The Slow Train to Salisbury
Redbridge, Millbrook, Romsey
Dunbridge, Dean and Salisbury
A pall of thick, grey clouds was low over Southampton as I walked down to the station, under the quiet of a Saturday morning in January. I had Salisbury in mind for a visit; the county town of Wiltshire, a cathedral city, the location for Constable’s washed-out rainbows and sublime spire.
Arriving onto the platform at Central station I found myself faced with the choice of fast and slow. The fast and familiar train I had taken many times to Bristol and beyond would leave here later but soon overtake the provincial stopper due to pull out in a few minutes. I made my decision, preferring to extend my journey ‘cross county lines to Wiltshire, and was soon sitting in an empty carriage, listening to the pure poetry of our journey as told by the guard.
Redbridge, Millbrook, Romsey
Dunbridge, Dean and Salisbury
Pulling out of Southampton I was resolute in giving my attention over to the landscape of the journey. For a number of years I’d repeated this route as part of a longer expedition from Bristol to Southampton in order to see my partner. Now I was on the stopper and not the express, I was given time to observe and record what had passed by my window two-dozen times before without notice. With no book to engross me and no overwhelming desire to doze I was able to appreciate what this short but varied route had to offer.
The docks in Southampton are rarely seen, rarely heard and barely considered by the city. Despite being a major centre for employment and commerce there is little chance to satisfy one’s curiosity as to what actually happens in the huge swaths of land, once part of the sea, now reclaimed for containers and cranes. That’s not to say that there is no curiosity to be satisfied, as the polite rush for tables beside the window in John Lewis’s café would testify; this being one of the very few places in the city where the activity of the docks can be viewed.
One of the other places to catch a fleeting view of this maritime twilight zone is from a train window as it pulls away from the city, past Millbrook and Redbridge. The flatness of the reclaimed land gives way to a topography of gravel and scrap metal forming a mountainous landscape beside the tracks; pylons, cranes and flood lights thrust upward, into the grey sky. Our tiny two-carriage train passes the enormously long, snaking lines of Freightliner containers being loaded by hulking, automated cranes.
The line peels off, heading north away from the New Forest and the mainline along the south coast. Three bridges come in fast succession out of the window; two collections of concrete arches which take the busy dual-carriageway across the broad, shallow Test. The third bridge, a medieval relic, sits low on the water. On top fishermen stand and cast their rods from the niches where, once, locals would have stood out of the way of carts and horses crossing the causeway.
Past Redbridge the Test becomes indistinct, lost amongst the reed beds. The bucolic scene acts to remind me of the state of the shoreline, from here to the city walls, looked like before concrete and cranes came to colonise it. From the yellow reeds, swaying pleasingly in unison beside the carriage window, a flock of birds is caught on an updraft. The birds come to rest on the wires strung between two electricity pylons. The motion of the train intermingles with the familiar rhythm of the National Grid, of great, geometric pylons and gently sagging wires.
Still heading northward, following the Test valley, the fields on either side of the train are half-submerged under brown, swirling water. The gentle stream of summer has become an expansive, meandering lake enveloping footpaths and stiles. The scene changes as we approach Romsey, an expanse of allotments appears, a flash of brown and red sheds, leeks and lettuces braving the frost-bitten soil of the kitchen garden. The stumpy tower of the Abbey comes into sight as the train pulls alongside the platform.
As with most towns, the railway’s view of Romsey doesn't do it justice. It’s delightful Norman abbey is a distant sight and instead the eyes are drawn to the yellow, corrugated iron sheds of an industrial estate, the smoke, and soot, and steam rising from gleaming chrome chimneys and a wastewater treatment plant where slurry is slowly rotated around vast, cylindrical tanks.
The rich, alluvial silt of the Test becomes the white, porous chalk of the Avon as the train crosses into Wiltshire and through the country way-side halts of Dean and Mottisfont. The fields roll seductively toward the train, coming to abrupt halt at the top of the cutting the railway has made through the undulating downland. A monotony of fields and farmhouses takes hold, it comes as something of a surprise to see the spire of Salisbury Cathedral appear on the horizon.
The train rounds one of the final bends, snaking into Salisbury past a barren dual carriageway, plotting a wide arc beside a school playing field and the neat back gardens of a dozen town houses. A junction, the clatter of metal wheels over metal points, the dankness and darkness of a tunnel beyond the glass of the carriage windows and then out, into the light and promptly into platform six of Salisbury station.
by Adam J. Smith
