Simply the best station in the kingdom
Last updated 05:35, Friday, 05 September 2008
On more than one occasion the Carlisle Journal praised the smooth running of the Citadel Station in the city.
In January 1879 the editor wrote: “There is an efficient and civil staff and a desire to accommodate the public that might be emulated elsewhere.”
This was further confirmed by a Canadian lady traveller, quoted in August that year: “The station is one of the largest, lightest, cleanest and most comfortable in the kingdom, through which one goes by a covered passage into the pleasant County Hotel, which has been patronised by Her Majesty and the Empress of France.”
For some time people were aware of its popularity, the newspaper 10 years earlier said: “The Citadel Station has the reputation, all England through, of being one of the best-managed railway stations in the kingdom.”
The report continued: “The porters are numerous and civil; the station master is always to be found, and when found is ever obliging; the arrangements are singularly free from embarrassment to travellers, and the whole routine of the place works smoothly and well.”
The station officials, said the Journal “welcome the coming and speed the parting guest, whether it is a royal train or a cook’s excursion... from the secretary of the Joint Station Committee down to the humblest porter”.
A more literary description of the station appeared in the Western Daily Mercury in 1869: “A cold, sharp wind, bearing upon its melancholy wings the damp and foggy cloak of the December night, sighs and soughs through the station, rattling in its outward career the doors and windows of waiting rooms and refreshment rooms, coquetting with the swing lamps, and curvetting around the girders and iron frame work of the roof.”
This was the welcome which greeted the evening limited mail as it ran in from the north, the station “all ablaze with the lights of many lamps and a lively bustle on the platform”.
On the brightly-illuminated stage stood “the picturesque master of the Citadel Station, fierce with the eye of a hawk and a moustache like a raven’s wing directing the base of operations from the summit of his own proud official dignity”.
Time was allowed for passengers to leave their carriages as there were no refreshment cars at that time, and on this occasion, preceded by a multitude of ‘By Joves’, doors flew open to disgorge “one noble duke, three lords and seven baronets” as they crossed to the County Hotel for brandy and soda.
Turning to the business end of the train, the Mercury stated: “Standing upon the iron floor of the engine is the cool-brained, steady handed driver, encased in an oily pea-jacket, and crowned with a fur cap, and all of him that you can see is a smutty nose-end and two storm-blown eyes.”
As you look at him, “this concrete mass of smut and oil and cool manhood”, said the reporter, “you mark his nonchalance, his conscious power, and you say that upon the promptitude and the steadiness of this one man depends your precious life and the preservation of your sacred limbs”.
Ready to depart, “the guard, bound in silver and swelling with importance, walks down the platform, and closes the doors of the train with a thunderous thud”.
In a noisy perspiration, with hissing and seething exhalations “the mighty iron horse itself stands with its green eye peering into the south” and as the guard “holds aloft his hand the driver ‘takes’ the commanding digit and the engine, with many snorts and much preparatory screaming, glides away from the Citadel Station, out into the cold and the darkness of the deep winter night”.
But not all travellers were happy with the way things were run.
One first-class female passenger complained in a letter to the Journal in 1870: “First, second and third class tickets are all issued at one pigeon hole where passengers huddled together like a flock of sheep, squeezing forward.”
She thought this undignified and recommended a first-class-only window.
Tickets had to be bought before travel and the booking office “did not open until a short time before trains depart”.
In the holiday season this got far worse and the newspaper stated that “in the ugly rush” for seats in August 1883, excursionists found it “almost impossible to make their way to the ticket windows”.
The editor thought “it would not be very difficult, we imagine, for railway officials, with their talent for organisation, to devise some more convenient and rapid method of meeting the demands of their customers”.
Most complainants were first class and one traveller, signing himself ‘the ghost of St George’, wrote in February 1871 that the entrance to the men’s first class waiting room was “barred by a stout little green dragon who demands from everyone about to enter a sight of his ticket or sixpence”
This he considered “an excellent regulation to prevent any other than first-class passengers using the room”.
Sometimes, said the traveller, it was impossible to get a through ticket and those booked to Carlisle had to give up their tickets on the train thus losing their status.
So those waiting a short time before trains departed must pay sixpence when faced by the ‘dragon’.
He thought the solution would be for ticket collectors to issue first-class platform tickets in exchange for those collected.
One contemplation by the North British Railway in 1869 was to open their ticket office at Carlisle all day “instead of just before trains, so from the number of tickets issued beforehand the officials will be able to calculate on any extra carriage accommodation that may be necessary”.
What a pity this never caught on.
