Best Railway Poem

[DerekC]

William McGonagall gets my "worst railway poem" vote:

Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!
Alas! I am very sorry to say
That ninety lives have been taken away
On the last Sabbath day of 1879,
Which will be remember’d for a very long time

But what's your best?

Reason for asking: I have been talked by MrsC into reading a poem at an event in a few weeks time (). I thought railway, but any ideas for what I should read?

 

[Gloster]

Only read McGonagall if you want to leave ‘em laughing,

If you Google Railway poems, one entry is a choice of ten such in the Grauniad long ago. The Tourist’s Alphabet (no. 9) might be unfamiliar but amusing.

 

[6Gman]

Adlestrop.

Or RL Stevenson's From a Railway Carriage - which gave us the titles of two superb railway books.

Or the poem by Hardy about a woman seen on a station platform. (Faintheart on a Train?)

 

[JGurney]

How about Elliot's 'Skimbleshanks': http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/t__s__eliot/poems/15178

Or the poem by Hardy about a woman seen on a station platform. (Faintheart on a Train?)

'Departure platform': https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic Poems/Hardy/On the departure_platform.htm

 

[Magdalia]

I have been talked by MrsC into reading a poem at an event in a few weeks time (). I thought railway, but any ideas for what I should read?

Here are a few more suggestions.

Night Mail by WH Auden
Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury by John Betjeman

 

[Peter C]

Here are a few more suggestions.

Night Mail by WH Auden
Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury by John Betjeman

(My bold)

I came here to suggest exactly this - Night Mail. It's my favourite railway poem, without a doubt - and also my favourite poem, full stop. And the film is so good too!

-Peter

 

[Western Sunset]

"Adlestrop" by Edward Thomas.

 

[Henffordd]

All good suggestions so far.

How about "The Express" by Stephen Spender?

Has any modern poet written about IETs?

 

[DarloRich]

Night Mail by WH Auden
Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin

Obvious but correct: the winner is one of these

 

[eastwestdivide]

The Bard of Barnsley, Ian McMillan was poet in residence at a previous incarnation of Northern wasn't he?

 

[Matlock Man]

Morning Express by Siegfried Sassoon

 

[ChiefPlanner]

Morning Express by Siegfried Sassoon

Also a Passing Train of Thought ...........

 

[John Webb]

"The Railway Book", edited by Stuart Legg, published by Forth Estate Ltd. in 1988 (as a reprint of a 1952 book) contains a number of railway-related poems from the earliest days up to the mid-20th Century. (Although most of the book is prose.)
Some of the poems oppose railways - such as William Wordsworth's poem regarding the projected Kendal and Windermere Railway.
Others are more positive.
A complete chapter "Poet's Corner" includes R L Stevenson's 'From a Railway Carriage', Auden's 'Night Mail' and Spender's 'The Express' all mentioned in posts above. 'Night Mail' is my favourite.

 

[6Gman]

How about Elliot's 'Skimbleshanks': http://famouspoetsandpoems.com/poets/t__s__eliot/poems/15178


'Departure platform': https://www.poetsgraves.co.uk/Classic Poems/Hardy/On the departure_platform.htm

He (Hardy) wrote at least two railway poems - the one I was thinking of was "Faintheart on a railway train", definitely not "On the Departure Platform"

 

[Railsigns]

But what's your best?

"During fog and falling snow
into the bothy we must go"

 

[SteelWeelApeal]

Obviously not claiming it’s anywhere near the greats mentioned, but for anyone who knows “If” by Rudyard Kipling, here’s a railway spin off

If you can see a train that stops at Theale,
But doesn’t stop at Combe or Haywards Heath,
If you can see two bridges to the south,
With every rail passing underneath
If you can board a train to Mortimer,
But not Cardiff, or Fleet, or Ashton-under-Lyne
Or Leyland, but you see a passing freight train
And it happens to be running right on time.
If every train that stops then calls at Reading
And every train that passes stops there too
Except the freight trains, heading north or southwards,
And only those that come through platform two,
If there’s no footbridge anywhere around you
But a really, really lengthy platform one
Then you must surely be at Reading,
And, what’s more, it’s Reading West, my son.

