A vintage ride on the British Isles' only electric mountain railway

BBC News

a day ago

The Snaefell Mountain Railway reveals the Isle of Man's forgotten tourism boom – and serves as a gateway to the seven mythological kingdoms.
Our train was crawling slowly up a steeply pitched valley that felt hidden from the rest of the world. To the right of the tracks, the Laxey River dropped suddenly, turning south to vanish into the Irish Sea. Here and there, sheep grazed and the soft scent of gorse wafted into the carriage. I gazed out as the vegetation disappeared and we rattled higher – higher – as the train spiralled around the mountain's bald summit.
A howling wind greeted our arrival at the top station, and I looked out to a sea that had turned to thrashing waves. The view stretched even further. According to folklorists, the summit is where one can glimpse seven kingdoms, including those that aren't acknowledged by any map. I could see England, Ireland, Wales, Scotland and the Isle of Man, but up there you can also see that of Manannán mac Lir, son of the sea and king of the otherworld in Gaelic mythology, and the kingdom of heaven. For believers, the journey is an imagined pilgrimage.
Snaefell, or "Snow Mountain", is no ordinary peak and the Snaefell Mountain Railway is no ordinary train. I was on the Isle of Man, atop the island's highest peak, having ridden the only electric mountain railway in the British Isles. The tradition to ride to the top is a profound one, but, equally, to learn about the train is to build a vivid portrait of the Isle of Man. For the railway's story is one of unemployment and migration, engineering milestones and the rise of Victorian-era tourism, and it still looms large in the legend of the island, revealing the independent character at the very heart of Manx life.
The day had begun at the Manx Museum, the Isle of Man's national museum in Douglas. The former hospital building is a nostalgic place by nature, with galleries dedicated to Viking silver hoards, Celtic crosses and Tynwald (the oldest continuous parliament in the world) helping distil the island's 10,000-year history into bite-sized nuggets. Chiefly, I was interested in the railway's timeline, which led me to the social history galleries and an encounter with Katie King, the museum's curator of art and social history.
"In the mid-19th Century, the Isle of Man was in a mess," she said, as we symbolically slipped back in time. "There was low population growth, no employment, exponential immigration and the island's coal industry was collapsing. The [Isle of] Man government was alarmed by all of this."
At the time, this was a familiar lament across many communities in the British Isles. But the Isle of Man, a UK Crown Dependency, had a secret weapon: its influential lieutenant governor, Sir Henry Brougham Loch, 1st Baron Loch. In office from 1863 to 1882, Loch realised the island's potential as a destination for spa tourism. Seaside holidays were booming in Queen Victoria's era and the Isle of Man, with sandy beaches and bracing waters, was primed to reap the rewards.
In one sense, the island's capital, Douglas, was sacrificed to tourism. A glossy marketing campaign appeared on the London Underground in the 1870s, featuring idyllic sailing boats and beautiful women in swimming costumes, transforming the working-class port town into a glamorous holiday destination. The journey to get there, from ports including Blackpool, Whitehaven, Silloth, Ardrossan and Greenock by the Isle of Man Steam Packet Company, the world's oldest continuously operating passenger shipping company, was also portrayed as an exotic sea crossing to a mystical island.
The speed at which things changed was astonishing. At its peak, 11 steamer ships made the crossing from Liverpool daily; and, by 1880, nearly 350,000 visitors were arriving every summer. A staggering 1,500 hotels opened, and, within a decade, Douglas had been transformed with a seafront promenade, pier and the largest ballroom in Europe. Despite moral outcry from the influential Methodist community, the island attracted legions of unchaperoned single men and women. And with liberal drinking laws, it was once described, as King puts it, as "one of the most debauched places in Britain".
"But the governor wasn't content with stopping there," added King. "All those visitors only spent time in Douglas because there weren't opportunities to explore the island. So, building a train was the next obvious step."
Enter the Manx Electric Railway at the northern end of the Loch Promenade. First opened to the coastal town of Groudle in 1893, it is now the oldest electric tram line in the world with its original rolling stock still in service. Then, two years later, the Snaefell Mountain Railway arrived as part of a further tourism push. Remarkably, the two connecting lines still run with much of their original Victorian-era infrastructure. Both feel like museums on wheels.
If it's fascinating to hear these stories, it's more thrilling to ride to Snaefell, all while peering out of the world's oldest operational electric tram cars. While the epic views mean that comfort is secondary, the enjoyment of the three-hour return journey to the summit comes from riding on period piece Victorian tram cars doing what they were built to do. First, the Manx Electric Railway rattles, stutters and sways along the seven-mile track from Derby Castle Station to Laxey; then it's a quick switch onto the Snaefell Mountain Railway as it pushes uphill for a further five miles to 621m. Inside, the shallow arched carriages are polished ash and pitch pine. There are glazed vestibules, mirrored panels and sliding windows. For me, it had the particular atmosphere of an Orient Express, as if run by model railway enthusiasts. For the Manx, the legends and reality of the train are ingrained in their psyche.
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"When the railway opened, it was like science fiction," Andrew Scarffe, Manx Heritage Railways' technical support officer, told me when I met him at the depot. "Droves of people came over on the ferry just to see its electric technology and innovation. What's rarely spoken of is we were 130 years ahead of the rest of the world with green travel. We began generating our own power back in the 1890s to run the railway, and the electric tram cars are still doing what they were built to be doing. Slow travel by electric train? It all started here."
As Scarffe tells it, the railway had one million annual passenger journeys at its peak, with trains leaving Derby Castle Station for Laxey every three minutes. These days, the Isle of Man's holiday traditions have been eroded, but the train still completes around 200,000 passenger journeys a year, from April to October. Like me, many come for the ride through the glens and fields, the train clawing past beech trees bursting to green before the hillside peters into rocks. Some come for the rare experience of driving the tram itself, with one day train-driving tutorials available. And those of a more spiritual bent come to savour the seven kingdoms.
Before dusk, I reflected on much of this as I scrambled to Snaefell's true summit above the rail tracks. Ireland lay in front of me, with Wales, Scotland and England at my back, facing east. Above, so Manx folklore says, was the domain of "otherworld", a legend more difficult to ignore because of the remains of a Victorian-era observatory at the summit. Around me was the watery kingdom of Manannán mac Lir (fun fact: he's reputedly buried under a grassy knoll behind the walls of Peel Castle on the island's west coast).
All of this was a confusion of the real and make-believe. And yet, looking out at this island full of stories made me realise that my short journey onboard the Snaefell Mountain Railway had taken me to more places than I ever could've imagined. It seems an ordinary train, but the tracks of this tiny electric mountain railway continue to keep both fantasy and so much of Manx history and culture alive.
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