I read Shute's
The Chequer Board -- not many years ago -- but had completely forgotten the railway connection as above. (Seem to do this a lot -- some railfan I am
!) With Shute's having been a clued-up guy about technical / industrial matters: he must for sure have had, three-quarters of a century ago, the Big Four railway companies on his radar. However -- so far as we know, he wasn't a besotted railway enthusiast as such; and maybe the Wadebridge / GWR north coast matter here, was just a slip-up on his part -- the Great Western / Southern [LSW] set-up around Bodmin, was pretty confusing. Or perhaps our signalman friend had fallen out with his SR employer, and got work with the GWR instead? -- I gather that this kind of rationalisation re oddities in fiction, is vulgarly known as "fanwanking".
I've read a fair number of Shute's novels -- far from all -- he was a prolific writer: in an otherwise-busy, and not particularly long, life. Those I've read vary for me, along a scale from "splendid" to "utterly awful". (
The Chequer Board, I rated as pretty good.) An "utterly awful" one for me, is
The Far Country, published 1952: involving assorted high-profile issues of that period, including Britain's post-WWII times of hardship and austerity (re this, I gather that Shute was "agin" the 1945 -- 51 Labour government). Britain's then miseries and hard times, vividly contrasted with conditions at the same time, in Australia. Other stuff prominent in those years, also plays a part. A friend of mine -- not usually a great reader -- found himself enchanted by
The Far Country, and strongly urged me to read it. I had a go -- more than one, in fact -- but each time, found the book so very "hackneyed and glurgy" that I couldn't stomach it: gave up before the end; the second time, for good. One small thing recalled, from
TFC -- at one point, an Australian character is putting forward the view that at that particular time in history, Australia is a better place to live than probably the majority of the other countries in the world; while acknowledging that Aus. has its faults, in which he includes, "crook railways". "Crook" here, in its Australian sense of "ailing / messed-up" -- one takes it that the guy is referring to Australia's idiosyncratic case of the different-gauges problem.
Another of Shute's which I have, is
Pied Piper (1942 -- in part I feel, purpose strengthening Allied morale). Again, considered by me "pretty good" -- with a goodly bit of rail-featuring. "Condensed" content: suspenseful journey by basically naive civilians, at the time of the fall of France in early summer 1940, from the Jura mountains to -- as it pans out -- the north coast of Brittany, seeking to get away and reach Britain. Much of the journeyings, "to" and "from", are by rail of various kinds: from what I can figure out, Shute had an overall accurate idea of rail matters in France as at the onset of World War II. At one point of all this, I think I've caught Shute out in an error. By assorted ways -- rail, and getting lifts by road, and trying as best they can to "beat" the German advance -- the hero and his companions have got to Angerville, halfway between Paris and Orleans. They are attempting to get ever westward, to attain ahead of the Germans, some coastal spot where they'll be able to take ship for Britain. They learn by chance, that the roadside steam tramway from Angerville westward 50-odd km. to Chartres, is still running; and duly catch and travel on it -- reaching Chartres in three hours (good going, vis-a-vis the basic mode of transport, and the extra-ordinary circumstances !).
Sorry, Nevil -- per Davies's
Minor Railways of France, the metre-gauge Tramways de l'Eure-et-Loir, which included the line from Angerville to Chartres; were an early victim of road competition -- the whole system abandoned by 1936; so would no longer have been around in 1940. There were a fair number of cases in which after the fall and occupation of France: in the ensuing conditions of hardship and shortages, assorted recently-abandoned rail lines, both standard and narrow gauge, were reopened including for passenger traffic; but even had the T de E-e-L Angerville -- Chartres line still been physically in place in summer 1940, with workable motive power / coaching stock on hand -- at the time of the novel's action, everything is in flux and chaos -- reopenings only started to happen, when the occupation was an established thing.
A small oddity: shortly before reaching Angerville, our heroes pass through Pithiviers, a little way south-east thereof. The Germans have not yet got there; but it strikes "our lot" as a ghastly place -- "a beastly, sordid little town" -- where the group pick up and take on with them a child refugee, who will clearly otherwise be shunned, handed over to the Germans when they arrive, or worse. Bryan Morgan in
The End of the Line -- telling of factual journeys a decade after the fictional ones of Shute's book -- calls Pithiviers "a horrible place". I have to wonder: what is it with this hapless community? -- of railway note, for being at one end of France's last 600mm gauge public line, to survive: the Tramway Pithiviers -- Toury (Morgan got to the area just too late to travel on this line before passenger closure; perhaps that has something to do with his jaundiced view of the place). There is a preservation operation which runs, at the Pithiviers end, a couple of kilometres of this 600mm line. I feel something of a wish to visit this venue -- largely, just to see whether Pithiviers strikes me as the nadir of France's "c*** towns"; or whether its general "bad rap" is unfair and unmerited.
