File:Punch May 15th 1957 b.jpg

Branch-Line Fever BEFORE taking an early taxi to Paddington I put on my Rare Railways Waistcoat. This was in peasoup satin, with motifs of forget-me-nots, fog detonators, viaduct arches and Hudson the Railway King’s profile, the whole furbished with a set of Stephenson’s Rocket buttons haggled for the previous Saturday in the Portobello Road.

I was off by special train to see the Festiniog Railway, North Wales. Than which nothing could be rarer. The Festiniog Railway is very old and very small and spry, dating from 1832, snug as a pocket borough, with rails a little less than two feet apart, served still by tubby engines born in the ’sixties. One of the engines is called Palmerston. If the Festiniog Railway directors were men of action instead of irresponsible dreamers who stare out of windows all day Palmerston would have been fitted with dyed sidewhiskers long before this.

The first-class carriages of Festiniog are quaint, shamelessly so. Strong, stern men—wholesale hardware factors and electricity board attorneys, for example—have been known to giggle and collapse with gratification at the sight of them. Designed apparently for rich circus midgets, they have monogrammed antimacassars on blue upholstery, sepia photographs of deer glens, small tarnished mirrors and a strong feeling of crinolines and stovepipe hats. There’s sure to be a penny-farthing or bath cabinet stowed aft in the guard’s brake, you tell yourself.

The rarity of the Festiniog Railway is admitted by all: even, out of their mouth-corners, with much anguished lip-gnawing, by the directors of Taly-llyn, a rival rare railway beyond the mountains to the south. The Talyllyn directors and the Festiniog directors are known to make images of each other in plastic wood, hammer in carpet tacks, then run over them ceremonially by the light of gibbous moons while poison herbs brew on the footplate. Many an eldritch titter is heard at such times among the foothills.

When it comes to really fey and goosefleshy jobs, the Festiniogers undoubtedly have an edge on the Taly-llynites. They own a Corpse Car. To this the Talyllynites have no answer.

The Corpse Car is a black cube with little gilt urns at the top corners. It is floored in a grisly way with rollers for the easier shipping and unshipping of coffins. On the outside walls are hooks to hang wreaths on. In dun-drearier days than ours the Corpse Car, hauled by Palmerston (cylinders and stroke 8¼ inches x 12 inches) or by Welsh Pony (c. and s. 8½ inches x 12 inches), plied between hill hamlets and a lineside burial ground snowy with marble. Level crossing gates were flung open at its approach by lady station masters who, being Welsh, wore white aprons and witches’ hats. It was all very solemn, grand and grotesque.

Now a bit bleached and peeling, the Corpse Car languishes in a rolling stock shed lower down the line, at Boston Lodge. Nobody knows what to do about it. Double-bassoon players, cement salesmen, dealers in small glass giraffes and city rectors with dog collars inside boiler suits—solid men all who pay their pound a year membership fee to the Festiniog Railway Society and work on the line at week-ends as amateur guards or signalmen or platelayers—gather round the Corpse Car and scratch their ears uncertainly. One says, or so I conceive:

“Take the rollers out, put in a buffet counter, regild those urns, repaint the outside in Dayglo green and pink. Stock up with ginger pop, chocolates, comic postcards, plastic statuettes of David Lloyd George (for people do remember him in these parts) and Carnarvon Castle souvenir mugs. You ’ll do a roaring tripper trade down at Portmadoc, holiday times. The thing would be a gold mine.”

Another, judicially refilling his pipe, says:

“ Regild the urns, right. But stick black feathers in them. Garland the car in black crape. Install lectern and small harmonium. Hire out the lot as a mobile crematorium chapel. That would be equally good business. And so much more reverent.”

Lots of suggestions, you see. But no unanimity. Everybody goes on scratching his ear. The Corpse Car stays potently on in its shed. The Talyllynites creep into corners and howl apprehensively every