I pushed up the blind as we slowed for the stop at Carstairs Junction and saw a pasture where cows stood and chewed, casting long shadows in the new day’s sun. A Clydesdale landscape; framed by the shadows of my compartment, it looked like a bright painting. “Fine morning,” said a man’s voice from the corridor. “Isn’t it just,” said another. Then the train came to a halt at the platform, a door slammed, the air brake hissed and soon enough the train was broken into two parts – the first half-dozen coaches going west to Glasgow while those behind them travelled in the opposite direction, east and north to Edinburgh. Dividing trains (and joining them together) is what Carstairs has done since the 19th century, though these days that function is confined to one train only – the sleeper from and to Euston.
Do people get off here? I have never seen any. Carstairs is more name than place, its importance entirely conferred by the railway, at least until Scotland’s state hospital opened here in the 1950s as an institution for the criminally insane. Glasgow Central used to have a handsome information board entitled “Trains from the South”, which charted the progress of the expresses from England for those who waited for them, a porter or perhaps some grander station official chalking up the number of minutes a train was late at Carlisle and then again at Carstairs, so that a wife waiting for her husband or a father for his son could look up to see if the Mid-Day Scot was making up or losing time, and keep her or his impatience in check.
“Five minutes late at Carstairs.” The phrase held meaning. It seems odd to remember that now – that such a device would be within living memory, and not even at its outer reach – but the board at Glasgow Central was only one of the railway’s many old features that persisted into the 1980s. In the early Thatcher years, it was still possible to travel by sleeper from Glasgow to Liverpool or Edinburgh to Inverness: journeys that even when the motorway system was still incomplete could be done by car in an afternoon, but that the railways still dignified with white-sheeted berths and water jugs, as well as those mysterious hooks and pads on the wall near the light switch where (so it was said) a gentleman could hang his fob watch and keep it from harm. What an enterprise it must have been to timetable these trains: to make sure they had departure times before midnight and arrivals after five the next morning, preserving the idea of “overnight” by means of leisurely stops in stations such as Preston and Perth, where the traveller who fell asleep to the train’s sway and clatter would wake to a puzzling stillness that might be punctuated by the soft whine of a parcels trolley echoing under a high glass roof; the traveller like a baby who opens his eyes with suspicion when the crib’s rocking has stopped.
Few of those sleeper trains survive. The story is the same across Europe. Expressways, cheap flights and high-speed lines that halve daylight journey times: the combination has spoiled the market for overnight trains, so that even the most famous of them, Le Train Bleu, has been replaced by a sadly reduced service. Britain should be grateful, then, for the six services it has managed to retain – from London to Penzance, Aberdeen, Inverness, Fort William, Edinburgh and Glasgow. The franchise for the Scottish five, known collectively as the Caledonian sleeper, is in the gift of the Scottish government and was acquired last year by the outsourcing giant Serco, whose 100,000 employees also operate the Trident nuclear submarine base on the Clyde, the Yarl’s Wood immigration removal centre in Bedfordshire and Walsall’s local education authority.
These examples give an idea of this company’s great range – a ubiquity that may explain its shyness. So far as I can tell, none of the literature placed inside my little cabin mentions the name Serco or its Hampshire headquarters. Instead, thanks to Serco, the service has been rebranded as “a celebration of the best of Scotland” in its giveaway magazine. The Highland food and drink in the lounge car, the Harris tweed and tartan uniforms of the attendants , the “sleep-over kit” from Arran Aromatics, which includes a pillow spray, an item fit for Marie Antoinette: all of these have been produced in Scotland and introduce the visitor who steps aboard at Euston to an idea of the country, not entirely unpleasant or false, as an extensive gift shop.
“I’m Kelly and I’ll be looking after you,” said the cheerful young woman who knocked on the door as we left Euston, asking if I’d travelled this way before and, when I said I had, many times, pointed out that I now had two pillows rather than one and that I could have porridge and honey for breakfast, or granola and yoghurt, or “the full Scottish” (I imagined black pudding), which would be served in the lounge car. In the magazine I read an interview with Kirsty Wark, who commutes between Glasgow and London and is probably the sleeper’s most celebrated advocate. And then I slept … and woke, and slept again, and woke, each time alerted by the silence that had settled over the train and wondering, as I always have, whether it meant Rugby, Preston or Carlisle, whether the summit still to be scaled was Shap or Beattock. Then at last I pushed up the blind and discovered the field of cows, vivid in the early morning sun.
The stop on the Glasgow line after Carstairs is Motherwell. Briefly, for no more than a summer, I worked in this town as its reference librarian. It was a good library, well-funded by a local authority that was in turn flush with money from the business rates paid by Colville’s the steelmakers. Their various works – the biggest, Ravenscraig, was then less than 10 years old – dominated the town both physically and financially, and supplied what we would now think of as its identity. Motherwell FC were known as the Steelmen with no hint of self-consciousness, and the smoke from the furnaces and rolling mills drifted over the town day and night.
The library and the football club remain; the reason they’re there has vanished. The new bilingual station boards, in English and Gaelic, common now right across Scotland, suggest a country’s search to assert a sense of difference in another way. Motherwell is rendered also as Tobar Na Màthar. Has anyone asked for a ticket to this place? Almost certainly never. Will anyone ever? Probably not. Even in stations where Gaelic might be spoken – Mallaig and Kyle of Lochalsh – a request for an off-peak return to the well of the mother is likely to confuse. And yet there it is, on every nameboard on every platform.
Like the haggis on the Caledonian Sleeper’s menu, it represents something less utilitarian – a quest, almost. In 2018, thanks to money from the Scottish government, 75 new sleeper coaches will be delivered to Serco from the manufacturer in Spain, replacing rolling stock built in Britain and promising more comfort and luxury. But haggis will remain on the menu, an easy way to announce worth and identity when the bigger things – construction, ownership – have failed.