A look at stylish travel – before the tide turned

Articles in newspapers rarely start with the words "Once upon a time". Those are saved for fairytales.

When writing about the romantic, golden age of railway and ferry travel, however, it seems entirely appropriate to invoke the phrase.

Once upon a time the railways and ferries lived together in a harmonious state of symbiosis.

The trains would take their passengers to the ports, roll on to ferries, and onwards from there – and the luxury never stopped.

"A ferry crossing from Harwich to Hook would cost 10 in the 1950s. That was when the average annual salary was 40, so if you were the sort of person who could spend a quarter of the average annual salary on a ferry trip, you were used to, and expected, a certain standard of service, and you got it on the railways and ferries," says Russell Hollowood.

York's National Railway Museum, from next week, will be home to Once Upon a Tide, a new exhibition which harks back to a golden era.

It will also allow visitors to experience the museum in a way they have never seen it before.

"For the first time in the history of the museum, we're allowing people to go onto the turntable, where there is a model of one of the old ferries that used to cross the Channel," says Hollowood, the museum's creative content developer.

"It's the only time people have been allowed to do that, actually go onto the turntable, since the museum opened in 1975."

The exhibition is based on a PhD which has recently been completed by a student at York University. Simon Wilgoss's doctorate has involved him spending a number of years researching the history of the passenger experience on ferries to the continent.

He was sponsored to carry out the research by the Abellio Foundation, a German-based public transport company.

The foundation then approached the National Railway Museum, to ask if it would like to be involved in an exhibition based around a similar concept.

The exhibition, Once Upon a Tide, tells the story of the experience of passengers crossing from the Netherlands and Britain from 1880 to 1984.

Taking in over 100 years, the exhibition explores the route from Harwich in South East England to Hook in the Netherlands, when ferries were part of the British Railways fleet. The story of the route is told through the memories of the people who used it and the posters and artwork that publicised it.

"The exhibition looks at the people whose job it was to 'sell' the route to passengers and how they did it, and balances it with the actual experiences of travelling the route, told by passengers – with stories of homesickness, seasickness and all the things that changed over time," says Hollowood.

The exhibition, says Hollowood, is split into three distinct sections or parts of the story of the route.

The first part of the timeline goes from the 1890s, when the route first began, to the 1960s.

"That really was the romantic period for this kind of travel," says Hollowood.

"It was only the very well-heeled who could afford to travel in this kind of way, because of how expensive it was, and that was reflected in the level of service people got while travelling.

"People would travel by train, which would go straight on to the ferry, sleep in a cabin while the ferry crossing took place, wake up in the morning and have breakfast before stopping off in Berlin and then possibly travelling on to Rome or wherever else in Europe

after that.

"The trains were incredibly luxurious, it was all polished wood and brass and they were manned by guides who were often multi-lingual

and were able to cater for anything the passengers needed."

Interestingly, travel was designed to shield passengers from the fact that they were travelling at all.

That all changed in the next era the exhibition examines, when this type of travel became much more democratic and those who were travelling wanted to experience the actual travel.

Hollowood says that the Sixties, which heralded the birth of the airline industry, the advent of mass car ownership and saw a generation of men who had fought in Europe and felt the compulsion to travel back to the continent, changed everything.

"It became an industry of pile 'em high and sell 'em cheap," says Hollowood.

"Now people arrived at ferry ports far more by car than they did by train, so the ferries were stripped of the space where they would normally have carriages and turned it into car storage. There was also a surge in package holidays, so now a different type of person entirely was travelling by sea.

"These people didn't want to do things like eat in a snooty restaurant while they were travelling – they wanted to eat in 'Sid's Caff', which is what the ferries began to cater for."

The final age the exhibition looks at came with the advent of the Channel Tunnel. This changed the industry again, with lorries now becoming a major user of the ferries, signalling the end of the connections with the railway.

"When we look back at the golden age of this kind of travel, people actually don't realise that it's only golden in retrospect," says Hollowood.

"Most ordinary people simply couldn't afford to travel, but an exhibition like this allows people a window into another world."

After it closes in September 2010, objects featuring in the exhibition will travel across the North Sea to the Spoorwegmuseum in Utrecht so Dutch visitors can also reminisce about the historic ferry route.

Once Upon a Tide opens Feb 10 and runs until Sept 6.