My memories of the royal train

Spectator

02-07-2025

It is the most civilised way to travel anywhere in the kingdom. Which is why I am so distraught that the King has cancelled it.
This week His Majesty has agreed, reluctantly I can be sure, to decommission his royal train. The decision was announced by the Keeper of the Privy Purse, James Chalmers. Mr Chalmers brings to the Royal Household all the romance and lyricism you'd expect of a chartered accountant who spent 39 years at PwC, including time as something called a Global Assurance Leader. He justified the decision on the basis of the need for 'modernisation' and 'fiscal discipline'. This is not so much letting daylight in upon magic as strangling it with a spreadsheet. It is a tragedy. The most myopically mean-minded cost-cutting measure forced on a monarch since Regan and Goneril took away Lear's knights.
I am biased, I admit. Partly because I know which side I would have been on at Marston Moor, standing with the first King Charles against the loathsomely drab utilitarians who would have denied that monarch the money needed for his ships. But also because I have travelled on the royal train and mourn its passing with the sadness of one who sees another cherishably special link with our past dismantled by the un-holy alliance of the lanyard class and Treasury brainiacs.
The royal train itself is very far from the last word in luxury. Defiantly unmodernised, its decor owes more to Seventies Ventnor than Silicon Valley. It is like the royal family – understated, comfortable, traditional, gently hierarchical and thoroughly reliable.
I travelled on the royal train in March 2018, as environment secretary, accompanying the Prince of Wales (as he then was) on a visit to mark Unesco designating the Lake District a world heritage site. We boarded the train at dusk at a wayside halt in Bucks before it made its way to Kemble in Gloucestershire to pick up HRH.
Dinner in the mess with the Prince's private secretary and protection team was basic but delicious – steak and chips cooked in a galley unchanged since Harold Wilson's day. My berth for the night was fitted out like an Aberdeenshire B&B from my childhood. A narrow single bed with reassuringly itchy sheets and blankets, framed prints of non-descript highland landscapes, a Roberts radio and blinky electric strip lighting. The one undeniable luxury was the ensuite bathroom – no other train in Britain allows you to soak in Radox suds. But even that indulgence was reassuringly retro. The bath itself was the sort of pastel pink plastic that takes you back decades – to a time when the only essential oil was diesel.
There was a protocol to arrangements on the train. The late Queen, Prince Philip and the Prince of Wales each had their own dedicated carriage. Other travellers would be allocated their size of berth depending on their place in the Palace pecking order.
Members of the royal family would entertain guests in a compact drawing room occupying a section of a carriage fixed between their accommodation and the rest of the travelling entourage. I was invited there to join HRH for a nightcap (Laphroaig) before we retired and breakfast (a minimalist fruit salad that even a dieting catwalk model would consider frugal) the next morning. Concerned that such a meal would not set me up for the day ahead, the police officers travelling with us insisted I have a 'big boys' breakfast' with them in the mess beforehand. I think the sausages may have been Wall's rather than Highgrove organic, but they were appropriately fortifying.
The royal train runs to its own timetable, and is never more than a few seconds early or late, a novel experience for an MP who had to rely on South Western Railway to travel to and from his constituency. I've no idea if the crew were Aslef or RMT, but now that these professionals with their curious habit of punctuality are being made redundant perhaps they could replace the current management of Network Rail.
As we rolled into Langwathby station, on the breathtakingly picturesque Settle to Carlisle line, the impression created by the royal train's arrival was vivid on the delighted faces of the gathered schoolchildren and curious residents. It was as though the Hogwarts Express had materialised through the drizzle: stately, traditional and wreathed in mystique. Dull would he be of soul who wasn't taken by the appearance of living history on platforms where only inter-city 'sprinters' normally draw in.
But now the royal train – environmentally friendly, a clockwork-perfect piece of British engineering heritage from our manufacturing past, affordable even when the state took less than 10 per cent of GDP and Gladstone was taking his axe to government excess – is to be scrapped. It will save less than Ed Miliband's department spends annually on air fares. As Philip Larkin put it, when another round of cost-cutting left a lesser Britain: