Platform Souls E-Book

Nicholas Whittaker

• Herausgeber: Icon Books
• Kategorie: Lebensstil
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 464

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2015

Beschreibung

Nicholas Whittaker's much-loved classic recollects the long sunny days of his childhood when, notepad in hand, jam sandwiches in the duffel bag, he happily spent his time jotting down train numbers during the Indian summer of steam and the heyday of diesel. Whittaker returns to his roots in this updated edition, casting a sceptical eye over recent developments, catching up with old acquaintances and considering the toll that half a century of ridicule and a couple of decades of privatisation have wrought upon his beloved pastime. As Andrew Martin notes in his Foreword, this is 'one of the best books ever written about rail enthusiasm'. Equally it is a poetically written memoir of growing up in a more innocent age, a hymn to British eccentricity and to the virtues of observing the world around you: 'Spotters – of trains, planes, buses or birds – are a last redoubt for something rapidly vanishing from our lives: looking outward, seeing, observing. People notice things less and less these days, while watching things more and more.' Praise for the first edition: 'An elegy: for the steam trains already vanishing when Whittaker's hobby began in 1964; for the short-lived diesel age which followed; for an era of near innocence.' Times Literary Supplement 'Whittaker writes with humour and considerable evocative power … For anyone who will admit to having a childhood brush with this now derided hobby, Platform Souls brings it all rushing back.' Independent 'Destined to become the Fever Pitch of the sidings and embankments' Publishing News

Leseprobe

Praise for the first edition of Platform Souls

‘An elegy: for the steam trains already vanishing when Whittaker’s hobby began in 1964; for the short-lived diesel age which followed; for an era of near innocence. … Delightful and unexpected.’

Times Literary Supplement

‘Whittaker writes with humour and considerable evocative power … For anyone who will admit to having a childhood brush with this now derided hobby, Platform Souls brings it all rushing back.’

Independent

‘Destined to become the Fever Pitch of the sidings and embankments, required reading for all thirty- or forty-something – and possibly current – “gricers” … it is the aching nostalgia, hanging like the smoke from a Stanier engine on Shap Fell, that lingers most in the mind.’

Roger Tagholm, Publishing News

By the same authorBlue Period: Notes From a Life in the Titillation Trade Sweet Talk: The Secret History of Confectionery Toys Were Us: A Pop-Culture History of Toys

PLATFORM SOULS

THE TRAINSPOTTER AS 20TH-CENTURY HERO

REVISED EDITION OF THE CULT CLASSIC WITH A FOREWORD BY ANDREW MARTIN

NICHOLAS WHITTAKER

This revised and updated edition published in the UK in 2015 by Icon Books Ltd, Omnibus Business Centre, 39–41 North Road, London N7 9DP email: [email protected]

Originally published in 1995 by Victor Gollancz

Sold in the UK, Europe and Asia by Faber & Faber Ltd, Bloomsbury House, 74–77 Great Russell Street, London WC1B 3DA or their agents

Distributed in the UK, Europe and Asia by TBS Ltd, TBS Distribution Centre, Colchester Road, Frating Green, Colchester CO7 7DW

Distributed in Australia and New Zealand by Allen & Unwin Pty Ltd, PO Box 8500, 83 Alexander Street, Crows Nest, NSW 2065

Distributed in South Africa by Jonathan Ball, Office B4, The District, 41 Sir Lowry Road, Woodstock 7925

Distributed in India by Penguin Books India, 7th Floor, Infinity Tower – C, DLF Cyber City, Gurgaon 122002, Haryana

ISBN: 978-184831-989-9

Text copyright © 2015 Nicholas Whittaker

The author has asserted his moral rights

No part of this book may be reproduced in any form, or by any means, without prior permission in writing from the publisher

Typeset in Dante by Marie Doherty Printed and bound in the UK by Clays Ltd, St Ives plc

CONTENTS

About the Author

Acknowledgements

Foreword by Andrew Martin

Author’s Preface to the 2015 Edition

Prologue to the Original Edition, 1995

EARLY YEARS

001 Steamer Gates: 1964

002 The (Not-So-Great) Great Western

003 Crewe: The Trainspotter’s Mecca

004 Sir Nigel Grizzly’s Spearmint Seagull

005 My Brilliant Backyard: Burton, 1966

006 Bristol Temple Meads

007 Waterloo Sunset

008 The Black Cities of the North

009 Yesterday Has Gone

010 Barry: Graveyard of Steam

THE SEVENTIES

011 An Itinerary of Despair: Our All-Line Rover, 1973

012 A Highland Fling: Women and Trainspotting

013 Whoa! I’m Going to Lostwithiel

014 King’s Cross Solitaire

015 Trans Europ Express: Paris, 1975

016 Commuting: Just a Way of Getting From A to B

017 Strangers on a Train: The China Clay Special, 1976

018 Fare-dodging

019 A New Agenda

THE EIGHTIES

020 A Grey Train to Fontainebleau

021 East Germany: Steam Days Again

022 Love on a (Very Short) Branch Line

023 ‘Return to Athens, Please’

024 A Question of Class

025 A Doomed Enterprise

026 Almost Virtual Reality

THE NINETIES

027 A Day at the Speedway

028 Postcard from Dawlish

029 Notes from an Open Day: Worcester, 1994

030 Indoor Trainspotting

031 The Care of Broccoli and Potato Traffic

032 Freight’s Great (Shame About the Wagons)

033 Je Suis un Trainspotter Anglais

034 Burton, 1995

THE NOUGHTIES

035 The Price of Fame

036 The Train Now Departing

037 Down the Junction

038 Museum Pieces

Epilogue: Before Trainspotting

A Glossary of Railway Nicknames

Nick’s mum

You said this was a holiday! A young lad is set to work polishing a steam loco at Butlin’s, Pwllheli, summer 1965.

About the Author

Nicholas Whittaker is the author of well-received histories of confectionery (Sweet Talk) and toys (Toys Were Us), as well as an account of life in the offices of Fiesta and Razzle magazines in the 1980s (Blue Period). He has written for the Telegraph, Guardian, Daily Mail and Sunday Times. He lives in London.