 

[Taunton]

The Beeching Report in 1963 caused an amazing political earthquake when published (in fact it's never really completely died down). The principal television political commentary/satire programme of the era was That Was The Week That Was (TW3), a sort of Have I Got News For You predecessor. Up it came that weekend with a poem:

Old engines with their primal anger gone
Their fire and fury rusted quite away
No longer chuffing into Platform One,
Butchered to make a scrapyard's holiday.
Don't think they will not take take it hard at Hatch,
Thornfalcon, Donyatt, Chard, their summary despatch.

Now for such evocative prose, let alone one with all the stations on the Taunton to Chard branch, actually making it onto national television was extraordinary. It was the talk of the town for some days afterwards. Whoever could have written it? Not only were the stations in correct sequence but Platform One was indeed the Chard bay at Taunton. I discovered many years later it was a freelance BBC scriptwriter of the time, who apparently regularly contributed quite a lot to that wholly political satire programme ... none other than John Betjeman.

 

[BeijingDave]

Here are a few more suggestions.

Night Mail by WH Auden
Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury by John Betjeman

Yes definitely Night Mail, came here to post that!

 

[Rescars]

How about:

• Broad Gauge Farewell by Horatio F Brown
• Nostalgia by Gilbert Thomas

The Internet can find "Nottman" by Alexander Anderson. A splendid Victorian melodrama which tells the remarkable and true story of a driver on the GSWR who saved his own child's life exactly in the manner told by the poet. Clambering around the framing was not so unusual back then! Anderson was a platelayer on the GSWR who became a self-taught man of letters and ended up as Chief Librarian at Edinburgh University.

 

[yorksrob]

Here are a few more suggestions.

Night Mail by WH Auden
Whitsun Weddings by Philip Larkin
Great Central Railway Sheffield Victoria to Banbury by John Betjeman

(My bold)

I came here to suggest exactly this - Night Mail. It's my favourite railway poem, without a doubt - and also my favourite poem, full stop. And the film is so good too!

-Peter

With regard to Night Mail, how about the Concerto ad version voiced by Tom Courtenay - "bricks for the site are required by tonight....."

Agree regarding Whitsun Weddings and frankly anything by John Betjeman.

 

[Rescars]

.

The Levelled Churchyard by Thomas Hardy. A commentary on the approach taken to the change of use of land when building St Pancras.

 

[negone]

The wonderful John Laurie, starts at 10.35
Beautiful Railway Bridge of the Silv’ry Tay!

 

[Taunton]

I believe it's courtesy of John Betjeman that I got grade 1 in GCE English Literature.

Well expected was a standard question "Choose a poem and comment on its various characteristics". Of course, some Shakespeare was what was taught as normal for this. But I had seen Betjeman's "Middlesex".

Gaily into Ruislip Gardens
Runs the red electric train
With a thousand "ta's" and "pardon's"
Daintily alights Elaine
...
Murray Poshes, Lupin Pooters,
Long in Kensal Green and Highgate
Silent under soot and stone.


So I wrote sections of it out, commented on the alliteration of the hard "r", that if you read it out a certain way you got a train rhythm of alternate hard and soft sounds. Murray Posh and Lupin Pooter gave a link to Diary of a Nobody, which I worked in contrasting comments between their Victorian inner London lifestyle and new Middlesex, and so on.

I didn't say that the trains were no longer red, but silver!

Middlesex by Sir John Betjeman

Comments & analysis: Gaily into Ruislip Gardens / Runs the red electric train,

allpoetry.com

I also didn't tell our English master, until after we came back to start A Levels, (not English for me), as I thought he would be disparaging. Actually he was fascinated. But he did say "you would be fortunate if the marker was a railways enthusiast"!

Separately, just a year ago I went up the Central Line, and so stopped off at Ruislip Gardens, alighting there (though alas not daintily) for the first time. I honestly expected some display about its role in literature, but absolutely nothing. In fact it's a rather decayed, concrete (as Betjeman says) late 1940s structure, decidedly dreary, and the scrappy outside no better. Elements of his 1930s suburbia have not lasted well.

