The 30 December 1967 saw the last train run on the Varsity Line. For more than a century, it had carried passengers between Oxford and Cambridge, ranging from codebreakers bound for Bletchley Park to a young Peter Hitchens. Pieced together by local railway companies between 1846 and 1862, it was an enviable achievement, even if C.S. Lewis sarcastically named it the ‘Cantab Crawler’ due to the train’s more relaxed pace of travel. Alas, despite dodging Dr Beeching’s axe, Harold Wilson killed the line off.
Wanting a railway between two of our greatest cities should not be a radical idea
Fifty-nine years later, I am living with the consequences. Like all great sibling rivalries, it started with one of us getting something the other did not. For Prince Harry, it was paternal love. For the Gallaghers, it was the spotlight. For my younger sister and me, it was her 18th birthday party. Whilst I was permitted a historical fancy-dress dinner party, she got a marquee and enthusiastic amateur DJs. Recently, I travelled home from Oxford to watch her have the party that I never had.
But getting home to Cambridge was an ordeal. Oxford and Cambridge sit barely seventy miles apart, yet to travel from one to another, the journey traverses a giant V on the map and takes just under three hours. There’s the inevitable GWR delays, due to staff shortages, as someone presumably pulled a sickie on a Saturday morning after a few too many pints the night before. Then there’s screaming babies, the people with comedically large suitcases only made for those wishing to dispose of bodies, and those kind individuals who are committed to ensuring that everyone can hear the whininess of the latest TikTok dance tune.
On arrival at Paddington, I face the part I dread most. I detest any subterranean travel, but I am forced to drag my three overpacked bags around the Tube and across the capital to King’s Cross, only to board yet another train back out the way I came. Naturally, I’m forced to pay £70 a pop for the privilege of all this.
But this isn’t just my sob story. If we are trying to build, as ministers often suggest, the ‘Silicon Valley of Europe’ between the City of Spires and the other place, bringing back a train between the two would be a good way to start. Wanting a railway between two of our greatest cities should not be a radical idea; in most countries it would simply be called infrastructure. Indeed, two former Treasury officials have just released a paper suggesting the long-mooted ‘Oxford-Cambridge Arc’ is Britain’s biggest short-term growth opportunity.
We’re actually about half of the way there: the line from Oxford to Milton Keynes has been built. But the unions are being awkward. As if derailing everyone’s plans multiple times a year by striking wasn’t enough, they’re now refusing to even open doors. The cold war between the RMT and Chiltern Railways has arisen because Chiltern Railways plans to operate the new line with drivers controlling the opening and closing of train doors. But the RMT wants every service to have a ‘second safety-critical staff member’, a guard to open the doors. This is just a silly opportunity for the unions to wield more power, but now Chiltern Railways has been nationalised, it’s on this government to get it sorted.
Then again, the construction of the Varsity Line wasn’t smooth sailing. Rival railway companies spent years squabbling in Parliament over who would get to Cambridge first, with the Great Northern Railway even plotting to muscle in on the route. Inevitably, costs spiralled, and by the time the line opened, the bill had ballooned by over 50 per cent, the Bedford and Cambridge Railway had run out of money and had fallen out with the London and North Western Railway, the bigger company it was relying on to bail it out. The LNWR eventually coughed up and swallowed the smaller company whole. Yet, despite this bickering, parliamentary wrangling and massive overspends, the Victorians still managed to finish the thing in sixteen years.
Going onto Cambridge hasn’t even started. I’m sure some in Westminster have already developed post-traumatic stress disorder thanks to HS2; the prospect of us building a new rail line may bring back flashbacks to bat tunnels, newt surveys and never-ending consultations. So why bother? Won’t it just be a taxi service for stuffy academics?
Of course not: tourists flood to the two university cities, yet there is no simple way to get from one to the other. They come by coach instead. I recall seeing about a hundred tourists descend from one; to which they promptly posed for a selfie for a young man in white tie at 11am. They were clearly convinced they’d stumbled into some otherworldly city where students dress extravagantly for their tutorials. The poor chap was, quite obviously, on a walk of shame.
But, even if the prospect of selfie sticks and tour guides doesn’t fill you with optimism, how about the projected 160,000 extra jobs that we could have had by 2035 by enabling this Silicon Valley of Europe to flourish? I’ve heard plenty of horror stories about my peers embarking upon the job market, so some highly skilled jobs within the embryonic Oxbridge growth zone would be much appreciated. Hitchens migh worry that an ‘Oxford-Cambridge corridor’ could become a ‘Home Counties California’. But isn’t that what Britain needs: a thriving region where the brightest minds are enticed to work on projects that can improve all of our lives? What about the investment, the money, the Anglofuturistic utopia just a train line away?
When I got my acceptance letter for Oxford back in 2024, I naively thought that I might be able to get just one train home by the time I graduated. It won’t happen for me. But it doesn’t have to be this way forever. If the Victorians could piece together the original Varsity Line in under two decades, connecting those two cities again should not be beyond us a couple of centuries on. If Andy Burnham is serious about ‘good growth in every postcode’ – including those that might prefer a Gail’s to a Greggs – then he must bring back the Varsity Line.
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