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS(in no special order)

Bill Wright for all the wonderful photos. Apart from the splendid cover, the rest are reproduced here in black and white, but it is well worth checking out Flickr for the full colour versions: www.flickr.com/photos/barkingbill

Walter and Aidie Parker, and the collection of the late Alf Moss, for helping with the photos of Burton and Crewe.

Steve Burdett for the China Clay and Henley pics.

Philip Cotterell, Andrew Furlow, Leena Normington, Nira Begum and Tom Webber at Icon Books for their enthusiasm and support.

Duncan Heath, Icon’s Editorial Director, for his guidance and saintly patience with the copy-editing.

Ian Preece, my mentor for the original 1995 book and still today the unstinting voice of common-sense editorial nous.

Marie Doherty, for her elegant typesetting.

Andrew Martin, for his wonderful introduction, which makes me sound a lot more intellectual than I really am!

Staff at the London Transport Museum.

Richard from Clapham Junction.

Gary Johnson at British Railways Books.

I take full responsibility for any errors, of course, which I blame on too many coffees and listening to Who’s Next on full volume. Little wonder that I can hardly hear the station announcements these days …

FOREWORDby Andrew Martin

The full title of this book is deliberately provocative. It was first published in 1995 when ‘trainspotterish’ had come to suggest any futile male pursuit with anal-retentive overtones.

A railway publicity officer called Ian Allan invented trainspotting in 1942, by publishing lists of locomotives that could then be ticked off when sighted or ‘copped’. The satirists concentrated on the ‘ticked off’ part, but the important bit was the ‘when sighted’. The need to actually see the engines (dispensed with, admittedly, by the wretched ‘fudger’, who ticked them off without troubling to leave his bedroom) required the true spotter to be a dynamic, mobile figure.

I first had an inkling of this in the late 1970s when I was in the same class – at a northern secondary modern – as a very keen spotter called Chris Smith. He was far from being the nerd of the emerging mythology. For a start, he was hard; you wouldn’t mess with him. He also got about. My dad worked for BR, so I had free train travel, and I would see Chris Smith from trains, as he occupied a variety of lineside posts, some an impressively long way out of town. I was about to write that the young Nicholas Whittaker (author of the book you are about to read) was like the young Chris Smith, but since Platform Souls is one of the best books ever written about rail enthusiasm, there would be more propriety in saying that Chris Smith was like Nicholas Whittaker.

Whittaker and his fellow spotters didn’t wait for the trains to come to them; they went to the trains. Engine sheds were ‘bunked’: that is, furtively invaded. A good deal of bravery was required, and Platform Souls takes us into a Beano comic world of scruffy boys inventing ‘dodges’, sneaking through holes in fences, being chased by red-faced adults in official uniforms. Even when not bunking, the spotter was at large, perhaps travelling – by train of course – to a bunk. ‘We’d strike off early, with sandwiches and flasks of Heinz soup tucked into our tartan duffel bags.’

There’s nothing especially virtuous about trespassing, but the point is that the trainspotter actually left the house; he made his own entertainment. This seems more of a virtue now than in 1995, but even then Whittaker seems to have foreseen our thraldom to the solipsistic world of a little glowing screen: ‘As society becomes more TV-dependent and we enjoy everything by proxy – sport, crime, road accidents, even practical jokes – so we are encouraged to despise eccentricity. Once harmless hobbies are redefined as sad and definitely untrendy.’

It’s true that, after the ‘bunk’, the spotter came home to make order out of chaos. ‘Our disorderly lists of cops had to be processed, each one slotted into its appropriate place in the ABC Combine and marked with its red underline.’ But in Platform Souls these quiet interludes are akin to scenes of a soldier cleaning his rifle after a battle; they do not betoken a passive existence.

Those who maligned the spotters, then, did so partly out of ignorance. Whittaker puts forward another reason. For most of the period covered by this book the car was king, and trains were seen as a second-class form of transport patronised by second-class people. But I think it is also true to say that the spotters began to seem to be infected with the boringness of the trains they spotted.

In the first part of Platform Souls, dealing with the Sixties, Whittaker introduces the reader to the Diesel Multiple Unit: ‘the bog unit’, he and his friends called it, since it offered ‘no frills, bog-standard travel’. The DMU resembles a line of carriages; there is no locomotive. Whittaker mentions it almost in passing, as his means of getting from his home station of Burton to Wolverhampton, where he hoped to see some of the enchanting green locos of the former Great Western Railway, the kind with such quintessentially English names as Witherslack Hall, Tudor Grange, Cadbury Castle, Hinton Manor. (‘To the bookish child that I was, it conjured up a weird and wonderful England populated by Agatha Christie colonels, Wodehouse aunts and Elizabethan plotters.’)

That was in 1965 – one of ‘the last years of the iron age’ – when there were plenty of such aristocrats left, even if their brass nameplates had been prised off, or they’d been demoted to hauling filthy goods trains. Today, the entire network has been given over to worm-like trains that might as well be ‘bog units’.

But Platform Souls resists the soft-centred nostalgia of so much railway writing. The spotters of the book are young men, after all, not a bunch of wet antiquarians. Even though Whittaker loved steam (‘Diesels could never be as alive as steamers, they didn’t work by the same dirty and elemental chemistry’), his account of its decline and disappearance is nuanced. He liked the Western class of diesels, for example, because their wide windows reminded him of Yves St Laurent’s specs.

Here he is in 1966, a couple of years before steam’s fullstop: ‘Britain’s railway workshops (still a dozen of them even then) were busy building the future and we trainspotters had the privilege of seeing many of these diesels spanking new, fresh out of Derby or Crewe.’ Another virtue of trainspotting is thereby disclosed: its practitioners were in tune with something Britain could be proud of doing well: engineering. This virtue also seems magnified from today’s perspective, when we have a shortage of engineers, and all politicians would like to ‘rebalance’ Britain away from the ‘service economy’ and the sedentary, demeaning and dead-end work it offers young people.

