The Railways

  Accounts of this subculture as seen from outside include a piece from the Manchester Guardian in 1951. A reporter went to Crewe, one of the stations that later closed its gates to spotters. He found the platforms pullulating with hundreds of them, drawn from a wide social range. The ‘almost drug-like fascination’ of the locomotives was noted. One aficionado, a seventeen-year-old clerk, had travelled from Wakefield with enough food to survive for two days, and nowhere to stay overnight but a waiting room or the open platform. The ticket had swallowed almost half his weekly wage. Two other teenagers had cycled all the way from Bristol. Despite this zeal, the spotters struggled to explain why number-taking had such an allure. ‘Well, what else is there to do?’ was the commonest response. Playing in the street was the main alternative cited. The interviewer left none the wiser.

  Had he dug deeper, the Manchester Guardian’s man might have learned more about the compulsive aspects of spotting. Steam locomotives were strongly territorial creatures: each had a home shed where maintenance and light repairs were carried out and its own roster of regular duties. The average spotter could expect to see the same engines on his patch over and over again. Visitors from further afield were a cause for excitement, especially if they belonged to unfamiliar classes – like exotic migrants dropping in to a birdwatcher’s back garden. Thanks to the immense operational flexibility of the pre-Beeching railway, excursions, cup ties, summer holiday traffic and diversions for engineering work could all pay dividends, bringing ‘rare’ locomotives from distant sheds. Anywhere like Crewe, a hub station with a constant passage of trains from all directions, became a destination of exhilarated pilgrimage. Time spent away from home, on holidays or visiting family, offered the chance to encounter new types and numbers. If the journey was made by train, so much the better.

  Besides, steam locomotives were exciting. This is easier to appreciate today than in 1951, when every train in almost every region outside London and the south-east had one at its head. No other land-bound machine can match the impact of a powerful engine working hard. The sharp propulsive beat of the exhaust, synchronised in sight and sound as the wheels and rods revolve, the smell of coal-smoke combined with steam mixed with its own fine suspension of hot oil, the penetrating shriek or hoot of the whistle, the orange-red glow of the firebox within the cab and the sparks hurtling from the chimney when working in darkness – all these are sublime. Even little shunters have a bustling charm of their own, as the Rev. W. Awdry well knew.

  Nationalisation made the hobby at once more challenging and easier to follow. Great Britain became a single hunting ground, as a unified system of numbering succeeded the overlapping lists of the Big Four. Locomotive exchanges were announced, to allow the relative strengths of different designs to be assessed on unfamiliar lines. Engine sheds themselves were gradually reclassified under a single, orderly set of codes. Locomotives wandered more easily beyond the boundaries that had divided the Big Four, echoing the promiscuous improvisations of the war years. Outlandish transfers were reported; in autumn 1948 a pint-sized shunting engine from the Burton brewery lines (ex-LMS) was sent to the former LNER fastness of Northumberland, to work the North Sunderland branch while its own pint-sized engine was away for repair.

  Locomotives in 1948 were also bewilderingly, inexhaustibly varied. Despite years of striving for standardisation by the Big Four, there was still great diversity when their holdings passed into public ownership. British Railways’ dowry of over 20,000 engines included all manner of archaic, specialised or experimental designs, originating from over fifty different companies. Among the prodigies was a ten-driving-wheeled monster built by the Midland Railway solely to assist trains up the Lickey incline by pushing from behind. Among the veterans were three London & South Western suburban tank engines of a design originating in 1863, which survived in Cornish exile, working china clay trains on a mineral line connected to the venerable Bodmin & Wadebridge. Even these were not the oldest on the network, an honour that fell to a North London Railway tank engine that had first turned a wheel in 1858; rebuilt with a small rotary crane grafted on to the back, it was confined exclusively to the old company’s works at Bow.

