In a cavernous concrete warehouse on an industrial estate outside Margate in Kent, an enormous screen flickers, day and night, telling the times of train services from north London to Manchester Piccadilly and Glasgow Central and Tring.
Whether or not anyone is there to see it, the 22-metre-wide board never stops flashing up live, genuine updates of departures by West Midlands Railway or service disruptions on Avanti West Coast services.
This, until recently, was the main departure board of Euston station, one of the capital’s busiest mainline railway hubs. And although it now hangs 80 miles from its original home, where no one has any ability to jump on a train to Watford Junction or anywhere else, it is still plugged into the national network and doing its old job, like a nostalgic retiree unable to let go.
It’s a surreal sight in an eccentric place – part storage facility, part private museum – which is home to a collection of trains, models and memorabilia now in the care of the multimillionaire asset manager, rightwing political donor and self-confessed railway nut Jeremy Hosking.
As well as restoring and giving a home to old locomotives, carriages and scale models, Hosking part-owns Crystal Palace football team, a luxury hotel in Sussex and Britain’s only private train (even the royal family don’t own theirs). In addition, he has invested more than £100m in fossil fuel interests, was the sole funder of Laurence Fox’s Reclaim party, and this week confirmed he was backing a £100m bid to buy the Daily Telegraph. It’s quite the investment portfolio.
Given his lifelong love of trains – which he calls “childhood obsession meets midlife crisis” – and deep pockets, Hosking was an obvious person to approach to take the 25-year-old Euston board when it was replaced by Network Rail in 2022. Unlike several museums, he said yes. But his offer to house it was, it transpires, based on a major misunderstanding.
The businessman revealed to the Guardian that he thought he was getting the original, analogue 1960s display board, which operated on the clacking “split flap” mechanism once common at airports and railway stations, rather than a 20-year-old board with LED lights. “It still wouldn’t have been an antique, but it would have been the authentic, late 60s, white-hot technology of its day,” said Hosking. “And actually, what we’ve got is the white-hot technology of 2003.”
Was that a disappointment? “To have given house room to the wrong departure board? Yes! But hopefully in decades to come, people will come to regard this board in a similar way,” he said.
He may be right, given the vexed saga of Euston’s departure displays since. The board’s removal was part of a plan to address overcrowding at the notoriously dysfunctional station, but its replacement by multiple smaller information points – and one huge advertising board – caused such fury that it prompted the then transport secretary, Louise Haigh, to demand the changes be reversed.
No such drama in Margate, where the departures board now hangs quietly above a collection that includes multiple steam and electric locomotives, the 1830s Broadstairs horse-drawn mail coach, an original 1990s Channel tunnel train, complete with onboard Passport Office facilities that were never used, and an exquisite art deco “Beavertail” observation car commissioned to mark the 1937 coronation of George VI.
The Margate warehouse was previously a storage space for the model train manufacturer Hornby, which operates a small visitor attraction from its former factory next door. Though Hosking has spent huge sums to make his site fully accessible to visitors, there are no current plans to open it to the public regularly, according to Frank Martin, the former Hornby CEO who now runs the businessman’s Locomotive Services Group, which also operates a number of heritage lines around the country.
Next weekend, however, both will open their doors for a weekend marking the 200th anniversary of the modern railway, and visitors can, if they wish, relive the experience of pacing in front of the Euston board harrumphing over delays at Crewe.
It is left to flicker constantly with live information, said Martin, “because every time you switch it off and switch it on again, you stress the electrical components. So in order to keep it running for the longest possible time, it’s better to leave it switched on, just ticking away in the background.”
The fact that it still showing live information, he said, “means that it’s been kept alive. It sounds a bit emotional, but it’s been kept alive – and the alternative was for it to be scrapped and lost.”