Trains in the north of England have two settings: being packed tight enough to inhale a stranger’s wet coat or feeling like you’re in a secondary school prefab classroom disintegrating as it re-enters the Earth’s atmosphere. Sometimes it’s both at once. Any train ride taken in the north can compete with the worst public transport experience you’ve had anywhere else in the UK, and there are none more competitive than Pacer trains.
Introduced during the 1980s, Pacers were intended as a temporary solution to a rolling stock shortage. They were based on the bodies of old British Leyland buses, given a maximum lifespan of 20 years and left to linger for an average of 30. Forty years later, many are still with us.
But they are finally being removed from the rail network for good – due to the twin pressures of new disability access regulations and endless criticism from politicians and passengers. All three operators that use Pacers (Great Western, Northern and Transport for Wales) were intending to remove them by the end of this year, but further delays mean this target will be missed and they will not be phased out entirely until 2020.
Critics of Pacer trains have referred to them as “cattle trucks”; though this still doesn’t quite do the experience justice, since commuters will often need to ride the train twice in one day, or multiple times a week, whereas cows often make just a single journey before they’re granted the sweet release of death. On Pacer trains, the only sweet release comes from the shoddy lock on the thin toilet door that separates your movements from 17 huddled commuters. There’s no food or drink trolley, but on a wet day the broken door mechanisms permit sufficient rainwater to form a central canal, which transports discarded crisp packets through the carriage like conveyor-belt sushi.
Safety concerns were raised in 1999 when an empty Pacer was involved in a head-on collision with another train. Upon impact, the bus section – the part that would have housed the passengers, if any had been on board – was severed from its frame, which was fastened in place with wires, bits of old string and a daily quiet prayer from the station chaplain. Photographs of this incident look like two people tried to play a game of conkers with a brick and a shoe box.
There was a brief naive period when Pacers were brandished as a beacon of British ingenuity. In 1986, Margaret Thatcher attended a transport expo in Vancouver where a Pacer operated a shuttle service for the site as “evidence of … British achievements and British goods”. It generated zero orders. Previous Pacer stock was sold to Iran, but by the mid-2000s it stopped buying them due to their low quality. That is to say, a country whose GDP per capita is about an eighth of the UK’s chose to have higher transport standards than a government that boasted a Northern Powerhouse.
The only concrete promise about northern rail infrastructure in the Conservative party manifesto is the Northern Powerhouse rail scheme, creating modernised high-speed rail connections spanning major cities from Liverpool to Hull. HS2 is also mentioned, but next to the words “great ambition”, “review” and “2040”, so let’s not hold our breath there.
The “red wall” may have crumbled, but the north still contains one of the largest splashes of crimson on the electoral map, concentrated in urban centres that these new intercity rail connections would service. We need to think realistically about the Conservative government’s enthusiasm for spending billions connecting up the metropolises of the left heartlands. Could it run the risk of the sentiments and solidarity forged in northern post-industrial centres escaping via high-speed rail and infecting the rest of the UK? Stories of the Toxteth riots and the “battle of Orgreave” reigniting the class struggle in the heart of Workington Man?
Many people will remember the Pacers with fondness, including myself. They’re a rubbish piece of infrastructure that was easily absorbed into the identity of northern-ness, a culture of making do with something that’s naff and might very well snuff out your life as it veers off an embankment and tears a fresh path through the Pennines. Their much prolonged death is the story of an economy that centres wealth and power in the City of London and the home counties. Soon, the funny bad train will be extinct, but the structural inequality that led to us being hurtled through the moors on a dead bus remain in place.