If I lived in here I wouldn’t want to go to London. I would just stay in my massive house – everyone I can see looming out of the dark is a massive Georgian-looking extended manse with a shiny black German car parked outside – and watch YouTube videos. I would cruise along the A414 to Maldon in my brand new Range Rover, blasting my Balearic deep house mix, have some fish and chips by the sea then drive back home. I wouldn’t even think about London.
The station’s walls have been sprayed with strings of warm orange Christmas lights. A fire crackles in the grate inside the entrance. Somebody has crossed out “Happy Christmas” on a board and written “Happy New Year” in its place. Several National Heritage Railway Awards are stuck proudly on the wall above it. Proudly: each award has been recently polished. The interiors have been painted in various shades of brown (Bovril brown, dripping brown, ration cocoa brown, wireless brown, Burma brown) that went out of fashion sometime between the end of the fall of Singapore and the coronation of Elizabeth II. I feel a bit like I’m an extra on the set of Brief Encounter, except there are several giant inflatable snowmen outside – objects far beyond the imaginings of Noël Coward.
“Yeah, we do get people,” says the volunteer. He is one of those teenagers who loves trains (they still exist). He’s wearing a black peaked cap and a black wool British Railway uniform with shiny buttons, all slightly too big for him, making him look like a child who has got lost trying on his grandfather’s mothballed army uniform. He directs me outside and I follow the smell of frying oil to a marquee. The passengers, 30 of them, are waiting here in their puffa jackets. A small boy staggers past me, weighed down by three boxes of chips. A sign says all the sausages and burgers are HANDMADE IN CHELMSFORD FROM ESSEX PRODUCE. There are doughnuts for sale. Real doughnuts; end-of-the-pier doughnuts. Sugar, no icing, deep-fried heart attack grenades. I go to the bar and bravely smash through dry January, ordering a bottle of Spitfire. Take that Göring, I murmur lavishly to myself. A whistle blows. Puffa jackets rustle. Heads turn. The journey is about to begin.
I am by no means an expert, but the train leaving Ongar tonight appears to be a GWR 4900, or “Hall” Class of locomotive, designed by Charles Collett. Only 259 were ever built, of which 11 have been preserved for the nation. One of them, named Olton Hall, became an international celebrity after it appeared as the Hogwarts Express in the Harry Potter films. In other words, this kind of locomotive is what the majority of people in the world today think a steam train looks like. The Epping Ongar Lights Express takes a GWR 4900 and covers it in several thousand LED lights. Children scream as they board it and their parents laugh. A blue stream of soot billows from the smokestack into the night sky. Worryingly, before we board, we are given a song sheet. Mine has the lyrics to Abba’s “Dancing Queen” printed on it. I am nowhere near drunk enough (I would have to be unfathomably drunk) to sing on this train in public.
We leave the station. The train lurches forwards then sort of levels out at a speed most dogs could comfortably outrun. The LEDs mounted on the surface of every carriage change the colour of the woodland outside, turning the bare branches and hedges and squat outhouses we pass lurid shades of neon turquoise and fuchsia. The entire journey is narrated by Voiceover Man, the guy who voiceover-ed X Factor and The Price Is Right. There is a great deal of call and response: “Are you ready?” (This is the first of several moments when I realise I should have bought more bottles of Spitfire.) My compartment affirms it is ready. Puffas are removed as we slowly stagger forwards, deeper into the bare, flat Essex land towards North Weald.
“Oh, the Sixties, WHAT a time to be alive,” voiceovers Voiceover Man. “Pinball Wizard”, begins to play from the speakers in the carriage so loudly I worry it might strip the upholstery from the seats. Voiceover Man proceeds to play a series of songs in chronological order, from the Jackson 5’s “I Want You Back” (1969) up to Shane Ritchie’s cover of “I’m Your Man” (2003). Given how badly everything has gone since 2003, I realise that it is probably fair and just for Voiceover Man to end history with Ritchie’s crooning. Why would anybody sane want to find out what happened next?
“Here we are in the rich, ancient woodland of Epping Forest,” intones Voiceover Man. I look out the window, hoping to see an angry crowd of protesters attacking a hotel. But it’s all skeletal trees as far as I can see into the gloom, painted green and red by our insane lights. “Does Your Mother Know” plays. “Oooh, I love Abba!” screams a woman in the compartment across from me. She savours every word of“Does Your Mother Know”. Then she yells every word of “Dancing Queen”, as do her friends, as do all the kids, as, with enormous reluctance and a good deal of bravery, do I. Collectively it sounds as if several horses are being strangled at the same time in our compartment. A bloke with a beard and a ponytail films himself dancing entirely with his chin – it’s the only part of his body that moves, loosely in time with the Abba – as his daughter laughs at him.
The late Tony Judt wrote convincingly that the railways were the great glory of industrial civilisation. As they spread from London to Sydney to Bombay to New York they reshaped our cities and our imaginations. “Railways were never just functional,” he wrote in 2010, shortly before his death. “They were about travel as pleasure, travel as adventure, travel as the archetypical modern experience.” I thought of Judt and these lost horizons as the locomotive huffed back into Ongar. The people around me were happy. They had taken a journey to nowhere in particular, cocooned in layers of protective heritage, happy and drunk and messing around. For an hour, the rest of the world ceased to exist. Exactly what I suspect most British people are craving right now.
This column – which, though named after a line in Shakespeare’s “Richard II”, refers to the whole of the UK – has run in the New Statesman since 1934. If there is a patch of the country you think we should write about, send an entry to thisengland@newstatesman.co.uk. Successful suggestions will receive a £5 book token
[Further reading: America’s imperial fights are not necessarily ours]
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This article appears in the 07 Jan 2026 issue of the New Statesman, What Trump wants
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