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“I’m passionate about them,” says Trelawny when we retire, at his suggestion, to the station’s Clermont Hotel, a surviving example of the grand establish- ments that used to make rail travel so enticing if you could afford it. “The smell, the sound, the heat coming from the boiler; the idea of someone shovelling coal into this spitting oven that heats water and drives the train forward. All that would have seemed a miracle when the first passengers were taken across open country 200 years ago.”
Trelawny is referring to the momentous day, 27 September 1825, when George Stephenson’s Stockton to Darlington route opened with a journey by a train pulled by Locomotion No 1, becoming Britain’s – and the world’s – first passenger railway service. That journey, along with the following 200 years of British train travel, will be marked by Radio 3 on Saturday with Train Tracks, a day-long celebration of the bicentenary of our railways, with a unique live broad- cast on London North Eastern Railway’s (LNER) Highland Chieftain express service, travelling from mountains to metropolis.
This is not a steam service, but one pulled by an technology inspired by Japanese bullet trains. Trelawny begins broadcasting at 7.30am at Inverness, then continues on the 7.55 King’s Cross service, which will have a dedicated studio carriage. There will be live performances, radio premieres of works commissioned by the BBC Scottish Symphony Orchestra (Unfolding Landscapes by Erland Cooper and All Change! by Jasper Dommett), an interview with Scotland’s only female freight train driver, plus slots for presenters Tom McKinney, Tom Service, Elizabeth Alker and Georgia Mann as the train heads south, stopping at Pitlochry, Edinburgh Waverley and Darlington before pulling into King’s Cross. It all sounds admirably ambitious, but what will they do when the train goes through a tunnel?
“There will be blind spots, especially in the far north and as we pass through multiple tunnels. We have decided to record my reports a couple of minutes before they’re broadcast to ensure a smooth listen.”
Radio 3 and railways are well suited. Trains are high-speed orchestras that rattle, swoosh and whistle and have been inspiring music since 1844, when French composer Charles-Valentin Alkan wrote Le chemin de fer. “There’s a huge amount of music about the railway,” says Trelawny. “Strauss wrote waltzes and polkas about trains. Dvorak was passionate about them. When he was living in the States and feeling homesick, he’d go to Penn Station and watch trains and think of the main station in Prague, which gave him reassurance and comfort. A work like Pacific 231 by Arthur Honegger really evokes the sound of a locomotive and it’s very hard to listen to Rachmaninov’s Second Piano Concerto now and not imagine the train at Carnforth Station in Brief Encounter.”
The romance of train travel hooked Trelawny long ago. He grew up in Cornwall at the far end of the Great Western and Cornish lines, over 280 miles of track, tunnels, bridge and embankment, begun by Isambard Kingdom Brunel, that strides out from Paddington all the way to the tip of Cornwall. As a boy he obsessed about its trains; as an adult he has done the journey “hundreds of times” but seldom gets on without thinking about his mother, who he last saw alive on Penzance platform, waving her off aged 12 when she was going to London for cancer treatment. “I remember her getting on to go to hospital…”
Rather than it being a melancholy ghost train, he adds: “I also think of my late father, and the first time I caught the train on my own, going to the buffet car and being excited to buy a cup of tea and a sandwich with money he’d given me.”
And the journey back to Cornwall is still a source of joy. “I never tire of the train running along the Exe estuary and then, suddenly, seeing the sea and chopping in and out of those cliffs at Dawlish. People walking along the seawall on the other side of the railway track, waving. People still wave at trains.”
There is, he admits, “something lovely about sitting with other people in relative silence. The gentle clack-clack of the train; reading a book and realising you haven’t turned a page for 15 minutes because you’re looking out the window.”
There's no point R3 existing for a tiny privileged number
For many of us the magic of train travel is increasingly being disrupted by someone watch- ing their mobile with the volume turned up and no headphones. “Thirty years ago, we were complaining about Walkmans with the noise escaping from tinny headphones, but it’s moved on to something even worse and feels to me incredibly selfish,” says Trelawny. “There is a massive problem that our leading brand of smartphone got rid of headphone sockets. But it’s the epitome of selfishness to want to listen to anything and share it with other people. There are moments when we want to listen to stuff together, at the Royal Albert Hall or Wigmore Hall, but not on a train.”
Would Trelawny say something if someone was listening without headphones on his carriage? “I’d like to think I would but, like most of us, I’m quite a coward and so seethe internally and don’t do very much about it,” he says. “I think it needs something broader than me getting very angry for 15 minutes and then prob- ably slightly red in the face intervening.”
Locomotion No 1 averaged a speed of eight miles an hour and was preceded on the track by a horse rider with a flag carrying the Latin words, “Periculum privatum utilitas publica” (“The private danger is the public good”). There’ll be no flag in front of Saturday’s south- bound locomotive, which will hit speeds of 125mph. But these, as Trelawny admits, are days of fractured public confidence in the railways, especially in northern England.
“I have lots of friends working for the BBC in Salford who are reliant on Northern trains, and they have quite a tough time,” he says. “It’s easy to romanticise elements of rail travel. It’s not so much fun when you’re standing in the rain on the platform at Hebden Bridge, waiting for a half-an-hour late train that replaced a train that’s been cancelled.”
So, what if the Highland Chieftain is late? “This is a major express train,” he says. “I’m pretty confident that we’ll be on time.” Nonetheless he’s been preparing for other eventualities, on the simulator LNER uses to train drivers at King’s Cross. “It didn’t work out so well. I managed to undershoot the platform at Stevenage so only half my carriages were on the platform. I also failed to keep my foot on the dead-man’s break, so we stopped, and I brought trains on the East Coast mainline to a standstill.”
Happily, Trelawny is a better broadcaster than train driver, presenting Radio 3’s Breakfast show for 14 years before he took over the 5pm In Tune slot in April, where he shares duties with Katie Derham. “You are with people at really a very intimate moment,” he says of the morning show that is now Tom McKinney’s domain. “They start heir listening in bed, then take you to the bathroom. They’re padding around the kitchen, trying to wake up, making a piece of toast while listening to you. The pieces of music that you play can shape their day."
However, there were drawbacks. that feeling of the alarm waking you up from a deep sleep. There’s no chance of ‘I’ll just have another ten minutes.’ And also being tired in the evening, when you’re meeting friends.” Did he ever nod off in concerts? “Definitely! But I got good at closing my eyes and keeping my head up. I worked out a position that avoids your head slumping.”
Trelawny’s new role is just one of the changes that have come since the arrival of a new controller in 2023. Radio 3 is flourishing under Sam Jackson, but some critics suggest the station has become safer, leaning on well-known works to attract an audience. Trelawny, who has live musicians on his afternoon show throughout the week, often playing new or less well- known pieces, strongly disagrees.
“It’s just not true that we’re playing those works more,” he says. “People will hear a piece of music and think that because, by pure coincidence, they’ve heard it played twice in a month at completely different times of day, ‘Oh my God, it’s on all the time!’ But the variety and range of music that we’re playing is as broad and diverse as ever. I don’t see any danger of that ever changing – we’re still the biggest commissioner of new music in the country. At the same time, we must make ourselves welcoming to people who are dipping a toe into classical music.
“There’s no point us existing for a tiny number of people who are privileged to have had an education and an introduction to the music when young, who went to a school that still has a good music department, which not many state schools still do. We have a responsibility to those [new] people.” In which case, all aboard.