The sleeper trains were always a bit of an oddity. I dealt with them at Bristol Temple Meads when I was a signaller there. The early shift at 06:00 would see the Glasgow sleeper stop for the daily shunt move. The car wagons would be dropped off before the train departed for the south west. In the evening on the late shift the reverse move would take place. The sleeper was a part of our daily routine – as much as the “Dusty Bins” refuse train. These services had their regular routine moves that we had rehearsed to the point where the timetable was in our heads. At the given time we were expecting the sleeper to dial in on our control panels – and if it was running late, the shunt moves would be disrupted and the early morning services at Temple Meads would involve re-platforming to make things fit out of time.
At £112 for a ticket, the London to Penzance service isn’t cheap – but then rail travel isn’t cheap for long distance travel anyway. The usual five hour run is taken at a more leisurely pace on the sleeper and takes eight hours thereby giving people a decent night’s sleep – one hopes. Alan Hamilton takes the Cornish Sleeper that runs from Paddington at 23:50 and arrives in Penzance at 08:08 the following morning. He describes something from a lost era – a time when life was a little more slow and the locomotive hauling the train would be named after a king or a castle. Even today, despite all that has happened to them, the railways evoke something romantic that is a piece of England lost forever.
I do hope that the night sleeper continues. It would be a shame to lose it.
I must confess a passion for the railways, it’s been my dream to work for them, even if it’s cleaning trains while they sit in sidings during the night. I love train stations, trains (though not jotting down numbers!), platforms, there’s something romantic about them. Often as a child, I would sit and watch old black & white films, with people boarding these big old trains, I can remember sleepers featuring highly. Yes, a piece of Englishness.
I took a sleeper just once, but it was a brilliant experience. It was also an accident. My girlfriend and I were on the way back from Paris and we entered the train station in London to see a Glasgow train just about to pull out. We ran and jumped on…then found out it was a sleeper. I paid the ticket by cheque which took me even further into overdraft, but it was worth it. We got seved a pot of tea before bed and woke up feeling refreshed instead of dirty, cramped and irritable.