Platform Souls

The Trainspotter as 20th-Century Hero

Nicholas Whittaker

• Publisher: Icon Books
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781848319905
• Topic: Technology & Engineering
• Subtopic: Rail Transportation
• Index: Technology & Engineering

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

EARLY YEARS

001

Steamer Gates: 1964

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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

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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...

Table of contents

• Copyright Page
• Contents
• About the Author
• Acknowledgements
• Foreword
• Author’s Preface to the 2015 Edition
• Prologue to the Original Edition, 1995
• Early Years
• The Seventies
• The Eighties
• The Nineties
• The Noughties
• Epilogue: Before Trainspotting
• A Glossary of Railway Nicknames
• Back Cover