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

Brochures used to tell passengers what they could see through the window. Now we sit and stare at our screens

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.

Ian Jack is a Guardian columnist

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