I like it when Whittaker does give way to nostalgia, however: ‘… the sepulchral gloom of the sheds, the clang of buffers in the goods yard, the ghostly whistle in the small hours, the night train throwing panicked shadows against the slummy houses.’ This is a beautifully written book. Scenes are fixed in the reader’s mind with a few apparently casual sentences. Here is the old Burton station, which was replaced in 1970 with a ‘Lego kit’: ‘… a grand Victorian building, proud with filigree and importance, coiled around with the thick brown aroma of history.’ Or here is the Paris Metro, which Whittaker – like any right-minded person – loved on sight: ‘It wasn’t just the trains, but the whole ambience: the bready smell, the warning hooters, the sad Africans with their lazy brooms.’

The writing is such that Platform Souls will be enjoyed even by those with no particular interest in trains, should they be adventurous enough to pick it up. The book can be savoured as a classic memoir of growing up, as Whittaker’s gang of spotters gradually disperse, encumbering themselves with jobs and long-term relationships, but periodically re-convening for railway jaunts. (These passages, full of bittersweet affection and recriminations, reminded me of the Seventies sitcom, Whatever Happened to the Likely Lads?)

I see no reason why Platform Souls shouldn’t be enjoyed by that category of persons to whom trainspotting is supposedly anathema. I mean women, of whom there are plenty in this book. It is a testament to Whittaker’s love of both trains and the opposite sex that he sometimes attempted the apparently impossible: to go trainspotting with women.

He brushes over the emotional details, but it’s not so very surprising to the reader when he discloses that, in the late Eighties, he suddenly ‘acquired’ a twelve year-old son. He attempts to bond with the boy over what else but trains. So many of the railway places, and all the steam engines, having departed from the real world, he takes his son to the National Rail Museum in York: ‘The place was full of lovingly restored railway engines, every one as pretty as a carnival organ.’ This visit to ‘trainspotting’s trophy room’ falls flat, so the pair go to a preserved steam line, the Severn Valley Railway, but the ‘trompe-l’oeil’ of a preserved line doesn’t do it for Whittaker or the boy. The scale is too dinky; the set-up too ingratiating: ‘No one bothers us … I wish we weren’t welcome.’ He longs for ‘some old codger of a foreman to come out of his office and chase us off’.

But this introduction is slipping into the lachrymosity the book avoids, so let me conclude by mentioning that, in 2015, the motor car has been comprehensively dethroned. Traffic congestion and global warming have seen to that. Railway ridership is at its highest level since the 1920s, albeit over a much reduced network. We have one high-speed line, and it looks like we’ll soon have another. Our trains might once again be fit to be spotted, and it could be that a new generation of enthusiasts will reject what Whittaker calls the ‘emotional poverty’ of atomistic car culture, in favour of ‘the joyful communism of the trains’.

AUTHOR’S PREFACE TO THE 2015 EDITION

It’s a rare privilege for an author to get a second crack at one of his books – a 20th-anniversary edition, no less. Many would pay dearly for the chance, to correct stylistic faux pas, to shift paragraphs around, add afterthoughts and hindsight. But therein lie many dangers, along the lines of ‘If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it’. Changing one small thing could lead to all sorts of mix-ups.

I have tried to steer a middle course, tweaking here and there, adding a few light touches. The picture I painted of our steam days stands the test of time, I think, as does the later diesel era. I have added a few small brush strokes here, a memory omitted from the original, but by and large I have tried to leave well alone.

It’s only in the later periods that I saw much need for change, removing references to Eurostar at Waterloo, for instance, but even there I have trod carefully lest things start to unravel.

I could probably have added a postscript of some kind to every chapter, but I thought that a clumsy approach. As for style and simile, well, as we all know now, there are only fifty shades of grey, so if I have repeated some in my descriptions of the steam age, I beg your forgiveness. And to any readers who find that I have left some threads unpicked, or missed those that should have been removed, I offer my apologies.

Twenty years after the first edition of Platform Souls, I think the trainspotter has, so to speak, come in from the cold (though he still braves it often). Not only are people leaving the trainspotter unmolested, but many who used to berate him and his hobby now seem happy to cash in on Britain’s love of railways. One night I turned on the TV and found railways on three channels at once – they seem to figure larger now than in the heyday of trainspotting! Michael Portillo, Chris Tarrant, Dan Snow, Pete Waterman, Fred Dibnah – all have fronted railway-themed programmes. Having a slot on BBC2 or BBC4 certainly seems proof of a discerning audience. Back in 1996 there was even talk of me doing a series on Sky TV. I was invited to Canary Wharf for discussions, but nothing ever came of it.

The demand for all things ‘railway’ shows no sign of slowing – books, DVDs, tickets and railwayana. If you’ve got the dosh you can even buy an old station to live in. 2015 will see over fifty steam trips on the old Settle and Carlisle alone. Britain’s scores of preserved railways all continue to do well. If there’s not enough steam here in the UK, then specialist railway holiday companies will gladly fly you off to Ecuador, Romania, Cuba, even North Korea, where you can snap away to your heart’s content, albeit under the watchful eye of state security who are far less indulgent than old Alf the steam shed foreman.

Despite all this interest in railways, people who should know better still get their facts wrong. Only recently I read an otherwise well-researched history book, the first page of which had the protagonists taking a Great Central Railway train from King’s Cross. While TV makes great efforts to achieve historical accuracy – heaven forbid that Downton Abbey’s Lord Grantham is seen with the wrong kind of fish knife! – such stern fact-checking never seems to extend to scenes involving railways. So long as it’s some kind of steam loco and there’s a porter with mutton-chop whiskers, then it will do. No matter that the so-called London express is being hauled by a dumpy 0-6-0 freight loco! Then again, it’s nothing new. Alfred Hitchcock was making the same mistakes in The 39 Steps.

It’s part of the trainspotter’s job to put these people right!