 

[Calthrop]

I have a great fondness for Ireland's one-time narrow gauge lines. It would seem that these were -- in various aspects concerned therewith -- a plentiful source of inspiration for verse, to local bards. Such offerings vary -- sometimes "overlappingly" -- from the sub-McGonagall, to the (genuinely and intentionally) humorous, to the truly moving. An often-occurring theme, is lament regarding a particular line: on the occasion of its closure, or retrospectively from viewpoint of later times.

My two top favourites on this subject for verse, are in the "lament" category: concerning respectively a line "far south", and another "far north". The former, the Tralee & Dingle -- a reminiscent poem which I encountered long ago: frustratingly, don't recall where; and have been unable to turn it up via Googling -- only "snatches" remembered. Quite poignant: including the two final lines -- Climbing the slopes of Glenagalt / Like an old man full of tears. The latter, the Clogher Valley Railway: a sad but wryly humorous piece composed by a local inhabitant, in local dialect, on the occasion of the line's abandonment at the end of 1941; thus, during World War II. A verse of this one:
She ran through back gardens and down the main street / And frightened the horses she happened to meet; / Now she's all gone for scrap, for to build up our fleet / Ahmdambut, boys, it's tarrah. (The last four words are the refrain ending each verse -- figured out from context to have, in Co. Tyrone-speak, a general meaning of "this is a thing to be regretted".)

 

[Falcon1200]

I very much agree re 'Adlestrop'; Rarely can so few words have been so evocative.

 

[ian1944]

The lyrics of maybe one of the most elegiac songs ever written, Slow Train, make a fine poem.
e.g. "No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street" instantly takes me back decades.

 

[contrex]

I saw a poem on the 'letters' page of a railway magazine in 1969, after Flying Scotsman was shipped to America. It started 'To 4472, adieu'. It stayed in my head for decades, and in 2007 I posted in the uk.railway Usenet group asking if anyone remembered it. I kept the email account that I used for the Usenet posting, and you can imagine my great surprise, nine years later, to get an email from a fellow called Gavin Stewart. He had used the poem in a school English project, and still knew it by heart in 2016. It had been, he said, signed simply 'T.G.F', and he strongly believed it was a fairly well-known railway writer called TG Flinders.

It moves me still. Here it is, to the best of Gavin's recollection:

To 4472, adieu,
Be sure I shall remember you
With boyhood memories intertwined,
Safe in the casket of my mind.
Thoughts of childhood bring recall
Of chimneys, soot and wartime gall,
Of tripe and chips, and homemade brawn,
The chilling, cold grey northern dawn,
With sleep disturbed by bombers drone
And black faced miners trudging home.
There was not much to light up joy
Within that waiting, wanting boy.

And yet, a spark of hope was there,
In trains that went, I knew not where.
With piercing scream and proud white plume
Seeming disdainful of my gloom.
Aspect as brave as names they bore,
Mons Meg, Mallard, and Galtee More,
And one from legend gaining fame
For Flying Scotsman was her name.
A name to glide the mind away
To hills and meadows sweet with hay.
Through fire to seek a happier time
Far from this sulphurous fog and grime.

Now times have changed and I've moved on
With dreams of Eldorado gone.
But, all that was, is part of me
Those things that set my spirit free
That syncopated triple beat
The rush of wind and oil and heat
That swept the platform as you passed
With Doppler surging Whistle blast.
I feel them when the air is still
And though the line goes round the hill
A small boy here will wait for you
And hope it's not the last adieu.

 

[Brightonboy]

The lyrics of maybe one of the most elegiac songs ever written, Slow Train, make a fine poem.
e.g. "No churns, no porter, no cat on a seat
At Chorlton-cum-Hardy or Chester-le-Street" instantly takes me back decades.

I'm glad I'm not the only one who remembers this, it is so evocative. I also love Night Mail (which I think is best when delivered almost like a song) and Adlestrop. Sadly, I think you have to be of 'a certain age' for all 3 to conjure up the pictures that many of us will see on hearing them. The OP doesn't say what the event is and who the audience will be so the impact may not be as great if they are young.

 

[Taunton]

OK, which ones did we do for our children when young:

- From a Railway Carriage (Robert Louis Stevenson)
- Skimbleshanks (T S Eliot)
- Middlesex (John Betjeman)

I'm the party pooper here because I never really cared for Night Mail. Bit too long, and I don't feel it scans properly from line to line. W H Auden was like that with other stuff.