Europe 1975: A Throwback Memory

I've been travelling independently for well over half a century. From my earliest trips, I have scattered memories of incidents here and there. This week, I got hit out of left field by a memory from my first independent trip to Europe in 1975, thanks to Instagram's random selection of stories that the software thinks might interest me. That picture so intrigued me that I promptly went digging for more. Here's the photo that IG turned up for my consideration -- a rather unusual sight by anyone's standards.

Let's face it, it isn't every day that you see a passenger train charging across the apron at an airport terminal. The location was the airport at Le Touquet - Paris-Plage in northern France, right on the coast of the English Channel south of the ferry ports at Calais and Boulogne. The scene was the transfer point between two legs of an unusual rail-air hybrid service that used to connect Paris and London three times a day -- "The Silver Arrow."

Since this was 1975, there was of course no Channel Tunnel to speed up rail travel between the two capitals. The available options were using rail at each end to connect with the ferries across the Channel from Calais and Boulogne, or to fly from Paris (Orly or Le Bourget) to London (Heathrow or Gatwick). The all-air option was fearfully expensive, while the traditional ferry crossing would take 5 hours or more (including train times) and laid you open to the notoriously rough seas of the English Channel, one of the most seasick-prone sea crossings on the planet.

I'd just spent four weeks touring on the continent, and would soon be heading back to England for my flight home when I saw an ad (while browsing a bookstore) for the Silver Arrow. I had a vague memory of having heard of it earlier, but wasn't aware of the details. However, the price was right and I booked it with no hesitation, having had my own baptism by rough water when crossing the North Sea from England to Norway several weeks earlier (that ranks as one of the most miserable travel experiences of my entire life).

The journey began at the Gare du Nord, the same station in Paris where Eurostar expresses now depart for London via the tunnel. The train, shown in the first photo at the top, ran express to Le Touquet with only a single stop in the northern city of Amiens. As we approached Le Touquet, the diesel train left the main line on a branch. This ran north-westwards into the airport property, crossed two active taxiways, and then curved around to west and ran right across the apron into a station platform attached to the end of the small airport terminal. The track across the airport has been paved over now, but you can still see traces of the route today on aerial photographs marked here with several "silver" arrows!

As we were rolling into the airport, I was seated on the right-hand side of the train, and so completely missed a grandstand close-up view of the aircraft as we rolled in.

 

Considering that this train would go no further than the airport before returning to Paris, it was far bigger than any possible need. The plane only seated fifty people; the train probably had space for three times that number. And indeed, the train had loaded up with the inbound passengers and departed back to Paris before we'd even boarded the flight.

Check in went very quickly, and so did the security check. And then we walked out to the plane. Ah, the good old days!

The name of the airline was British Island Airways, one of a sizable collection of independent airlines in the British Isles which flew smaller turboprop aircraft like this one in and out of smaller airports at various cities beyond the big metropolitan centres of the United Kingdom. The aircraft was a real rarity, one of a number of aircraft types produced in the 1950s and 1960s by the British civil aviation sector which saw only limited service with non-British airlines. This one is the Handley Page Herald. It was one of several different types built at the same time, all seating around 50 passengers, and all powered by the ubiquitous Rolls-Royce Dart turboprop engine. The Herald struggled to make sales, and only 50 of these aircraft were completed.

Oddly enough, one Canadian airline operated the Herald around the same time period. Eastern Provincial Airways, the regional airline of the Maritime provinces, operated this type into a number of smaller airports from their main hub at Halifax.   

The two pictures shown so far were of BIA's final colour scheme, so they must have been taken a few years later on, perhaps on one of the final runs of the Silver Arrow. Here's one more picture which dates from an earlier year and shows the colour scheme as it appeared on my flight. 

 

Attribution:

Ken Fielding/https://www.flickr.com/photos/kenfielding

 

Once we were all aboard and seated (and the plane was not full), the engines were fired up with that memorable plaintive whining tone unique to the Dart engines, and we taxied quickly out to the runway. It was a beautiful sunny day, and the flight to London Gatwick airport took only 35 minutes, a great advance over the 90-minutes-plus that a ferry would take from Calais to Dover. We flew at a fairly low altitude and had a great view.

Why Gatwick? London Gatwick had a feature that was nearly unique in 1975, although it's now seen as more or less essential in Europe and much of the rest of the world. This airport had direct rail access to the city with a station on the main line from Brighton up to London Victoria. Once we deplaned at Gatwick, it was a quick walk through the terminal, across the footbridge over the tracks, and down to the platforms. Our ticket included travel on the premium-priced Gatwick Express service which ran into London nonstop in a matter of 35 minutes.  

I was saddened a few years later to find out that the Silver Arrow was no more. It wasn't the Channel Tunnel that caused the demise of this unique service -- that still lay years in the future. It was something completely different in the world of ferries.

 

 Photo credit: Andrew Berridge, CC BY-SA 2.5 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/2.5>, via Wikimedia Commons  

 

  

Photo Credit: Bachcell, CC BY-SA 3.0 <https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0>, via Wikimedia Commons

 

These monsters, the SRN-4 hovercraft, could carry 450 passengers and 100 cars at a time, "flying" across the waters of the English Channel a short distance above the waves, and (most significant) were capable of crossing in wave height conditions up to 3.5 metres (11.5 feet). The hovercraft service was already in existence in 1975, and I admit it was a tough choice, but the unusual aircraft won out over the exotic hovercraft. I never did get a chance to cross the Channel in this way. Pity.