The Intent of a Steam Train

It’s the regulator and the brake you notice first, the way they shine in a place where everything is coal-black. When you’re driving, you’ll have a hand on each – straining to look forward over the engine, twisted awkwardly to look backwards as you reverse, but either way, a hand on each. And they’re worn completely smooth, polished silver against all the blackness.

All the hands that have pushed Premier forwards or back, a hundred and twenty years on this line – every pair of hands has carried out the same actions you’re doing now, made the metal soft with ancient touch. Push the regulator, nudge it a little more to the left (I found myself tapping it a millimetre with the palm of my hand: Nigel, who’s teaching me today, wiggles it) – until you hear the steam hiss and feel the engine readying itself – and then spin the brake wheel to free the engine.

It’s lazy, a cliche, and Orwell has warned against such bad writing, but – the engine does seem to be alive. In one of their learning modules, NASA say ‘it is sometimes difficult to determine the difference between living and non-living things just by looking at them’ and they might well have been writing about steam trains. Because yes, Premier can’t grow like a living thing – but there’s breath there, and intent, and even a little moodiness. So let’s say
that, more than any other machine we have ever made, a steam engine feels alive when you’re controlling it. It’s not binary, not on-or-off like the machines we’re more used to, but … something else. A steam engine is in a relationship, held somewhere between the people working with it, the unchangeable rules of physics, and a response to the world around it.

That is somehow magical and is utterly wonderful, in the truest sense of that word. And this engine has worked on this line since 1905. Any nerves I had when I started are lost, when I realise that out here at Kemsley Down, this engine and these tracks belong together. Premier knows the kinks and tight curves, the gradients and the straights, almost instinctively. After a couple of runs, you can feel the engine telling you – more steam, or back off. For long minutes, you can take your hands off and do nothing. Once you’ve got it right, Premier runs itself quite happily – it knows the way. Getting it right is about finding the spot between acceleration and momentum, balanced against the friction of curves or the gravity of the rise and fall of the line. Push over the rise ahead of Sittingbourne Viaduct Station, and you feel the carriages closing up behind you. Pulling out of the station, you really feel Premier pull, doing the work. And then down, off the viaduct, Premier needs almost no intervention to run all the way home to Kemsley Down.

Nigel knows every metre of track, because he has worked on this railway since 1979. He’s a fresh-looking 59 years old. I was trying to work out who he reminded me of, and I realised it was George Smiley. Not one of the actors who has played him, but the man I’d imagined from reading John Le Carre’s books, a man who perhaps doesn’t want to be noticed. He has deep-set eyes, doesn’t use any more words than he needs, just gives a little half-nod when you’re doing well, and a ‘yes, that’s about how I’d do it here’. He’s a kiln engineer by day, working for a Kent company who’ve seen something of a boom since The Great Pottery Throw Down first aired in 2015. He wants Sittingbourne and Kemsley Light Railway to be understood by its relationship to this place, and the paper mills it was built for. Dan is the foreman, responsible for coal, water pressure, and the steam we need. Premier, he says, likes a good flat fire – so the few times he opens the doors to the firebox, he’s looking for holes in the field of burning coals to fill. On our first short run, he has the pressure at about a hundred, but we’re soon at a hundred and fifty. Premier is far more responsive at that pressure, the regulator looser in your hand at lower pressure. Dan – dark hair, black beard, covered in coal-dust – is very relaxed about me driving, sits on the back of the engine and takes little notice. But every now and again, he hears or notices something and moves across to adjust a valve or two.

So across a morning, we three start with just the engine, running a little way out from Kemsley Down to learn the basics. And Nigel never touches the controls the whole time I’m in the cab. We run back to hitch up to the coaches and go all the way to Sittingbourne Viaduct, loop the engine around, and run backwards to Kemsley Down. Again, we change ends and then back to Sittingbourne, change ends, and back to Kemsley. The line is just over three kilometres, so I’ve only logged about thirteen kilometres – but by the end, I do feel as if I know what I’m doing. I start by crashing the train into the coaches, by the end just nudge up to them. It feels good. And as we run out the last time, I am comfortable enough to really look at the landscape around me as we go. Out of Sittingbourne and across the viaduct and you’re into the late – summer mast-year wild. Bushes heavy with blackberries, trees thick with apples, an abundance of sloes and other berries. Dragonflies – hundreds of them, darting around Premier, in and out of the steam that is blown back into the cab. And late butterflies, white and pale blue and I think I catch sight of a glorious Red Admiral too. The line as you look ahead from the cab into the distance is intimately tied to this landscape: it’s not brutal, although it may have been once. Now it’s softened by the overgrowth, made fuzzy, as if it meant to be here.

It doesn’t feel like any of this is an imposition on the place, more that it belongs. Premier is a living thing, at home in its own natural environment. Everything is balanced. This is right.

Read about Dan!