  Few schoolboy spotters could hope to encounter all these exotica, but the prospect was alluring, like the blank spaces left for rare stamps in an album. For all-round variety, London enthusiasts had the easiest time of it, with fourteen termini to choose from. Such was the devotion to spotting in the capital that a viewing gallery was built in the 1950s on the slope of the cutting at Finsbury Park, next to the Great Northern main line. Hard-hit cases might even take up Underground spotting, as Ian Allan published lists of its trains too, as well as London’s buses, trams and trolleybuses, the coastal shipping fleets and many other subjects besides. A businessman rather than a hobbyist at heart, trainspotting’s first and only tycoon used his ABC profits to found an enduring commercial empire that at various times has taken in printing, a travel agency, miniature railway operation, Masonic regalia, organic garden supplies, garages and hotels.

  One axiom the Manchester Guardian got right was that spotting ‘inculcates a strict regard for truth’. No one at Crewe would tick off what he hadn’t seen, and the boys were shocked that the reporter even raised the suggestion. In reality, he didn’t know the half of it. Trainspotting, especially of steam locomotives, was apt to raise intense metaphysical conundrums concerning perception and identity. How much of a locomotive’s presence was it necessary to witness before it could be ticked off? Did a glimpse of the wheels or buffers count, or even the plume of its exhaust? What about a good view of the tender, but not of the locomotive to which it belonged? Some held that it was enough just to hear and smell an engine, a heresy W. Elgar Dickinson overheard being contested by juvenile spotters on a railway journey in the 1950s.

  Workshops and scrapyards posed still more complex dilemmas. A steam locomotive is essentially a kit of parts, which are at once widely interchangeable and liable to replacement at varying rates. By convention, the identity of each locomotive – its mortal soul – is constituted by the main frames, which sit under the boiler and hold the axles of the driving wheels in place. A spotter visiting a steam-age railway works might encounter all of the following temptations to swell his list: a collection of parts from a single dismantled locomotive, unmistakably numbered, but with the frames nowhere in sight; a line of new locomotives under construction, each more complete than its neighbour, and ending with a pair of virgin frames that were still being welded or riveted together; some redundant frames that had just been cut in two; an entire defunct locomotive broken up into a big pile of bits. In spotters’ argot, how many of these could honestly be ‘copped’ without risking the accusation of ‘fudging’?*

  Trips to locomotive works and engine sheds were essential for any spotter who wanted to fill his ABC. Steam locomotives were less efficient than diesels and electrics not only on account of their squanderous use of fuel – converting perhaps 7 per cent of the energy from combustion into useful work – but because they spent relatively little time actually working trains. The rest of their hours were given over to taking on fuel and water, getting up steam, being cleaned after use, undergoing repair or overhaul, or just being kept in reserve in case of need – like the London, Tilbury & Southend tank engines that spent seven profitless years stored at a Carlisle engine shed, easy game for visiting spotters, before they were finally condemned in 1955. The British convention of reduced services on Sundays was another factor, as spotters well knew: the morning of the Sabbath was an ideal time to visit an engine shed, where locomotives simmered in rows awaiting the start of the weekday timetable.

  As the hobby continued to develop, comprehensive coverage could be procured by joining one of the ‘shed-bashing’ coach tours arranged by railway societies, which followed gruelling whistle-stop schedules in order to scour as much territory as possible. Looking back, the film editor Ian Krause reckoned that his local railway club ‘covered every slum-clearance area in E
ngland in a year’ during the late 1950s. Its excursions sometimes dragged on into the small hours of morning, with spotters stumbling around darkened sheds by electric torchlight.

  Older railway enthusiasts looked down on this kind of number-chasing. It seemed a mark of immaturity in the young, and of a narrow or obsessive outlook in those old enough to know better. This was to miss the point. For successive generations in the 1940s–60s, spotting was the usual entry-level activity from which any broader interest in railways developed, a desire to join the workforce not excluded. This allure was knowingly exploited as early as 1946 in The Railwaymen, a short recruitment film made for the Ministry of Transport and Central Office of Information. The last scene shows a kindly old railwayman urging a schoolboy to head for home after a long day on the platforms, before furtively whipping out his own notebook to take the number of an approaching express. By 1956, the back cover of the ‘Combine’ featured an advertisement headed BRITISH RAILWAYS HAVE A MESSAGE FOR BOYS ABOUT TO LEAVE SCHOOL. Wherever they ended up working, spotters collectively generated traffic and revenue in their own right, as pocket money and paper-round income was poured into travel and platform tickets.

