An Inspector Calls

Recently returning from a couple of Study days in Wiltshire I sat reading on the Waterloo-bound train.  It had begun its journey out west in Exeter.  We were travelling in Wessex, so it was appropriate that I was reading Thomas Hardy, a respite from theology and the like.  I was perhaps too engrossed when a man breezed past.  He was the ticket inspector.

I missed what he said, but it was something like, "Any tickets from Salisbury?".  Yes, me (following in the wake of some infamous Russians earlier in the year). I fumbled around and eventually found my ticket when he was half way down the carriage away from me.  I left my ticket in my pocket.

Andover . . .  Basingstoke . . .  After Basingstoke he returned and I was more attentive.  "Anyone from Basingstoke?  Tickets please"  he said.  I wasn't from Basingstoke but dutifully put my hand toward my pocket again.  He was off, gone to an older lady in mid carriage who gained his attention after getting on the train relatively recently.

This is what I wondered.  Why is he inspecting tickets by request?  If I had no ticket would I be likely to speak up - "Excuse me sir, I boarded at Andover without a ticket.  Would you kindly fine me now?"

I figured this is a little like the way people approach the Judgment Day (if, they muse, it ever comes).  God the Inspector walks among the millions - "Anyone here who shouldn't be?  Any sinners to go to the Other Place?  Anyone want to confess anything?".  The silent hordes let the Day pass and quietly slip through the gaping net into the Everlasting Rest of the Blessed.

As if.  The South West Trains ticket inspector may have imperfect knowledge, limited time and lazy technique but this isn't going to be the experience of meeting the omniscient, eternal God in whom we live and move and have our being.

Berchtesgaden

Alongside the beauty of the Austrian landscape lies the beauty of the Bavarian Alps.  There, at the foot of one Germany's highest mountains, is the town of Berchtesgaden.  We arrived by train.

Berchtesgaden is not tiny, but neither is it a large town.  It is very picturesque, offering ice creams that you could die for - or more accurately die of.  To be fair to Berchtesgaden its most extraordinary feature is its setting and probably its second-most amazing feature is its palace complex where the Bavarian princes lived.

 

 

Yet right up there with the word amazing is the railway station.  Trundled would be the word to describe the winding, single track journey through the mountains that brought us to the town.  Winding and stunningly beautiful.  The trains ran every hour which, given the isolation of the line, was relatively remarkable.  Finally the three coaches clattered over some points (US: switches) and came to a halt in Berchtesgaden station, the end of the line.  There, one could deduce from the timetable, the train stopped for 20 minutes before setting off back through the mountains on its return journey.

 

I think it was on platform (line) 4 that we stopped on.  Platform 4.  But wasn't there only one train at a time?  Why ever would you need four platforms?  And then there is the station buildings themselves.  They are absolutely huge.  Befitting a large town or moderate city perhaps - but a mountain town at the end of a single track railway?

 

It was not always like this.  Berchtesgaden had its railway for many decades in humbler surroundings until, in the mid 1930s a man called Hitler bought a country retreat in the hills a few miles away.  The date on the station says 1937.  It was actually completed in 1938 and here the likes of British Prime Minister Neville Chamberlain were welcomed for meetings of state.  The meetings kept the world leaders abreast with the plans and developments of the Third Reich.  The meetings were about as much use as the monumental station is today - all outward importance, no true function.

 

It reminded me of that other World War 2 railway monument at Auschwitz.  There a bleak track leads to a dead end.  Here in the mountains of Bavaria a beautiful track and a magnificent station are part of the same great dead end that is man's inhumanity to man.

 

Ghost Trains

The Baptist assembly started in London in the afternoon on Friday and this gave me the chance to travel on one of Britain's Ghost Trains.  There are only a few of us sad enough to know they exist and even fewer that ever get to travel on them - but then they are not really designed for travelling on.

The train mentioned in the linked article above is the return journey of the train I travelled on from Gerrards Cross into London Paddington.  To the uninitiated that sounds a normal enough pair of stations but in fact every other train from Gerrards Cross goes into London Marylebone.

After dutifully waiting  for more important other trains (and every other train is more important) the 10:44 sets off in the same manner as dozens of others toward London (except it has hardly any passengers).  At Ruislip it waits for ages for some more of the more important other trains before setting off onto what can only be described as a siding.  Trundling down a single track at a speed familiar to all London road users (but not train travellers) it passes selections of burgeoning weeds, crumbling viaducts, electricity substations, old trackbeds and the back of Central Line surface Underground stations with waiting passengers visibly wondering how that train gets over on that bit by the hedges.  It passes the back of factories.  At times it is joined by important-looking freight lines.  It wends its lonely way through parts of West London that forever blow the theory that London is a city crowded with buildings - there are literally acres of wasteland and this train traverses them all.

It never stops.  (This is simply because nothing else uses the line it is on.)  It also never really starts because the line is not kept in any order that allows any speed.  It feels like it is going further and further into nowhere.

Then.

Then one more green light and it passes the gleaming Heathrow Express train depot.  It kind of springs into life at more than 20 mph and soon is in the back end of bustling Paddington Station.

And off I climb and join the hoardes of people pouring in from Wales, the West Country and from via Heathrow all over the world -  people everywhere from everywhere going everywhere.  Have I really just arrived from one of the most irrelevant pieces of transport infrastructure in London?

If assembly is anything - whether on a Sunday or Churches meeting together - it is a little like that journey.  We feel quite alone.  We look at the wastelands.  We feel we are travelling nowhere with nobody.  And then - and then we are part of the people of God.

What a day it will be when from the world over the people of God gather from their journeys through the wastelands of poverty and persecution and pain.  Ghost Trains are strange things - as anything must be that takes you to Paddington Station and leaves you standing there thinking of the Throne of Jesus and his glory!