One of the best things about this new edition is that it gives me a chance to re-dedicate the book. The original gratitude still stands, of course, to my late mum with thanks for all the well-packed sandwiches and the pocket money, and to my children, even if they never did become railway enthusiasts. But it’s with a mixture of sadness and celebration that I dedicate it to two people who passed away too soon. That original edition contained a paragraph about the old trainspotters who were dying off, men born not long after the Great War, with names like Albert and George. I never thought for a moment that I would be adding any of my own friends to that list.

First, timewise, is Adrian ‘Bolt’ Brown, the junior school classmate who got me started back in 1964. As W.C. Fields might have put it, ‘It was Bolt who turned me on to trainspotting and I never even had the decency to write and thank him.’ Indeed, although I had a notion that Adrian still lived in Burton-on-Trent, I never bumped into him, or perhaps I did and simply failed to recognise him after the passing years. A few years after Platform Souls was first published, I saw his death announced in the Burton Mail. I don’t even know if he ever read the book or knew about his small but important part in the plot.

Second place on my Roll of Honour must go to school friend and trainspotting mate Andy Parker, who passed away in 2011, a great shock to me and many others. We had shared many trainspotting adventures. We had been firm friends all the way through grammar school and well into our twenties, when I left Burton for London. When I returned in 1987 to have a family, it was Andy who spontaneously offered to sort me a job on the Burton Mail and our renewed friendship lasted from then right until the end. On my last visit (though neither of us knew it) we spent a whole afternoon talking about music, stamps (more serious ones than the gaudy communist bloc stuff he was collecting in 1964), books, birds (feathered) and railways.

We said our goodbyes and I got the bus back into Burton, never thinking that it would be the last time we would talk about steam days.

His funeral was attended by hundreds. If he had looked down on us that day, he would have known how loved he was, in Burton and beyond. Our old friend Kev came all the way from Australia to attend. I could probably fill another book with stories of our youthful adventures. All I can say is that no one could have wished for a better friend and even if we spent some of our lives in different parts of the country, our friendship was so enduring that picking up the threads again was always easy.

So, to my dear mum, to my children, and now to Andy and Adrian, I dedicate this 20th-anniversary edition of Platform Souls.

Nicholas Whittaker London, March 2015

PROLOGUE TO THE ORIGINAL EDITION, 1995

Author’s note: I firmly resisted making any changes to my original Prologue, though it was hard and much of it could have been commented on or rewritten with hindsight. But that would have been meddling with the past and I include it here unedited for historical accuracy, and to show you how it was back in those spotter-bashing Nineties.

If there was an ugliest railway station competition, and I were one of the judges, I’d stick my neck out for Birmingham New Street. It’s always been one of my least favourite places. I don’t mind the dark cuttings with their tenacious ferns and furred sediment that’s been trapped on the ledges since the steam age. Rather, it’s the station itself that I hate. Low-ceilinged, harshly lit, square-cut, it’s one of the real horrors of the Sixties. We have plenty of lovely stations – York, Bristol Temple Meads, St Pancras, Rugby – but Birmingham was built to be despised. Not only that, it’s so drearily suburban. There are Class 90 electrics on the Euston shuttle trains and Flying Bananas on the Bristol–Newcastle route, but the rest is all local stuff, Sprinter units ferrying workers and shoppers to places like Aston and Walsall and Dudley.

Yet these are the moans of one man, obviously not shared by the scores of trainspotters who come here every weekend. Men like Alan Knowsley, amiable and balding, the left-hand pocket of his jacket so distorted by spotting books that it keeps its square shape even when he takes them out. As he looks around the gloomy concrete canyon at the top end of platform 8, his face is lit by the slightly crazed smile of a psychic. While shoppers and students wait for the 11.45 to York, Alan can see ghost trains and hear the crackle of ancient loudspeaker announcements.

‘Imagine, Jason, the exhaust on a Coronation taking one of the big expresses out.’ Alan gazes towards the top floors of the looming rotunda, imagining a billowing column of engine smoke.

Jason, his son, looks puzzled. ‘Big express’ has a quaint ring to it now. He’s heard of InterCity and Cross-Country, smart marketing concepts invented by men in red specs and fancy braces, but big express? It sounds like something off kiddies’ TV. He folds another Juicy Fruit between his teeth and tries to take it seriously for his dad’s sake. But Alan’s on to a loser. No matter how many tales he thinks up, he’ll never convince Jason there was a time when all a lad needed to be happy was a biro and notebook and a duffel bag with some Marmite sandwiches.

Trainspotting carries a heavy cargo of nostalgia, and there’s nothing wrong with that. If it’s good crack now, it was even better three decades ago. There were more trains, livelier stations, busier engine sheds. The country was a different place then.

In the Fifties, Alan’s army was a hundred thousand strong: Just William kids standing at the trackside to salute the trains and their drivers. This was England at its monochrome best: smoky and proud, sadly oblivious to the political skulduggery that was going to change it for ever. But those kids have long gone. Today’s trainspotter – he’d prefer ‘railfan’ – is a grownup with a credit card. He has made a Faustian pact with Dixons and comes fully equipped with camcorder, Pentax with autowind and telephoto, and a personal stereo on which to listen to Fleetwood Mac between trains.

Progress is inevitable, but there’s been a more drastic change. The trainspotter has become everyone’s favourite wally. With blacks, gays and big-boobed women all off the right-on comic’s agenda, here’s a man you can titter at in safety, political integrity unblemished. The Identikit is hideous: a gormless loner with dandruff and halitosis, a sad case obsessed by numbers, timetables and signalling procedures. He has no interest in girls, and girls have even less interest in him.

What on earth happened? No one used to take the piss. Trainspotting was our national hobby, as English as morris dancing and looked on with indulgence. We had the best trains in the world, it was only natural that kids took an interest.

Those comics have a lot to answer for. They’ve made a pariah out of a harmless eccentric and totally destroyed the market in anoraks — all for a cheap laugh. Yet no one has ever specified exactly what the problem is, or explained why trainspotting is any more futile than, say, golf, stamp-collecting or keeping tropical fish. The character assassination has been so complete that to protest innocence is only to dig a deeper hole.

