Anecdote – Steamed and trained
Steamed and trained
My home backed on to a railway embankment so I was used to trains. Old steam trains like the Mallard and Brighton Belle used to charge past my house all the time. I did not notice them.
Things were easier back then. There wasn’t the same frenzied pace, obsession with health and safety and personal indifference. Back then people were friendly. The older men would stop and chat, give you a sweet or show you how to throw a hoop and make it come back to you without being suspected of being paedophiles. People were friendly and kids had freedom. That worked both ways. When we were seven or eight Jeff and I used to climb over the back fence and play on the railway embankment. We didn’t go up to the rails and were perfectly safe. But a train driver must have noticed us there and actually stopped the train to shout at us to get off.
Our road was equidistant to two railway stations. Jeff and I would go along to the station at Hersham and chat to the engine drivers. They were very friendly. They let us go on the engine and do all sorts. They would even take us along on the footplate and drop us off at Walton station where we’d walk home. We were allowed to shovel coal into the furnace and pull various levers. When we went past our houses we were allowed to hoot the steam whistles. They made a hell of a din. So technical, at the age of eight I suppose I could say I had driven a steam engine. I am sure that Jeff and I were a great help.
My mum bought me a train spotting book. It was basically a list of engine numbers. All the trains had their own number. When you see it you underlined it. I played in the back garden and tried to note the numbers as the engines went past. But that was useless. I was so used to them that I didn’t notice them coming.
There were a keen group of train spotters at school. I joined in for a bit. I liked the bit where we went along to the footbridge across the line. We’d stand on there as the trains went by and become enveloped in the smoke and steam. That was great fun. I also enjoyed going through the tunnel at Hersham. We’d shout and get echoes and wait for a train to thunder through overhead and deafen us.
The culmination of my brief flirtation with train spotting was a trip up to London. A little group of us ten year olds went up to the big train sheds. I don’t know how we got into the place but we spent the day wandering around the sheds underlining numbers to our hearts content. We climbed up onto footplates and went from train to train. It was wonderful. There were lots of people around but nobody seemed to pay us any attention as we walked across the tracks and watched engines shunting around. There were hundreds of them. I had pages of underlined numbers.
I lost interest after that. Trains were OK but I preferred animals. Looking back it seems amazing that things were so free and easy. Nowadays our children are strangled with safety. They don’t live.
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