End of another era

Two of the early giants among Britain's railway companies were the Great Western Railway of Isambard Kingdom Brunel, and the rather less-well known London & South-Western Railway (which started life as the London & Southampton Railway, before revealing the full scale of its ambitions), engineered by Joseph Locke.


The GWR spread westwards to Bristol and South Wales, and then, through initially independent companies which it later consolidated into its maw, into the farthest regions of the West Country.


The LSWR flung its route westwards from London, before a sharp south-westward turn at Basingstoke towards Southampton and the south coast. That angle was deliberate: a second route was planned westwards from Basingstoke, initially to Bristol in direct competition with the GWR, but later built via Salisbury and Exeter to Plymouth.


While the GWR and its affiliates took over south Devon and Cornwall, the LSWR went for the north coast. Between Exeter and Plymouth the GWR hugged the Atlantic through Dawlish, a route that today presents huge operational problems when the swell of the sea hurls salt spray and water over the trains, while the LSWR took a more sensible route inland, over Dartmoor.


These two companies spent a century locked in competition for West Country traffic, both of them racing to get the Atlantic mails to London as fast as possible (a race which led to a number of accidents and significant numbers of deaths). The intense rivalry led to the creation of prestigious "named trains", the GWR's Cornish Riviera Express, and the Southern Railway's Atlantic Coast Express.


The ACE became one of the heaviest scheduled trains ever to operate on British rails, and so great was the demand that it was sometimes split into two, three or even four separate trains. As each train reached different junctions it split further, until often just three or four coaches would wind down a tiny north Devon branch line to its destination, hauled by an implausibly massive express locomotive.


After Nationalisation in 1948, all the routes in the West Country were transferred to the Western Region; the Southern Region was locked out. Since most of the Western Region's management was ex-GWR, they set about closing down the ex-LSWR routes on the grounds of "efficiency".


A few of the old ex-SR services remain, including a daily service from their London terminus, Waterloo, all the way down to Plymouth (via Salisbury and Exeter). Every other Plymouth train leaves from Paddington. The ex-SR route train is served by the SouthWest Trains franchise.


Alas, from the timetable change this December, another piece of history comes to an end: no SWT trains will travel further west than Exeter. The through Waterloo-Plymouth services will be no more.


SWT (and, before them, BR(SR) and BR's Network SouthEast) operates these services with Class 159 Express diesel multiple units. The final DMU produced in BR's Sprinter series, these lightweight, air-conditioned DMUs are actually rather decent stock. Usually working in three-car formations (but occasionally two), on some of the longest-haul services three units are coupled together giving a nine-car unit.


These units join together at different parts of the route, in a pale imitation of the original ACE expresses.


From the end of this year, though, I suspect nine-car formations will be a thing of the past.


In some ways rather than there being none I suppose it is surprising that echoes of these historical services are still so abundant, if only you know where to look in the timetable.