Driving the World’s Last Scheduled Steam Train / Financial Times 19.2.2022

It is 5.20am, and I’m sound asleep in a guest house in Wolsztyn, a small town in western Poland. The light snaps on outside my room. I hear Howard Jones, my host, shout: ‘It’s working, it’s working.” It takes me a second to register what’s happening, then I leap from my bed and hurriedly dress.

Thirty minutes later Jones and I reach the train station. It is cold, dark and raining, but sure enough there’s a huge black steam engine standing at the platform with clouds of steam and smoke billowing from its chimney.

We climb up into the cab where Andrzej and Marcin, the driver and fireman, are waiting in their grimy clothes and baseball caps. At precisely 6.03am the great steel monster pulls out of the station, clanking and creaking, shaking and shuddering, huffing and puffing as it slowly gathers pace. 

Thus the last daily standard-gauge scheduled steam train service left in the world, the last one providing primarily for regular passengers not tourists, begins its morning journey.

It is also the last one on which novices like me can learn to drive, but I’m getting ahead of myself.

****

It was three years ago that a friend of a friend who happened to be a steam train lover - more commonly known as a ‘gricer’ - told me about Wolsztyn’s steam engines, and of the curious  Englishman who had done so much to keep them going by setting up “footplate courses” for those who longed to drive them.

Intrigued, I contacted Jones who invited me to visit in February 2020. I booked my flights, but the day before he called to say that unfortunately none of the three serviceable steam engines were working. Then came Covid and the lockdowns.

I resurrected my plans last month (Jan), booked a three-day visit, and flew out to Poznan with a ‘gricer’ named Peter Lockley, a retired solicitor from Leamington Spa who now travels the world photographing steam engines for fun. An hour later we arrived in Wolsztyn where Jones broke the discomfiting news that just one of the locos was working.

The service to Leszno runs twice daily, at 6.03am and at 11.41am. Having got in late, I opted to lie in and take the second one the next day. That was a bad mistake. The loco developed a fault in its brake pump during the early morning run, so the later one was cancelled. 

That gave me time, at least, to be inducted into the strange and secret fraternity of gricers - most of them men old enough to remember Britain’s last steam trains; men raised on Thomas the Tank Engine, and films like The Titfield Thunderbolt, Brief Encounter, The Great St Trinian’s Train Robbery and The Railway Children.

I admired the guest house where Jones accommodates his visitors, and which he has filled with steam engine memorabilia: signals, ticket collectors’ caps, guards’ lamps, platform signs, model trains, jigsaws, a library of railway DVDs and, of course, photographs galore.

Lockley and I explored the Wolsztyn engine  ‘shed’ (depot) where there is a splendid old ‘roundhouse’ (workshop), a working railway turntable of a sort I had not seen since childhood, and 18 ageing steam engines in various states of repair - or disrepair. Lockley knew them all. “That,” he would say knowledgeably, “is a PM36-2, built in Poland in 1937 and the last of its kind in the world.”

And over a long, late lunch of wild mushroom soup and venison in a pre-war aristocrat’s country mansion Jones, now silver-haired and 70, told me his story. 

Born and raised in South London, his father took him to see a rare ‘Clan Stewart’ steam locomotive at Liverpool Street Station when he was just five. As a boy, he would sneak into ‘sheds’ at Cricklewood, Neasden and Old Oak Common to admire the steam engines. “In the summer it was trainspotting and in the dour winter days it was a model railway in the bedroom,” he said. When the last regular steam train passenger service ended in Britain in 1968 “it was almost like losing a close friend”.

He left school just as the era of cheap package holidays was beginning. He worked for Clarksons and Freddie Laker before both went bust, then set up a company which organised weekend trips for British gricers to heritage railways in Germany and Poland. That was how he discovered the Wolsztyn depot.

Steam trains had survived longer in Communist Poland than elsewhere because it produced lots of cheap coal, and diesel locomotives were expensive. They were still common in the 1980s, and three or four working sheds survived until 1990, but by 1994 Wolsztyn was the last one left. “It was just clinging on” thanks to a wheeler-dealer manager whom Jones described as a “Polish Del Boy”. 

By that time Jones’s company - and his marriage - were in trouble, so he decided to follow his heart. In 1997 he moved from Burgess Hill to Poland to try and save Wolsztyn and its steam engines. “It was a kind of eureka moment,” he said. “Someone said ‘you’ll never get away with it’ and that was a bit of a kick in the backside. They said ‘you’ll never get beyond five years’ and here we are 25 years later.”

