Read On the Slow Train for Free Online Page B

grand to live near the platform). Because of its exposed position, it was one of the first houses in Britain to be fitted with double glazing. It is also graced by a magnificent fireplace made of the local blue limestone, known as Dent marble, which was also used to create the trimmings of Manchester Town Hall. Sleep in my snow hut is blissful, though insomniacs may be rattled from their beds by heavy coal and gypsum trains in the middle of the night.
    Next morning the weather is grim, and the grey sky is still unleashing bucketloads. I take the train south, although it doesn’t run until 10.07 – no commuting to work from here. There is more high opera as we enter the sinister portals of Blea Moor Tunnel, at 2,629 yards the longest on the line. ‘A damp, terrible tunnel,’ one historian called it. ‘A horrible place . . . that drove men mad so they could go underground no more.’ Another wrote, ‘It was a devil to build, a devil to drive through on the footplate, for the enginemen always seemed glad to be out of it. A long dead dank smell of ageless rock and stale engine smoke greets the trains. Windows are hurriedly shut tight, while for two minutes, the vapours somehow find their way into the carriage.’ Even today, engineers have to penetrate the blackness before the first train of the day to chip off the sooty black icicles which form inside the tunnel on winter nights.
    We emerge from the gloom onto the treeless Blea Moor itself, whose very name reeks of desolation, and which might as well still be in the Ice Age, dotted as it is with drumlins – ancient piles of stones untouched for aeons since the glaciers met here. The train slows for the mighty Ribblehead Viaduct, now secured with concrete injected inside the piles. But only one train is allowed over at a time – just in case. On the ground more than a hundred feet below nothing grows and very little lives, although some enginemen claim to have seen wild cats – descendants of the creatures of the navvy camps and shanties that grew up here during the building of the line. Two thousand men lived here in primitive and squalid conditions during the five years it took to build the viaduct. The camps had names such as Sebastopol, Jordan and Jericho, derived from biblical locations and battles of the Crimean War. There were scenes of wild carousing and bloody drunken battles as the navvies struck terror into the local people. Records show that, in true Mayor of Casterbridge style, one man was prosecuted for selling his wife for a barrel of beer. Many died, not just from accidents but also from smallpox and other diseases. Now nothing is left of the camps except traces of the roadways where their huts once stood, though some say – as the evening mists swirl down the slopes from Whernside – that ghostly laughter can sometimes be heard echoing under the viaduct.
    I get off at Ribblehead station in search of more tangible evidence of their memory. There’s a little visitors’ centre on the platform here, but this morning it’s closed. Over my shoulder, as the rain turns to sleet, I can just glimpse the dirty grey hilltop of Whernside, whose 2,416-foot bulk dominates the Eden valley below. To the north, the sleet billows along the River Greta and over the arches of the magnificent Ribblehead Viaduct to grit-blast my cheeks.
    There’s a ballad, which I once heard at a folk club, which runs
    And when the winter came it froze them to the floor
.
    It blew them off the viaduct and it killed them on Blea Moor
.
    Some died of the smallpox and some of cholera;
    Chapal and St Leonards have many buried there
.
    And so I am crunching along a track to the little church of St Leonards, Chapel-en-le-Dale, in search of memories. My toes are frozen after the thirty-minute trek, but here is the little grey-slated church cloistered among the trees. And, sure enough, inside is the memorial, partly paid for by the guilty men of