As society becomes more TV-dependent and we enjoy everything by proxy – sport, crime, road accidents, even practical jokes – so we are encouraged to despise eccentricity. Daftness is for TV personalities, not for the likes of you and me. Once harmless hobbies are redefined as sad and definitely untrendy. And unselfconscious trainspotters, unaware they need an excuse for their interest, are sitting targets. I suspect that further scorn lavished on trainspotting is an inevitable side-effect of a culture obsessed by cars. Interest in any other form of transport is regarded as eccentric. Fast cars and posh cars are aspirational, but railways (and buses) are seen as a second-class form of travel, ergo any interest in them must be suspect and pitiable.

But how far will it go? In December 1994, a man found guilty of stealing rare bird eggs was described by the prosecution as a kind of ‘railway spotter’ – one more step in the demonisation process, and a rather sinister one. It’s one thing to make fun of a man for liking trains, but to use him as a stereotype for a criminal is surely dangerous. The trouble is, people have never forgotten that Michael Sams, the infamous kidnapper-murderer, was a quiet man whose hobby was trainspotting. He was even wearing his enamelled loco badges when he carried out his crimes. Such things sink into the collective subconscious, and stay there.

Years ago Birmingham had another big station: Snow Hill. With its Great Western colours and holiday posters, it whispered rumours to small trainspotters of places beyond their ken; places like Oxford and Paddington, Torquay and Weymouth. I first went there in the spring of 1965. My mum and nanna were off shopping in Birmingham, and instead of me whingeing all afternoon I suggested they dropped me off at Snow Hill and came back for me later. I’d heard about Snow Hill and was prepared to love it straight away; there was even a red carpet on the stairs down to the platform! What a welcome. The trainspotters’ view was limited by a black tunnel mouth at either end, yet instead of being irritated, I was fascinated. The tunnels tightened the station’s perspective and reminded me of the little doorway in Alice in Wonderland; when the train emerged on the far side there would be sunshine and open skies and a great sense of adventure.

But I find myself talking of the past too often. It’s the present I’m seeking to understand.

‘Look, Dad!’ yells Jason, suddenly galvanised. ‘There’s The Clothes Show.’ As the Class 90 electric slips out of the station with its Euston-bound train, Jason takes an interest. He’s finally found something he can identify with.

Alan smiles bravely. The engines he remembers from the Golden Age had names like Princess Elizabeth, Gold Coast, Pendennis Castle, names which reflected the glories of royalty and Empire. Hardly PC, of course, but better than today’s tributes to important customers: Rugeley Power Station, Blue Circle Cement, The CBI. Britannia and Royal Scot were names revered by all boys, majestic steamers that thundered past on north–south expresses. Still, electrics are better than nothing. Alan swings his camcorder towards the Class 90. Its driver gives a cheesy grin. With the number of home videos being made these days, it won’t be long before someone sets up a make-up department for image-conscious ASLEF men.

But I can understand Alan’s predicament: it’s not just the engines that fascinate the trainspotter. He clings, like a burr to a tapestry, hooked and entangled in the whole fabric of the railways. He loves the addictive smell of diesel fuel, the signals that blink from red to green, the rattle of station announcements, the driver with his pipe, and the tortured squeak on the rails as a ‘Brush’ pulls 500 tons of carriages out of the station.

And then there’s silence, one of those odd moments you get, even on the busiest station, when nothing moves and all the signals are at red. Jason chews gum and kicks a fag packet up and down the platform. Alan has time to think, and I can imagine him worrying about the future. The trainspotter is an endangered species; the railway magazines are full of obituaries these days, tributes to pals from the golden years at Paddington, Crewe and York:

… the stained glass window in his local church, paid for by friends and incorporating Ted on the footplate of Pixie, will ensure that his memory lives on …

Dads try their best to pass on the eccentric gene, but today’s youngsters are more interested in trainers than trains. Trainspotting promises no excitement now. When a country despises its railways like we do, it’s no surprise that our youngsters don’t carry a torch for them. But it’s not just the jokes that keep the kids away – there are no role models any more. Railwaymen used to be our heroes, gritty working-class men with denim overalls and jaunty caps. We couldn’t wait to grow up and work alongside them. Who could aspire to be a railwayman today, squeaky clean in corporate uniform and parroting phrases from the Customer Care Manual?

EARLY YEARS

001

Steamer Gates: 1964

It was Adrian ‘Bolt’ Brown who introduced me to trainspotting in those first summer holidays after leaving Christ Church Junior School. Considering I’d not long been accused of breaking his arm during a boisterous game of Wagon Train in the playground, I thought it generous of him.

His offer came at just the right time and I was grateful for the distraction. I had already guessed that our lives would never again be as easy as they had been for the last six years. Junior school had been full of joy. At secondary school there would be no playing marbles in drain covers, no belting out ‘Go And Tell Aunt Nancy’ to Miss Jones’ plodding piano, no squabbling for the privilege of fetching Sir’s mid-morning tea – no ringing of an old-fashioned hand bell to signal home-time.

I had other reasons for sadness. My heart was as broken as Bolt’s arm. The object of my affections was Olga Jaworski, a brown-eyed girl in a pink cardigan. I had happily ignored her for the past four years, but now, in our last year, I had become besotted, though far too shy to tell her so. Now we were going our separate ways, me to the grammar school, Olga to the technical high. My junior heart was all churned up.

Little did Olga or I know how quickly she would be brushed aside for the smoky charms of British Railways …

Trainspotting was as simple as it was brilliant, Bolt reckoned. A biro and a sixpenny notebook were the only kit you needed – any kid could afford it. Then you went along to ‘Steamer Gates’ and just sat there, watching trains. There were plenty of them then, with enough variety to keep any curious child happy: thundering expresses with passengers’ faces pressed to steamy windows; rattling freights packed with boxes, bottles and barrels; and long, slow, seemingly endless coal trains that left us choking in clouds of black dust. Four lines ran in parallel through Steamer Gates and it seemed that none was unoccupied for more than a few minutes.