He promised to raise funds for the shed provided the state railway company continued to run the trains. He tapped into the surprisingly large community of British train lovers (the UK supports at least eight railway magazines). He persuaded 40 gricers to invest £2000 each, in return for which they could spend a week a year for the next five years learning to drive the steam trains. He moved out to Wolsztyn, launched his ‘footplate courses’, and began organising special steam train trips around Poland. 

His scheme worked. By the early 2000s he was contributing about £50,000 a year to Wolsztyn’s shed and attracting visitors from around the world to that small Polish town. In 2006 he was awarded the MBE for his contribution to British-Polish relations. “I felt a bit of a fraud because all I’d done is play trains,” said Jones, who also acquitted a Polish wife. Today the Wolsztyn to Leszno service carries about 50,000 passengers a year, of which only about 5,000 are tourists.

I asked Jones what it was about steam engines that he found so fascinating? “To me a steam engine is the closest thing in machinery to being alive. It’s like a breathing dragon,” he explained. They are temperamental. Each has its own personality. “No two steam engines are alike. They’re all completely different. You have to learn the characteristics of each loco. You have to learn how each one handles. You call them ‘she’, and you certainly swear at them…It requires a lot of skill to drive a steam engine, but any idiot can drive a diesel or an electric.” 

Jones, incidentally, can drive a steam engine but cannot drive a car. 

****

The next morning brought more bad news. The brake pump was still not mended, and I was due to fly home at noon the following day. Desperate situations require desperate measures, so late that afternoon a young employee of the Wolszstyn shed was dispatched on 650-mile, ten-hour round-trip drive to a railway museum in Chabowka, in south east Poland, to collect a cannibalised spare part. He returned in the small hours of the morning, the faulty pump was swiftly mended, and at 5.20am Jones woke me up. Over the next three hours I began to understand why gricers are gricers.

Dressed in a boiler suit, I climbed up six feet of metal steps to the cab of the steam engine, an OL49-69 built in Poland in the early 1950s. It has old wooden floorboards. The doors and windows are held together by bits of wire. In front of me, above the firebox, is a huge and bewildering bank of levers, wheels and dials. Behind is the coal tender. Every surface is oily, black and grimy. There is a strong smell of sulphur.

Jones briefly introduces me to the ‘regulator’ (a long steel lever that serves as the accelerator), the ‘reverser’ (a wheel that operates the gears) and a handle for the brakes. Then we’re off - 140 tonnes of steel rumbling out into the pre-dawn darkness amid clouds of steam and smoke. 

It is thrilling, but a little alarming too. We can barely see the line ahead because the loco’s great long boiler is in the way. Andrzej, aged 67 and a 48-year veteran of the railways, relies almost entirely on his intimate knowledge of the track to know when to accelerate and when to stop. Fortunately, he could navigate it blindfolded.

Leszno is 30 miles and 78 minutes away. En route we stop at 11 village stations with unpronounceable Polish names comprised largely of consonants. Normally there would be lots of schoolchildren and students waiting on the rudimentary platforms, but it is half-term so today we pick up just a few huddled figures, mostly early morning commuters. They are blithely unaware that they have a complete beginner not actually driving the train, but pulling levers and turning handles as Andre barks instructions at me in broken English.

I’m told to blow the whistle as we approach level crossings. I help Marcin shovel large chunks of glistening coal into the blazing firebox, filling the cab with an orange glow and blast of hot air each time we open its steel doors to expose the red hot furnace inside. At times we reach 40 or 50 mph, and the whole loco is vibrating, but somehow we make inch-perfect stops at every station.

Approaching Leszno, a major junction, our single branch line merges with a dozen others. We place our lives in the hands of an unseen signalman, who somehow guides us through the tangle, and we grind to a halt in a crescendo of noise and smoke. Diesel and electric trains glide in and out almost silently, but steam engines are drama-loving, attention-seeking prima donnas - a statement.

A dozen passengers get off, and scarcely 20 minutes later we set off back to Wolsztyn, only this time the loco is at the back of the train so we are going in reverse.

It is light now, though grey and misty. We pass factories, warehouses and modern boxy houses as we leave Leszno. We speed under bridges, past old-fashioned signal boxes and over level crossings where cars as small as dinky toys wait as we roar past. We thunder through flat rich farmland, then forests of pine and silver birch, scattering deer. We pick up shoppers heading for Wolsztyn’s market, and Ukrainian workers heading home, 38 passengers in all. In no time we’re pulling into Wolsztyn’s station having burned our way through two tonnes of coal.

It is 9.07am. Elated, I thank Andre and Marcin, pull off my boiler suit and sprint to a waiting car with my hands and face still black and filthy. I should just make my plane. Either way, Jones informs me: “You are now one of perhaps two thousand people in the world who have helped drive a steam locomotive on a main line in the 21st century”.