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  My inner trainspotter began to swoon. But l wasn’t the only one gazing with curiosity at the strange-looking train sitting in Marylebone station. Strange in that, rather than having arrived from the suburban towns of High Wycombe or Amersham, it seemed to have rolled in from 1971. The commuters drifted off to work but l was lucky, as I had a ticket to ride on this retro beast. Wrexham & Shropshire is one of the youngest, and smallest, of Britain’s 25 train operators, and it celebrated its first birthday this ear. The service runs five direct trains a day from the capital to Wolverhampton, Telford and Shrewsbury; the journey ends at Wrexham, giving the ‘capital’ of North Wales a direct link with London for the first time since 1967. Inside the carriages, pulled by a refurbished Class 67 diesel engine, everything was defiantly old school: window tables galore, impeccably friendly service and a dining car in first class. ‘We tell people we’re renovating our rolling stock but they’ve been asking us not to as the old seats are so comfy,’ said Thomas Abelman, the railway company’s marketing director. ‘I wouldn’t want to comment on why Virgin and others don’t offer the same things we do but we’re still here after our first year so we’re obviously providing something that people feel they can’t get on other trains.’ Soon after leaving London we passed the gentle Chiltern Hills and continued on through Banbur to Leamington Spa. We chugged through swathes of Middle England on train tracks that seemed to be rarely used. We sailed through rickety, quiet rural stations with names like Stretchford and Cosford, all white dogtooth railings surrounded by warm licks of green pasture. Passing through the epic greyness of Wolverhampton Station I saw a newly married couple, the man still in his best suit, wearily clamber on to the train, presumably setting off on their honeymoon. l craned my neck to check out the floodlights at mammoth Villa Park one of the last pieces of modem city hardware before we returned to countryside, making our approach to the Severn valley. I tucked into a lamb shank and a bottle of Shiraz. The serenity continued when I got off at Shrewsbury, a market town that’s packed with Tudor and Elizabethan buildings. It was the childhood home of Charles Darwin and this year the bicentenary of his birth is being robustly celebrated: the centrepiece is a vast riverside sculpture called ‘Quantum Leap’ which looks like a dinosaur’s ribcage. You probably wouldn’t expect postmodern self-referencing in Shrewsbury, but the town’s market place is now home to ‘The Old Market Place’, a digital cinema and media centre located in what was originally the offices for the region’s wool industry. It’s a quirky kind of regeneration, but it’s possibly the only place in Britain where you can watch heavily CGI-ed action movies in an auditorium with genuine Elizabethan oak beams above your head. I slept through the return journey. Weeks later, memories of my quiet trip are still making me look for excuses to head back to Shropshire e cry time I’m squeezed on to a ludicrously overpacked train carriage on one of London’s other rail providers at rush hour. A haven for trainspotters the Wrexham & Shropshire line may well be, but it’s also nice to discover that the golden age of train tra\ el didn’t necessarily die with the passing of steam.