Railway Nation: A Journey in Verse

It’s been quite a year for railways on TV. We have had the well-chronicled Return of the Flying Scotsman [BBC4, 6/316], the staccato, uncomfortable [and, for some, downright indigestible], Train Spotters Live [3 parts, BBC4, July 2016] and the admirable series about what the Victorians ever did for us as far as trains were concerned [Full Steam Ahead: How the Railways Built Modern Britain, [6 episodes, BBC2, July 2016].

My stand out moment from that series was when Dr Ruth Goodman wanted to stress the impact of steam railways on our way of life, comparing it’s influence by way of an indignant put-down for the computer, “The internet…. Pah!”

Incidentally, in case you were wondering who fixed the map of the old Great Central Railway to a table in the waiting room at Loughborough Central station with Bluetack, enabling Dr Alex Langlands to discuss Sir Edward Watkin’s grand design for an international railway via a channel tunnel, an idea that was realised a century after his time - it was me.

The latest contribution to the BBC’s current infatuation with the railways, Railway Nation: A Journey in Verse, [BBC2, 1/10/2016, available on iPlayer for the rest of October] invited 6 poets to follow in the tracks of WH Auden’s The Night Mail between Euston and Glasgow, 80 years after the film first appeared.

Each poet took a section of the journey to observe their fellow passengers and come up with their own interpretation in verse. It worked really well. It was sensitive, perceptive and amusing. It managed to capture some reflective, wistful and sometimes very moving moments in the travellers’ lives, during what, on the face of it, what would otherwise have been a fairly mundane transit from A to B, and soon forgotten.

It was absorbing television. It succeeded in recording very personal sentiments from its contributors, without fuss and any apparent interrogation. It was a carefully crafted piece of work. It must have necessarily required considerable logistical preparation to package the whole event into a single trip, and it benefited from some very thoughtful editing.

Oh, yes, and the poems were OK, too, but then it was a big ask to match up to the original.

Flying Scotsman, Bewdley, Severn Valley Railway, 22/9/16.