Britain's most beautiful coastal train journeys
It’s impossible not to feel ever so slightly star-struck sitting chatting to the national treasure that is Julie Walters. Sorry, Dame Julie Walters (or Rita as I’ll always think of her).
But she’s good at putting people at ease, at smiling engagingly, at infusing you with an almost childlike enthusiasm for wherever it is the conversation appears to be leading.
We meet in the splendour of the St Pancras Renaissance, that late 19th century railway hotel given such a thrilling new lease of life with its reopening six years ago, and itself something of a grande dame and national treasure.
“I’ve never stayed here,” Walters says, ordering a green tea in a side room at The Gilbert Scott restaurant named after the man who gave the hotel its gothic grandeur. “But isn’t it gorgeous?”
Walters has a bit of a thing about grand old railway stations (“they’re like fabulous big old ocean liners”) and trains, which is one of the reasons she agreed to take time out of her busy filming schedule – involving of late Paddington 2, Mary Poppins Returns and Mamma Mia! 2 – to present a television series detailing some of the most spectacular rail journeys to be had along Britain’s coastline.
“Years ago I did an overnight train journey from Euston to Fort William with my daughter,” she explains. “Oh it was heaven. I absolutely loved it and she will never forget it.”
Viewers last Sunday would have seen Walters heading back to Scotland to the West Highlands for among other things a ride on The Jacobite, the steam-driven train that was used in the Harry Potter films – “Unlike Mrs Weasley, I did get to go on the Hogwarts Express,” she purrs – and a look around the huge herring port at Mallaig (“It was interesting but I’m not sure I’d want to spend too long in a fish factory again…”).
Tonight she will be reminding us of one of the early loves in her life, Newcastle Brown Ale (“my memories are a bit hazy and painful”) and we will also see her sitting chatting cheerily with the driver aboard a Virgin train to Edinburgh, a journey that affords spectacular glimpses of Durham Cathedral, the Angel of the North, the mystical island of Lindisfarne and the rolling waves at Alnmouth.
In the weeks ahead she will be revealing some of the riches – and thrills – to be enjoyed in North Wales and travelling south to Devon and Cornwall where she’ll be taking the heritage steam line to Kingswear and revisiting Torquay, one of the quintessentially British seaside resorts with which she fell in love as a girl.
Walters has a bit of a thing about the coast too. “I went to Torquay in the Fifties and Sixties and remember it felt very exotic,” she says. “I mean you didn’t get palm trees in the West Midlands. I remember the boarding house we stayed at and the smell of the carpet and the fried breakfast and speaking in hushed tones and having to keep up appearances and not show my mother up…
“The resorts have changed; they are past their heyday, but I still find them very romantic. And I still have a huge passion for the seaside.”
The third element in the mix for the series is what Walters calls her “endless curiosity” about people. “I can never get enough of finding out about their lives and why they do what they do, what they are frightened of; what motivates them,” she says. “I love trying other people’s lives on for size.”
It’s a winning combination. So that, despite the fact that the famous-personality-goes-on-a-wonderful-train-journey is hardly a new concept on television (we’ll come to Michael Portillo later), the result is a watchable series of vignettes combining scenic splendour, coastal glory, railway nostalgia, the bubbly nature of Walters herself and a cast of characters that serves as a reminder of the sheer range, and – given that this is Britain – occasionally eccentric nature of human endeavour.
Thus we see Walters on the footplate of a steam locomotive shovelling coal into the furnace and enjoying a bacon-and-egg breakfast cooked on it; we see her sounding the “woo, woo!” whistle; we enjoy with her the sensation of delight at the approach to the Glenfinnan Viaduct in the West Highlands, one of the most scenic spots in Britain.
In Wales we are introduced to the extraordinary village of Llwyngwril, where the whole community seems to be engaged in a massive knitting project which serves as a unique form of team building. Walters’ love of the quirky shines through. “You get off the train at the station and the chairs are knitted; instead of graffiti everywhere there’s this knitted stuff. It’s barmy!”
In Duirinish, we are given a glimpse into the life of a Highland cattle wrangler; in Penzance it’s the world of the cake-makers of Peboryon Cakes; in Flint, it’s the people who come to mourn at the largest pet cemetery in Europe, while in Northumberland we are taken inside the former station at Alnwick that has been transformed into a vast second-hand bookshop within which the original (wartime) poster urging people to “Keep calm and carry on” was found. Her inimitable take on it? “It’s a great slogan – cheaper than the old Valium and less addictive.”
We also meet the people behind a project to reinstate one of the branch lines (between Alnmouth and Alnwick) which, courtesy of Dr Beecham, was closed in the Sixties. Walters dramatically rolls up her sleeves to help them lay stones along the track.
“It all feels very British,” she observes. “These people are dealing in very British things, like steam trains. They seem to be wanting to hold on to tradition and stuff which has been lost; perhaps they are trying to touch that period of the country’s greatness again.”
Walters herself is the first to acknowledge that she is following in the tracks – literally – of some fairly serious heavyweights when it comes to presenting stories about train journeys: Joanna Lumley, Chris Tarrant, Griff Rhys Jones and, of course, Michael Portillo.
For all her ease and brilliance in front of camera, did Walters feel the shadow of the great man hanging over her?
“Not at all! I think he’s great – there’s something massively comforting and knowledgeable about him and his programmes on train journeys. I think it’s funny that we are doing the same thing, but we are very different.”
That said, in the series she does frequently refer to the former cabinet minister turned doyen of the television train travelogue.
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“You wouldn’t catch Portillo up here!” she shrieks as she hurtles at more than 90 miles an hour down a zip-wire ride in a Welsh slate quarry. Later she concedes that, actually, he might have done it too – “I was just terrified at the time!”
I ask her whether making the series taught her anything new about Britain, the seaside and its communities.
For a moment she puts on a serious air. “We are constantly blathering on about communities being lost, but all these places showed me how much we need one another and how wonderful it is when we realise that. It’s important that we engage with each other on interesting and strange things – such as that knitting community in Wales.”
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She gasps in recollection of some of the places to which she has been introduced and in some cases reintroduced. “I didn’t appreciate just how beautiful Britain is,” she says, “the countryside and especially the coast. Some of those seaside towns may be past their heyday but they hark back to a sort of rose-tinted golden age somewhere – and the romance of that is something I love.”
And the romance of travel by train, in particular by steam train?
“They still play a huge part in our imaginations and appear in so many films – Brief Encounter, Strangers on a Train, and this year again, Murder on the Orient Express. I think part of the fascination is that they remind us of a period of greatness and I think we are trying to hold on to that somehow.”
Here the actress in her takes over and breaks into a recitation of Robert Louis Stevenson’s “From a Railway Carriage”, a poem she had to learn by rote at convent school.
Faster than fairies, faster than witches,
Bridges and houses, hedges and ditches;
And charging along like troops in
a battle,
All through the meadows the horses and cattle
She’s still word perfect. But then what would you expect?
Coastal Railways with Julie Walters is on Sundays at 8pm on Channel 4