I’d always been aware of the railways. Burton-on-Trent was criss-crossed with lines that ran between its numerous breweries, maltings, hophouses, cooperages and loading bays. Dawdling home from school I was often stopped in my tracks as level-crossing gates swung out across the street and a clanging iron bell heralded another train. With no more urgent worries than nibbling the diddies off a liquorice pipe or preventing my ice lolly dropping off its stick, I was happy to stop and watch.

From a mysterious hinterland of brewery buildings, a red Toytown tank engine would emerge, chugging through the gates with half a dozen wagons. Motorists huffed and glanced at their watches, but I was fascinated by what I saw. And then the train was gone, the sight and sound of it swallowed up between high brick walls and shadowy wharves. The car drivers gave a collective sigh of relief, the crossing gates swung open and we all went on our way, the motorists about their grown-up business, me home for my tea – milky tea and sandwiches of Stork and honey.

Yet the idea of trainspotting had never crossed my mind until Bolt suggested it. I liked Bass’s tank engines, I told him, but he just laughed. That was kid’s stuff, cutesy little puffer trains on an overgrown model railway. The serious business took place on the main Newcastle–Bristol line which ran through the town just a few hundred yards from Christ Church school.

Trainspotting was second nature to the boys who lived in the back streets around there. They went to bed with the clangety-clangety-clang sounds of shunting for a lullaby, and the railways must have burrowed deep into their subconscious.

I’d been through a few hobbies of late – car-spotting, fossil collecting, magnetism – but they were all lonely hobbies, show-off hobbies, the eccentric pursuits of an only child. In any case, there were no fossils in Burton; the Jurassic Period seemed to have missed the town altogether. So I thought I may as well give trainspotting a go.

It must have been one day soon after school broke up, the last week of July. Bolt probably expected me to get bored and slope off after half an hour, but I was quickly hooked, drawn into a boys-only world. Perched precariously atop the level-crossing gates, and later sprawled on a scruffy embankment with grass seeds in our jumpers and a shared bottle of cherryade, I knew straight away this would be the perfect way to while away the days of a significant summer …

I had the pen and the notebook, but there was more to it than that – rules to be learned and lore to absorb. For the first time I’d started on a hobby that couldn’t be swotted up from books. The only way to learn was to watch, listen and remember. The difference between a steam engine and a diesel was easy enough, but I soon learned to distinguish between a Duck Six (Bolt: ‘It’s got an 0–6–0 wheel arrangement, see?’) and a Jubilee (‘It’s a 4–6–0 and it’s a namer’). The Jubilees sounded like fun and I loved their exotic names – Sierra Leone, Bechuanaland, Punjab, Trafalgar – but this was years before I grew up to despise the glorification of Empire.

There were bound to be mistakes, but a chorus of mockery from the others ensured that I’d never again jot down a destination head code (‘That’s not a number, you clot!’) or feverishly try to record the numbers of the carriages as they rushed by. Before the end of the day I would even join in the loud jeers of ‘Scrap it!’ directed at any loco we’d already seen. Bolt was more daring: instead of the childish ‘Scrap it!’ he had an arsenal of swear words. ‘You old bleeder!’ he shouted at the over-familiar 8-Freights and Ozzies.* The enginemen could only glare back at him – if they’d been motorists they’d probably have stopped to box his ears. I was too well brought-up to use such language, but I thought it was wonderfully daring.

I certainly wasn’t prepared for the ecstasy that greeted one steam loco as it came upon us. Yes, it was green and clean, with well-polished copper piping, but why the fuss? ‘Brit!’ they yelled as I jotted down the number, 70004. I noticed it had a nameplate too – William Shakespeare. ‘Brit!’ they shrieked, tossing each other’s caps and jerseys into the air and whooping like Apaches. Didn’t I realise how lucky I was? they demanded. To see a Britannia on your first-ever day – complete jam! I was a ‘soddin’ lucky bleeder!’ agreed Bolt, obviously pleased that I had seen such a prize. All the best passenger locos had a ‘Pacific’ 4–6–2 wheel arrangement and smoke deflectors, he told me. I understood the 4–6–2 bit easily enough, but why was that a ‘Pacific’? Bolt didn’t know – it just was, that’s all. My questions irritated him. Me seeing a Britannia wasn’t enough for him – he had to make me understand how important it was too.

They called it Steamer Gates, but by the time I arrived the golden years of steam had already passed. It was a form of transport and a way of life already fingered for destruction on an immense scale. Falling in love with Jubilees and Duck Sixes was pointless: they were has-beens, clanking un-oiled leftovers of once-vast classes. Like the Scots and the Coronations, they had now surrendered their duties to diesels, to the shiny green Bo-Bos, Brushes and Peaks. With our warm pop and Smith’s crisps, our notebooks and pens, even a secret cigarette or two, we’d been set up as witnesses to a swan song. Children of the interregnum, caught in the uneasy period between the glories of the steam age and the cleaned-up InterCity-branded future.

Railwaymen were different in those days, working-class blokes in faded denim overalls. They strolled past us at Steamer Gates, swinging their billy-cans full of tea (to be heated up later on the loco firebox), puffing on Woodbines, grumbling about their bosses, wives and neighbours. In a good mood they might greet us with a nod and a wink. Being acknowledged like this made us feel great. All of us wanted to grow up and work with men like these, as a driver preferably, or a stoker, or, for those who didn’t want to get dirty, maybe even a signalman, like the one who worked the box by Steamer Gates.

Signalling was another job that needed muscle. In those days it was all done by wires, long, long steel cables that ran through a complex system of levers and pulleys to raise the red and yellow signal arms that might well be hundreds of yards down the line. The Steamer Gates signalman certainly had his work cut out, controlling this busy stretch of main line and keeping his eye on a rabble of hot-headed kids.

One of our favourite tricks, when he wasn’t watching, was to jump down to the track nearest to us, the slow freight line, and carefully place a penny on the rail. We never had to wait long before one of the lumbering coal trains turned that coin into a misshapen burnished medallion double its original size.

