MAY 2000
A LENGTHY goods train grinds slowly round the curved track at Carnforth station with a hideous screech that sets the teeth on edge and threatens to inflict serious damage on the eardrums. Inscribed on one of the wagons are the words: "Railtrack: renewing your railway". Take in the surroundings and "renewal" is not the first word that springs to mind. This once-proud north Lancashire railway centre looks even shabbier than it did when I was last here, nearly three years ago. The pigeon droppings are thicker, the pedestrian underpasses between platforms more dank, and there are fewer glass surfaces that haven't been smashed. On a fenced-off line, expresses still thunder past on their way to London or Glasgow. They never stop. Indeed, they can't stop because the platforms here were taken up years ago and replaced by sloping slabs. The weeds growing between them are longer than ever. But wait. There is good news at last. Work is due to start this summer on the lengthy process of restoration. "Renewal" is not quite the right word. Why? Because although Railtrack is spending �550,000 on bringing the platforms, the underpasses and the overhead canopies into the 21st century, the Friends of Carnforth Station are planning to spend twice as much turning the clock back to 1945. A pivotal year, 1945. The Second World War was drawing to a close and a little bit of movie history was being made right here. The great director David Lean chose Carnforth to provide the station location shots for that very English weepie, Brief Encounter What the Friends are planning is a sort of Brief Encounter theme park. The legendary refreshment room is to be rebuilt in wood, just as it was in the film. Tea and Bath buns will be served. Coke? That'll go in the boiler. There will be a restaurant as well, with a war-time menu. Brown Windsor soup, Spam and chips with semolina on one side of the card, black market duck, pheasant and decent wine on the other. "But for Brief Encounter, all Railtrack would require here would be a couple of shelters on each platform, so we're going to make the most of the rest," says Mike Chorley, chairman of the Friends (21/9/1999 to 26/9/2002). Mike, 65, moved to Carnforth five years ago after finishing his railway career as civil engineer (north) with ScotRail. A small part of his responsibilities involved overseeing the painting of the Forth Bridge. "Not one structural girder was either horizontal or vertical," he recalls. Although he is officially retired these days, his undoubted railway pedigree has helped to bridge the gap between the realists of Railtrack and what hard-headed executives saw as romantic dreamers among the Friends. But then the romantic dreams would never have come close to reality if the Friends' financial arm, the Carnforth Station and Railway Trust, hadn't managed to raise nearly �1 million towards making Brief Encounter into something more permanent. For Ald Bergus, a former fireman, the restoration will be a dream come true. He was 21 back in 1945 when he and a driver called George Farrer were plucked from their normal duties to propel an old Stanier steam engine in and out of Carnforth for the benefit of David Lean's cameras. It was Alf who, inadvertently, supplied the grit that found its way into Celia Johnson's eye and set up the storyline. He would go on to become a driver himself. He ferried the Queen to the Barrow shipyards during her jubilee year, but nothing has quite compared with his brief encounter with the movie industry. Filming went on all night and, at around 1.30 every morning, he would join cast and crew in a posh dining car for the sort of "slap-up" meal that was all too rare in ration-starved Carnforth. "What's more," he recalls, "they gave me �30, cash in hand [roughly seven times his wages at the time] for a week's work. I've never felt so wealthy before or since, and I didn't smoke or drink in those days." He's made up for it since, judging by the way he tops up his whisky and lemonade from a hip flask slid discreetly from the inside pocket of his dapper suit. We have, by now, repaired to the lounge bar of the Royal Station Hotel and one or two customers are studying the "Brief Encounter Menu". David Lean Sirloin anyone? Or perhaps the Stanley Holloway Giant Steak and Kidney Pie? Either of them might be a better bet than Brown Windsor and Spam.
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