King Charles is a man acutely aware that the monarchy has to be seen to provide value for money in these straitened times. Therefore, to coincide with the announcement that the royal household is to be given over £130 million of public money for the next two years to complete works on Buckingham Palace, it has been revealed that the cash-guzzling royal train is to be scrapped.
It is true that, from any economic perspective, the regal locomotive does not represent a worthwhile investment; it only made two trips last year, each lasting two days, and the total cost was nearly £78,000. But the news that it will be decommissioned before the current maintenance programme ends in March 2027 will make many people – not just royalists and trainspotters – feel a sense of sorrow at what is to be lost.
Sometimes heritage and tradition are more important than scrabbling around the back of the figurative sofa
Train travel in Britain used to be an event and an adventure. It’s still an event, but these days only in the same way that a deeply unpleasant experience, like root canal surgery, is. Overcrowded, often delayed or cancelled trains; fares, especially for on-the-day travel, that make you feel like you’ve been mugged; the sheer unfathomable horror of heading off from Euston station, London’s nastiest and worst terminus. Yet set against this are still a few private services, most famously Belmond’s British Pullman and Orient Express fleets, that attempt to return an air of bygone glamour to the idea of travelling by train. They succeed, although the eye-watering cost means that this is luxury reserved for the few, rather than the beleaguered many.
Perhaps surprisingly, the royal train does not represent the last word in comfort and sophistication. Pictures that have been released, most recently in the late Queen Elizabeth’s lifetime, reveal an interior which has not been updated since the mid-80s and represent a time capsule of that decade’s furnishings, complete with sensible, sturdy-looking tables and chairs and, naturally, floral curtains. In this regard, it reflected the character of Elizabeth II: no nonsense, functional and deeply English.
While the value for money that the royal train actually represents has been debated for years, the Queen was devoted to it, and so there was never any question of its abolition during her reign. The scrapping of the royal yacht, Britannia, was seen as bad enough; to have made the royal train redundant as well would have been a step too far. Now, it will meet its Waterloo.
It is, of course, likely that the vehicle will have its component parts displayed in some relevant museum or exhibition somewhere. Nevertheless, the idea that it will be used in any way as a working train seems impossible, given the cost of its upkeep and maintenance. The King can congratulate himself on the supposed efficiency of a money-saving measure that will soften the blow that the taxpayer is going to be asked for over a quarter of a billion pounds over the next two years.
Sometimes, however, heritage and tradition are more important than scrabbling around the back of the figurative sofa, seeing where a few pennies can be saved. The idea that the royal train would ever be maintained (and indeed refurbished) at the King’s own private expense is presumably seen as risible, hence the decision to put it out to pasture. Yet when I heard the news, I was reminded of one of the strangest and most haunting Thomas the Tank Engine stories, ‘The Sad Story of Henry’ when Henry, the disobedient train who refuses to move, ends up being bricked up in a tunnel and left there to rot.
The royal train may be an anachronistic relic of another time – and another Britain – and liable to be put out to pasture on that basis. Those of us who still treasure such fleeting moments of eccentricity – and increasingly bygone Britishness – may mourn its last whistle more than we can imagine.
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