At Steamer Gates, the road sloped down to pass under the railway and part of the signalman’s job was to open the crossing gates for any vehicles too high to pass under the bridge. When there were no engines to look at, we would amuse ourselves by throwing a pullover up into the photo-electric beam which set off the klaxons and the flashing message: DANGER – VEHICLE TOO HIGH. Cyclists and milk float drivers knew damn well they were okay to get through, but still they would stop and scratch their heads and look guilty – until they caught sight of us chortling.

Down the line from Steamer Gates was Anglesey Rec, a field of worn-out grass enclosed on three sides by railway lines. Beyond the mesh fences, trains provided a constant background to the kickabouts and messing about on swings and it was only natural for the local kids to take an interest.

Alongside the Rec was a car dump and when train activity tailed off we sat in the knackered Rileys and Morrises, making engine noises and wrenching at the steering wheels, jerking the gear sticks and furiously winding windows up and down (regardless of whether or not there was any glass in them). A long time before we had Mad Max there was Barmy Bolt, cruising the ruins of Sixties England in his green Morris Minor.

In 1964 we were living the last years of the iron age. Sometimes, clanking shamefacedly past the Rec, came a sad procession: a Jubilee on its last-ever job, steaming its own way to the scrapyard, towing a couple of redundant Duck Sixes and a defenceless Jinty. Yet we weren’t so sad. They were numbers to be recorded, after all, and we were privileged to be among the last boys to ever see them. Death meant little to us then. Anyway, these locos wouldn’t really die. The molecules of iron, brass and copper would be recycled. The old steamers would be buckled, crushed and sliced with oxy-acetylene torches on their way to reincarnation. Pressed, stamped, melted and extruded, they’d live again in teapots, fridge doors and bicycle wheels, even in the staples that held our school exercise books together. We had yet to learn the maxim, ‘Matter can neither be created nor destroyed’ – but we already knew that.

Across the line from the Rec, permanently veiled in smoke and floating ash, were ‘the sheds’. Officially known as Motive Power Depots, railway sheds were tantalising but forbidden places. Burton had a huge MPD (code 16F) comprising two roundhouses side by side and a yard forever busy with locos coaling up or being cleaned. Apart from the few Jubilees that lingered on, Burton’s allocation consisted mostly of commonplace 8-Freights and Blackies. Mixed in among them were four diesel shunters and the odd Bo-Bo diesel. Occasionally, in the shed yard, would be a visiting 92-er, an impressive giant with smoke deflectors and ten huge driving wheels.

With Bolt as my guide, I did my basic training in ‘bunking sheds’. First came the long walk along an ash-path from Steamer Gates, past a fragrant wood yard and over a dirty brook. Taking stock of any dangers, you then had to duck past the railwaymen’s canteen and slip through a tiny brick doorway into one of the two roundhouses. It was such a small gap in the wall, but in that moment you passed from the fresh open-air world into a sulphurous gloom, illuminated only by shafts of light from the soot-blackened skylights. We stood there on the threshold, like mischievous elves in a giant’s lair. Leaning against the wall were huge spanners, as long as our legs. I had never trespassed like this before. Thrilled yet wary, our ears were cocked to a corrupted silence punctuated by the hiss of steam, pigeons in the rafters, and somewhere, far off, the sound of someone banging a hammer on metal.

And all around us stood the engines. I’d never been so close to one before, and without a platform I only came up to the tops of the wheels, feeling the true frightening scale of things. Still, how thoughtful it was for British Railways to arrange all these locos for the convenience of us spotters: one quick circuit of the turntable and we had another twenty numbers jotted down.

Not that kids were welcome in the sheds. We slipped through another brick doorway into the second roundhouse to get more numbers, but Bolt decided against venturing into the yard – there were too many railwaymen around. We went back the way we’d come, and as we passed the canteen a man in overalls shouted something along the lines of ‘Cheerio, lads, see you again’ – although on reflection I think I may have misheard and what he actually said was, ‘Bugger off, you little sods! If I catch you round here again …’

Despite these warnings, we carried on regardless. On future visits we even dared to ‘cab’ some of the locos. Setting foot on board the cindery footplate of an engine entitled you to put a ‘c’ (for ‘cabbed’) next to that number in your ABC spotting book. It didn’t take me long to get addicted to these guerrilla raids into the heart of railway territory. We regarded the shed foreman and the loco crews as spoilsports, but they must have had many a heart-stopping moment as they watched lads wandering around between the moving railway engines.

My friendship with Bolt was cut short in an unpleasant way. We’d been in a phone box one day – mere curiosity probably – when the man from the Post Office came charging out and accused us of ringing 999. We may have been larking about, but we definitely didn’t do that. After taking our names and addresses, he sent us away with a flea in our ear and that evening the police visited each of us at home and gave us a severe ticking off. My mum was aghast and I denied it tearfully, but no one would believe either Bolt or me.

How could two harmless lads get treated so badly? The only explanation I can think of (in retrospect) is that Bolt often wore a leather jacket with ROLLING STONES painted on the back. The Stones were bad news just then (they’d just pissed on a garage wall) so fans of theirs were hooligans by default. From then on, Bolt and I were forbidden to knock about together. Protests were useless and anyway Bolt was destined for Anglesey Secondary Modern, so it was unlikely we’d see much of each other now.

The summer holidays were over and in those six weeks I’d had my basic training as a trainspotter. From then on I’d have to find my own feet. Bolt had turned me on to trainspotting (and to the Rolling Stones) and it seemed like I owed him something. But even if I had been allowed to say goodbye I would have struggled to express my feelings. In any case, how could I have guessed that a junior school fad would change the whole course of my life?

POSTSCRIPT. Twenty years later, browsing the railway section in a second-hand bookshop, I was astounded to find a photo of us both. The book was a history of Derby Loco Works and the photo a scene from the 1964 open day and flower show, where we had been unwittingly snapped while clambering up onto the buffer beam of the day’s star exhibit, Coronation 46245 City of London.

