4 hours ago
4
I’ve had this book lying around at home, Lonely Planet’s Amazing Train Journeys. I don’t think it’s been opened since I was given it six years ago. Of the 60 rail trips recommended from around the world, six are in the UK. Back then, the one that jumped out at me was a rail line I’d never heard of, between Swansea and Shrewsbury, even though the Swansea area is where I spend most of my time. On my way to work in Manchester I’d often travelled this way – east along the main line to Newport, then north on the pleasingly scenic Welsh Marches Line.
But this wasn’t Lonely Planet’s choice. They’d gone for the Heart of Wales Line, which takes an improbably direct route, cutting across Mid-Wales from Llanelli to Craven Arms. Into my bucket list this journey went. But the thing with a bucket list is that, once you’ve turned the corner in the direction of bucket-kicking territory, you need to set about emptying that bucket as well as adding to it. Nobody wants to have much left in that bucket when the time comes to join the great majority. That’s the whole point of a bucket list.
This was a maudlin thought indeed with which to board a scruffy two-carriage train just before 9am on a grey Tuesday in Swansea. But what followed was as quietly joyous a four hours as I’ve spent on a train, or anywhere else for that matter.
The week before I’d so enjoyed my three minutes on board the UK’s shortest train service that I got to wondering about taking the country’s longest. But with the demise of the Penzance to Aberdeen service, that title belongs to the London-Fort William sleeper and a sleeper feels like cheating somehow. Sleeping hours don’t count, surely. And on this Heart of Wales Line, such was the scenery, and the chatter on board, that sleep would prove impossible.
At four hours it might not come in at the longest service, but what it lacks in journey time it makes up for in the number of stops and the length and rhythm of the station names. Bynea, Llangennech, Pontarddulais, Pantyffynnon, Ammanford, Llandybie, Ffairfach, Llandeilo, Llangadog, Llanwrda, Llandovery, Cynghordy, Sugar Loaf, Llanwrtyd, Llangammarch, Garth, Cilmeri, Builth Road, Llandrindod, Pen-y-Bont, Dolau, Llanbister Road, Llangunllo, Knucklas, Knighton, Bucknell, Hopton Heath, Broome, Craven Arms. Poetry.
I had all day to get to Manchester, so I was taking the slow train and enjoying every moment. Estuaries, rivers, towns as pretty as their names, viaducts, rolling farmland steepening into hills and forests. The train manager, a young woman, had a smile as wide as you like, even as she imparted the bad news: the plug sockets didn’t work and there was no trolley service. Whatever. Who cared? No one. Everyone was too busy chatting to everyone else.
Alwyn and Elaine, a retired couple from Llanelli, told me they were volunteers tasked with keeping footpaths clear along the route of the line so that walkers can alight at one station and return from another. I looked it up. Incredibly, the Heart of Wales Line Community Partnership keeps 141 miles of footpaths clear, along the entire 121-mile route.
Off they got at Llandeilo to go about their work, and on got four women chatting feverishly in English and Welsh. Somewhere north of Llanwrtyd Wells, on the stroke of 11 o’clock, a bottle of wine was produced. And why not? They were off to Shrewsbury “for a nice lunch and a walk around the shops, and then home”. It turns out that seniors travel free out of season. And it only cost me £22. Lord Beeching must be groaning in his grave. How did this one miss his cull?
“Beautiful, isn’t it?” one of the retired music teachers said, nodding out of the window. It was, it all was.
Adrian Chiles is a broadcaster, writer and Guardian columnist
