Kinnaber

In the summer of 1895 the two groups of companies that ran trains from London to Scotland raced each other to Aberdeen. Both night trains left London at eight o’clock, one from Euston by the West Coast and one from King’s Cross by the East Coast, and the newspapers printed the arrival times every morning. The two roads are separate for five hundred miles and the same for the last thirty-eight, and the place where they join, three miles north of Montrose, is a signal box called Kinnaber Junction, with no station and no village. Whichever train was offered to that box first got the road.

On the night of 22nd August the West Coast train, three carriages and a handful of passengers, ran the 540 miles from Euston to Aberdeen in eight hours and thirty-two minutes. Nock, the historian of the race, wrote in 1958 that the record still stood. The story tells that week three times, one voice to each parcel, and the papers in each parcel carry the times.

Three parcels

1. The Correspondent. A newspaper man with a watch on his knee, sent up on the eight o’clock from Euston to time everything and wire from Aberdeen. Crewe in the dark, Hardwicke over Shap, a guard who tells him to put the lamp out, and the news at Perth that the race is already over.
2. The Signalman. Seven years in the box at Kinnaber, with the windows facing the North British side. Two nights earlier, in the grey before dawn, he saw a headlamp on the far shore of the Montrose Basin while the road was already set for the other train.
3. The Fireman. Twenty-four, three years passed, on Caledonian No. 17 with Driver Souter from Perth to Aberdeen. Eighty-two miles from Stanley Junction to Ferryhill in sixty-nine minutes, fed shovel by shovel, and two words from the driver at the end that he kept for forty years.

Read the opening of The Correspondent.

What is real, and what is ours

The race is real, and so are the companies, the trains, the engines and the times. Both trains left London at 8.0 p.m. The West Coast train reached Aberdeen at 4.32 a.m. on 23rd August, 539.7 miles in 8 hours 32 minutes, three carriages behind the engine. Hardwicke ran the 141 miles from Crewe to Carlisle in 126 minutes, and is kept today at the National Railway Museum at Shildon. Driver John Souter and Caledonian No. 17 ran the 82 miles from Stanley Junction to Ferryhill in 69 minutes. The North British general manager did wire, on 22nd August, that rivalry had gone far enough.

The three narrators are ours. The correspondent stands for the newspaper men and amateur timers who rode the racing trains; the signalman and the fireman are invented within what is known about their jobs; and everything anybody says is ours. Where we could not check a figure at source, the story treats it as reconstruction and the sources page says so. The printed pieces name routes, stations and times but carry no company crest, initials or lettering, because several of the 1895 names are still live brands and nothing in the parcel should pass for a real company’s paperwork. Every piece carries a small line saying it is a replica, made in 2026.

After Kinnaber

Four journeys a year, each in three parts, each a real journey on a real line. The next one begins in the parcel after Part Three.