Is there a better way to celebrate the 200th anniversary of passenger rail in Britain than a nine-hour “extravaganza” on BBC Radio 3? Train Tracks, broadcast live on Saturday from 7.30am in Inverness until 5pm at King’s Cross, follows the Highland Chieftain engine through stations at Pitlochry, Edinburgh, Darlington (the destination of that first trip in 1825) and London.
The trip is anchored by Petroc Trelawny, who himself travels on the Inverness-King’s Cross service, and is helped along the way by the Radio 3 presenters that meet him at the aforementioned stops. They each conduct us through the dendritic tracks of train-related music, from Johann Strauss’s and Brahms’ passion for rail to specially commissioned pieces from contemporary composers to Joan Baez’s “Railroad Bill”, as well as live performances on platforms, and interviews with current and former train workers or cultural figures. The ebullient Trelawny is the star, however. His stentorian annuncios have the crispness and limpidity of the Highland brooks and streams he shoots past. Trains, he waxes, have “something sentient” about them – “they seem to breathe like humans, sighing as they ascend the gradients. Smiling as they reach journey’s end.”
I confess I dropped out for a few hours in the middle. But the radio plods (or should that be choos) on, broadcasting to those just tuning in or who keep it on in the background. It’s a reminder that a public sphere continues to exist, beyond our algorithms: we are all still part of a national-cultural discourse however much the binary codes of digital obsequiousness try to overwhelm it. (Though Train Tracks is, ahem, available on BBC Sounds where it can be repeated, paused, rewound, skipped or sped up. The best of both worlds, perhaps.)
Trelawny and company are subject to the type of wrinkles familiar to rail users – his Azuma service runs a few minutes late, its route is altered because of an “incident on the line”, and there is a last-minute platform change. But he does exultantly arrive in the thrum of the capital. Train Tracks, and the stories of regular people metronomically keeping the country running, are a salve to the image of a nation in spluttering distress, which the various right and hard-right political factions are reliant on projecting. Beyond the complexity of train timetabling and network infrastructure, the production mastery required to knit together a programme like this suggests that, actually, Britain can and does function.
[Further reading: Who was the real DH Lawrence?]
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