It was a queer happenstance and I felt overwhelmed by nostalgia for that long ago summer of coal and smoke, the fragrances of wormwood and diesel and the taste of lukewarm cherryade. Normally, I might have bought the book, but some superstitious fear warned me off. I felt spooked by these two smudged ghosts from the Sixties, especially the skinny eleven year-old who looked a bit like me but stared back as distantly as any stranger.

Note

* There is a Glossary of Railway Nicknames at the back of the book.

002

The (Not-So-Great) Great Western

As a Burton kid, I’d got used to the Midland Region’s Duck Sixes, 8Fs and Blackies, so my first sighting of a Great Western loco came as a thrill. Ironically, it wasn’t at Bristol, Swindon or Paddington, nor any of those famous GWR locations. I wasn’t even out trainspotting at the time, but on a coach trip to Dudley Zoo with my mum.

Alongside the zoo, under a road bridge, was a disused station, still in use as a parcels depot. It held no interest to me … until I caught sight of a thin pillar of smoke rising over the wooden roof and insisted we go down for a look.

And there was 7813 Freshford Manor, green and brassy in the latticed shadows, simmering quietly and looking in no great hurry to go anywhere. I stared, somewhat mesmerised. Not only did this loco have a four-digit number (in 1948 every company except the GWR had been forced to add an extra digit to their loco numbers) but the numberplate and nameplate were cast in solid gleaming brass. There seemed to be no one else about, no activity on the platform, no sound at all except for the whisper of escaping steam and the distant sounds of the zoo. It was an enchanted moment, one which stayed with me in perfect detail for the next fifty years, so impressed on me that when I took my own children to Dudley Zoo a quarter of a century later I could hardly bear the memories.

Lions, chimps and zebra held no interest now. I trailed around the zoo with Mum but all I could think of was Freshford Manor. As soon as we got home I rushed for my ABC Combine and underlined it. For weeks it was my proudest exhibit and I would sit poring over it for ages. And the more I looked the more irritated I became by the solitary red line in an otherwise virgin section of the book.

The more I looked at the other GWR locos, the more fascinated I became. They had such quintessential English names – Witherslack Hall, Tudor Grange, Cadbury Castle, Hinton Manor. To the bookish child that I was, it conjured up a weird and wonderful England populated by Agatha Christie colonels, Wodehouse aunts and Elizabethan plotters. I’d got a taste for the Great Western and wanted to see more.

My first chance came when Mum and Grandma announced they were going on a shopping trip, to ‘the big shops’ as they called them, in Birmingham – and I was to accompany them. It sounded utterly boring, but I had no choice. From past experience I knew Grandma would be wanting to measure me up for socks and Y-fronts and any request for sweets would be met by a lecture on tooth decay. But then I remembered spotters talking of the city’s old GWR station, Snow Hill. I had to go. I begged my mum, saying she could drop me off there, then she and Grandma could come back for me after their shopping. Mum agreed to it, though Grandma seemed peeved at losing a chance to torment me with string vests and garters.

Snow Hill – I loved the name of it – had several platforms and the stairs leading down to them were carpeted. Carpet – in a railway station! I didn’t know that it was a marketing gimmick from Cyril Lord, and assumed the carpet was a leftover from the Great Western’s luxury attitude. I bought a platform ticket and went down. Mum had given me sixpence for the chocolate machine, and so I passed a couple of happy hours before they came to collect me. Grandma had bought me a new pair of gloves but I couldn’t give a shit …

In 1965, a couple of years after Beeching, Burton still fancied itself as important, boasting a buffet, a bookstall and a waiting room kept cosy by a crackling coal fire. As well as the north–south expresses that passed through, we had local services to Leicester and to Wolverhampton, the latter one offering a direct line into GWR territory.

On a freezing Saturday in January, I set off there on the 10.28, a rattling DMU, determined to add some Castles, Halls and Granges to that one solitary Manor in my book. DMU, by the way, stood for diesel multiple unit, better known to us kids as ‘bog units’. A despised hybrid, these trains were neither carriage nor loco and many trainspotters did not even bother to take down the numbers. DMUs offered no-frills, bog-standard travel – hence the name. They had dirty windows which rattled in their frames, seats that vibrated obscenely if not weighed down, and engine fumes that often seeped inside the carriage to give you a thick head. The only plus was being able to sit behind the driver and see the way ahead just as he did, watch his practised hand on the controls. As we slipped past the spires of Lichfield cathedral towards the drabness of the Black Country, I felt as intrepid as any of those explorers I’d read about.

At Wolverhampton I hurried down the road from the High Level station to the Low Level one, a surviving example of GWR style with chocolate-and-cream paintwork and the dusty smell of history. At the far end of platform 1, I caught sight of my next four-figure cop – 7022 Hereford Castle – the first of two Castles seen that frosty day. It wasn’t as pristine as Freshford Manor had been, but even under the grime you could see it had pedigree. In the loco hierarchy a Castle had to be worth at least two Manors. I watched as 7022 was coupled up to a Paddington-bound express and yearned to be one of the lucky passengers.

Fortified by cups of British Railways tea and bridging the gap with Cadbury’s Snacks (the finger ones, seven to a pack), I sat down on a luggage trolley and watched a sporadic parade of Granges and Halls which chugged in and out of the station. In between these smoke-shrouded entrances and exits, a cheerful little pannier tank busied itself shunting parcel wagons.

My second Castle arrived early in the afternoon. But this was no star turn. Pulling half a dozen goods wagons, it limped through the station, leaking steam from its old machinery, shame-faced at performing such lowly duties. The grime was caked on so thickly I couldn’t even tell what colour it was – certainly not Great Western green. This one, 5014, should have been Goodrich Castle according to my book, but where the nameplate had once been there were three bare metal brackets, a sight with which I was to become all too familiar.

At tea time I reluctantly headed back to the High Level station and got the boring DMU back to boring old Burton. Still, I’d definitely got the Great Western bug and couldn’t wait to spread the gospel …