I think King Charles must be a secret petrolhead, much more like the dreaded, goggled maniac motorist Mr Toad than the gentle plant-loving nostalgist he seems to be at first sight. What else can explain his horrible, needless decision to scrap the royal train? The instruction saves almost no money, is poorly justified and is a brutal blow at the environment he claims to love so much. Trains, as we shall see, are a million times greener than cars and, as for helicopters and private jets, these things – which have survived the King’s cuts – are not green at all, even if they run on old bits of cheese and cooking oil.
Remember that the late Queen gave him an Aston Martin, in ‘Seychelles Blue’ for his 21st Birthday in 1969. He still has it, though it now runs on biofuel made from wine, cheese… and unleaded petrol. Maybe that explains the rich, evocative whiff of old-fashioned fuel, which I sniffed a few months ago as I walked past the Royal Bentley near the gates of Clarence House, the King’s London home.
His favourite vintage Aston Martin is a typical pointless show-off machine, quite unfitted for real life and related to the absurd, pretentious plutocrat cars that make London nights hideous with their mechanical burps and rumbles and screaming tyres.
It is, for instance, capable of going at nearly twice the national speed limit. The great racing driver Graham Hill taught him how to drive it at the Thruxton circuit, not the sort of driving lesson most of us have. The King has said: ‘It is one of the great cars. I adore the design and the lines. They are special… It was always the car to have.’
Perhaps so. But most cars, however fast and however lovely their lines, spend most of the time depreciating in the gutter, or emitting fumes in traffic jams, unless you have a motorcycle escort, which few of us do. Whereas trains can legally go at 186 mph, with no need for police outriders.
As the King is three years older than me, and saw more of the steam age than I did, I had wrongly assumed that, in his old-fashioned heart he would, like me, have been far more thrilled by the thundering, roaring, shining glory of the great express locomotives of his boyhood. It is not just me who thinks he is a bit nostalgic. At his Highgrove home there is a painted sign warning guests: ‘Beware! You are now entering an old-fashioned establishment.’
And yet he is, apparently, not nostalgic for trains. I have been noticing worrying signs about our Monarch. He could, for instance, have commanded the use of the royal train to carry the Queen back from Scotland, where she died, to London for her funeral. A special funeral railway carriage, with large windows and carefully illuminated to allow mourners to catch a glimpse of her coffin, even by night, had been commissioned in case Her Majesty died at Balmoral.
Such a journey would have brought reverent multitudes to stand by the tracks, as countless Britons did for Sir Winston Churchill’s funeral train in 1965, and as two million Americans, black and white, did for the slain Bobby Kennedy in 1968.
It would have been an immensely moving national farewell, as those like me who queued for hours for Her Majesty’s Lying-in-State can testify. But it never happened.
Of course, it was more convenient, more modern, and more in line with the tedious, humourless and unfeeling demands of ‘security’ to fly her down.
Quite why, in that case, it was ‘secure’ to drive the Queen in a banal car down the public highway from Hyde Park Corner to Windsor, I do not know. That was also a journey that would have been done better and more reverently by rail.
You can see why the arguments for plane and car prevailed among the modern people who now surround the King. But they all missed the point. To be at the Lying-in-State in Westminster Hall was to witness and feel something that could not be measured by conventional instruments, and which I struggled to describe, though I felt it very strongly.
It would be more modern and convenient and secure not to have a King at all. Yet even republicans would all be strangely, unexpectedly bereft once the Crown was gone. So I’ve watched carefully since then and was not surprised to find that the train was hardly being used in the new reign.
Well, why wasn’t it? I recognised this as an ancient tactic for first squashing a thing you don’t like, and then getting rid of it. So note the dreadful, wimpy, logic-free excuse for scrapping the train – that it was used just twice in the year 2024-2025. It is claimed that it cost £389,984 a-time. That figure is reached by just loading all the overheads on to two trips. Many more trips would mean a much lower cost per outing. But, for heaven’s sake, why was it used so little?
It wasn’t because of the weather or the economy or global warming. It was because our petrolhead King and his glinting, efficient modern advisers did not wish to use it. They decided not to use it. It did not just happen. It will soon be obvious that this decision is a mistake, but it will be very hard to undo.
When James Chalmers, the ‘Keeper of the Privy Purse’ burbles that ‘in moving forwards we must not be bound by the past’, he is emitting drivel. He was brought into the Palace from the steely, efficiency-obsessed world of PricewaterhouseCoopers, a Goliath among accountancy firms. Such bodies specialise, alas, in knowing the price of everything and the value of nothing. I am surprised he has not renamed himself ‘Chief of Accounts’, as I bet he has never seen a privy purse and wouldn’t know what to do with one if he did.
Change is not always progress. Trains are not some archaic survival. They combine extraordinary beauty with great modernity. Railways remain, by miles, the most modern, quietest, cleanest, most efficient, fastest and least wasteful of all forms of powered ground transport.
They can use almost any fuel. Their ‘rolling resistance’ – the friction between steel wheel and steel rail – is vastly smaller than that of any motor vehicle with a rubber tyre on a tarmac road. That is why all proper environmentalists do all they can to favour and promote them, as the royal train would if used properly.
So the King should immediately reprieve it from this foolish doom. We should have not just one but two – a grand old steam-powered locomotive and chintzy carriages to tour this country in real state, and a 200-mile-an-hour one in royal maroon, adorned with kingly emblems, which could whoosh through the Channel Tunnel to Paris, Berlin, Warsaw and Rome causing all those poor republican foreigners to envy us.
Both should be open to paying visitors when not in use. And a seat aboard the royal train should be a reward offered to those otherwise unrecognised men and women, who have never so much as seen an Aston Martin, but whose distinguished, unspectacular work and duty keeps the national wheels rolling.
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