The London to Edinburgh train ride was once a thing of wonder. Can it be again?

Our art teacher had the habit of gripping his gown in both hands – at chest-level, like a Victorian making a speech, his thumbs in his lapels – and staring out through the classroom window, smiling at the memory of all the fine things he had seen. “Boys,” he might say after a minute or two’s silence, “the Wembley Exhibition had the most marvellous pavilions.” More often, it was cathedrals he remembered: those that lined the route of the London-to-Edinburgh train, a progress that started in Peterborough and ran via York Minster to its magnificent climax at Durham, with Lincoln sometimes mentioned too, because when he was an art student in the 1920s the occasional express to the north still went that way. Each had its different beauty. He suggested we found photographs and saw for ourselves.

Sixty and more years later, the cathedrals of Mr Smyth’s reverie still stand untouched, though my own highlight – on a journey I must have made hundreds of times – comes further north, with the dash along the cliffs at the Scottish border and the glimpse of the North Sea tumbling on the rocks below. Many other sights have vanished meanwhile. The multi-chimneyed brickworks that sailed across the flatlands south of Peterborough; the shipyard cranes poking their heads out of the Tyne valley; the colliery near Alnmouth where well into the 1970s a small steam engine could be seen shunting wagons. Gone, all gone, as completely as the dodo.

But even if they still existed, who would notice them today? Fewer people look out of the carriage window now. The flicker-book world of Robert Louis Stevenson’s poem holds no charm: “And here is a mill and there is a river:/ Each a glimpse and gone for ever!” Publicity-conscious railway companies once produced booklets that told the traveller what to keep an eye out for beyond the telegraph wires – old battlefields, churches, birthplaces – but now we have other entertainments and preoccupations: keyboards to tap, screens to stroke and prod. What used to be thought of as “long-distance travel” (which in Britain certainly included the 400 miles between London and Edinburgh) is now an ordinary experience, prompting only the smallest sense of adventure and occasion. Many more people do it. The cancellation of the eastern arm of HS2 and the projected high speed line across the Pennines may be a political betrayal of northern England, whose railways have been in a ruinous state for decades. But the whole scheme, from Euston northwards, can also be read as a symptom of incurable hypermobility.

In the early 1960s, only five or six trains a day left Edinburgh Waverley for London King’s Cross, with nameboards advertising them variously as the Flying Scotsman, the Talisman, the Heart of Midlothian and the Queen of Scots. The fastest journey took six hours. Today, there are 28 trains each way, with average journey times of four hours 30 minutes. Twenty-six are operated by the state-owned franchise London North Eastern Railway (LNER), and bear the name Azuma, which means “east” in Japanese; the other two are run by Lumo, a new subsidiary of First Group, which, according to its publicity, has formed…