  Special excursions were another channel through which railway enthusiasts repaid their debt to the network. The foundation year was 1938, when Great Northern Railway No. 1 was brought out of retirement at York Railway Museum. Built in 1870, it was the sole survivor of a fabled class that starred in the Race to the North of 1895 (one of which was the ‘cover star’ of the first Railway Magazine). Its single axle of enormous eight-foot driving wheels gave No. 1 a wonderfully obsolete look by the 1930s, a railway equivalent of Grandpa’s penny-farthing bicycle. Yet its general outlines were elegant, with ‘the perfect balance of the thorough-bred’, in the words of Hamilton Ellis. For authenticity, No. 1’s special train was made up of antique six-wheel carriages (though this time they only went as far as Cambridge or Peterborough).

  British Railways also favoured special trains, many of which were organised by railway societies. Some of these toured remote or little-used lines, others offered haulage by out-of-the-ordinary locomotives; sometimes the two attractions were combined. Often there was also a valedictory element, a last chance to travel behind this class or that, or to traverse a route whose closure was imminent. As the replacement of steam accelerated in the later 1950s, followed by Dr Beeching’s unflinching amputations, it became barely possible even for the most keenly focused enthusiast to keep up. In 1962 alone, 2,924 steam locomotives were earmarked for disposal by BR, equivalent to the rate of one every three hours. The photo-spreads in the Railway Magazine for August 1964 (to take an issue at random) include the following headings: ‘Scottish Branch Closures’, ‘Welsh Holocaust Continued’, ‘East Anglian Deceased Diesel Services’, ‘Condemned!’ Another photo shows a well turned-out special train taking the Home Counties Railway Society over the scenic Somerset & Dorset Joint line, on which Beeching had already pronounced sentence.

  Most of the trains depicted in this issue have woefully grimy and unkempt steam locomotives in charge. It is noticeable too how shabby and under-used many stations appear, with weed-grown platforms, peeling paintwork, gap-toothed valancing and empty sidings. There was no point in directing care or money towards assets, wheeled or otherwise, that were scheduled for imminent disposal. Besides, manpower to keep up the labour-intensive routines imposed by steam power was in desperately short supply. In the prosperous sixties, few wanted to begin their working life on an engine cleaner’s scanty wage. For most of the existing foot-platemen, a white collar and a comfortable seat in an enclosed cab – diesel or electric – could not come too soon. A vignette from Scotland, 1966: enthusiast (to driver of one of the last A4 streamliners): ‘Nice to see one of these on the train’. Driver: ‘Should be scrapped.’

  For devotees, all this happened far too quickly. In 1955 it was officially anticipated that steam might not finally expire until 1990. The last steam locomotive built for BR, 92220 Evening Star (another revived Great Western name), was turned out from Swindon works as late as March 1960. Expected to work well into the 1970s, Evening Star managed only five years before redesignation as a museum piece. BR’s last ordinary steam-hauled trains ran three years later, on Sunday, 4 August 1968 (the equivalent date in West Germany, where modernisation was less convulsive, was 26 October 1977). What was billed as the final steam train of all ran a week after that: a valedictory trip for enthusiasts, remembered as the ‘Fifteen Guinea Special’ because the ticket prices were widely regarded as a rip-off. By nice symmetry, its route included the original Liverpool & Manchester line, main-line steam having retreated in its last months to the very region where it began 138 years before. Crowds of the ticketless crammed station platforms to watch. Others lined the route, just as people had done three years before to pay their respects at the passing of Sir Winston Churchill, Britain’s last great railway-borne funeral.

  It was not simply the extinction of steam that left a void: an entire working world had disappeared too. In 1962 Britain was still a land of well-staffed country stations served by steam-hauled carriages of pre-war design, with goods yards equipped to handle wagons full of anything from coal to cattle. By 1968 there were no such stations or trains left, many of the lines they served had gone, and the surviving network had adopted new uniforms, liveries and typography which all seemed to spurn the inheritance of the past. These years were the enthusiasts’ equivalent of the Dissolution of the Monasteries (missing only the martyrdoms), an onslaught that has been dissected, mourned and memorialised within the subculture ever since.

  Any outsider curious to know what steam-age trainspotting was like can read all about it in veterans’ memoirs. This is a relatively recent publishing genre. The British Library’s oldest item with the key word in the title, beating Irvine Welsh’s grim novel of Edinburgh junkie life by three years, is 30 Years of Trainspotting, by John Stretton (1990). Unlike Welsh’s book, no one could accuse 30 Years of Trainspotting of having a misleading title. In its pages we learn that 1962 was Stretton’s peak year, with 3,198 ‘cops’, and that by the end of 1963 his loco tally stood at 14,565, of which 11,666 were steam. A little autobiographical detail is included too, including the author’s love of the guitar sounds of Duane Eddy, but the text really takes second place to the photographs, whose subjects may easily be guessed.

  Anyone hoping for a more reflective account had to wait for Nicholas Whittaker’s Platform Souls (1995). Whittaker took up spotting in 1964, aged eleven. There was then still plenty of steam around his home town of Burton-on-Trent, but it was fading fast. Spotters hailing from Liverpool or Manchester were envied, even though they seemed ‘thinner, paler, and not as tall as the rest of us’, as if from too much exposure to smoke and steam. Aware that his objects of devotion were on borrowed time, Whittaker staged a magnificently futile protest in 1966, standing with a friend on the already disused platform of Horninglow station as the line’s last ever freight train came through. They waved a home-made banner lettered UP WITH STEAM at the diesel in charge and were captured on film by the man from the Burton Mail.

  For Whittaker and his friends, spotting was but one adolescent pursuit among several, taking its turn with football, music and (a little later) girls. Musical references in particular have become a touchstone of the 1960s ‘spot-lit’ genre – blatantly so in the case of Phil Mathison’s Shed Bashing with the Beatles (2006). The stock props of 1950s recollections tend to be more tangible: gabardines, school caps and blazers, duffel bags (or old gas-mask holders), egg sandwiches, Tizer (or R. White’s lemonade). These half-generational differences count for less than the similarities, especially the memoirs’ emphasis on the rewards of friendship. Spotting was a good way for adolescent males to fill their empty hours together. It was democratically cheap, requiring minimal equipment: notebook, pencil, ABC. Like birdwatching, the payback came from a mixture of application, observation and luck; it encouraged both co-operation and good-natured rivalry. S
potters did not usually form gangs, defend territory or set out to beat each other up. They also developed an early taste for independence and a working knowledge of cheap public transport. For a gaggle of unsupervised twelve- and thirteen-year-olds to cross an unfamiliar city, locate an engine shed and joyfully swarm all over forty or fifty examples of British heavy engineering was – to borrow an expression from a later time – empowering. If the visit was a stolen one, via a back gate or hole in the wall, so much the better.

  A decade after the end of steam, this subculture was still in a fairly healthy state. Diesel depots were used to incursions by spotters, and some allowed them in on the nod. Ian Allan’s booklets could be found not only at station kiosks, but in ordinary bookshops too. There was even a rival brand, Platform 5 Publications. Their purchasers haunted the platform ends, even as their fathers had. But the contingents were thinning; and as they thinned, the proportion of spotters who might on first inspection come up to scratch in the pursuit of football, music or girls steadily fell. The residue of spotters were (and are) highly conspicuous on their platform ends, and could be (and are) jeered and gestured at from the safety of a carriage seat: dowdy-looking misfits to the public eye, pointlessly engaged in a project with no cultural, aesthetic or monetary value.

  By 1987 the hobby’s image problem was being debated in the pages of Rail Enthusiast, upstart junior cousin to the Railway Magazine and Railway World. One apparently genuine letter prescribed wardrobe makeovers, even to the extent of red-framed specs (‘Get trendy, get trainspotting!’). But it was no use. Viz comic, that bellwether of 1980s popular culture, introduced a new character in the same year, ‘Timothy Potter, Trainspotter’. Bespectacled, acne-dappled and dressed as if by his mother, myopic Timothy is too hopeless even to cut it as a number-collector. After various punishing mishaps, he decides to go home and spot phone numbers instead (‘there are lots of them in the telephone directory’).