This was not a case of an outsider picking on the hobby, for Chris Donald, the comic’s founder and editor, was himself an ex-practitioner. Profits from Viz allowed him to buy three large ex-North Eastern Railway country stations in Northumberland, one of which he restored and lived in, complete with an imported brake van in the old goods yard. But other mockers were circling around the dwindling tribe. 1988 is the earliest citation for the Oxford English Dictionary’s secondary definition of trainspotter, ‘(freq. depreciative): a person who enthusiastically or obsessively studies the minutiae of any subject; a collector of trivial information’. The related term ‘anorak’ is cited from four years earlier and defined thus: ‘(derogatory): a boring, studious or socially inept young person (caricatured as typically wearing an anorak), esp. one who pursues an unfashionable and solitary interest with obsessive dedication’.** In 1994 Stephen Dinsdale’s one-man show Anorak of Fire enjoyed a long run, introducing West End audiences to the character of Gus Gascoigne, trainspotter. With his thermos flask, chunky glasses, fur-lined hood and woolly hat, and his credulous stories about a legendary super-spotter with the power to see an elusive locomotive ‘even when it wasn’t there’, Gus was an amiable but predictably ludicrous figure. Such people were to be pitied or despised; not to do so was to miss out a little on the consolations of normality. Bill Bryson, in Notes from a Small Island (1996), dismissed the entire railway-loving tribe: ‘they are irrational, argumentative, dangerously fussy and often … have an irritating little Michael Fish moustache that makes you want to stick out two forked fingers and pop them in the eyes’.
People who have come within the orbit of railway enthusiasm will recognise Bryson’s sketch, without necessarily sharing his impulse to violence. But most railway enthusiasts were not and are not like this. A good many were never trainspotters at all, a term that has been stretched by outsiders – as with ‘twitchers’ (chasers of rarities) for birdwatchers – to cover a much broader range of interests. Seen from within, with a lover’s eye, the view across the railway network is one of breadth, rather than narrowness: an inexhaustible panorama of connectedness, extending together through time and space. For Eric Lomax, whose cruel destiny it was to be tortured by the Japanese as a slave labourer on the Burma–Siam railway, the revelation came in a moment, on 12 September 1932. Crossing a footbridge at Portobello goods yard in Edinburgh, he saw below him
a shiny heavy web of iron and wood, dead straight parallel lines of metal suddenly curving and merging smoothly into other sets of tracks; ladders fixed to the earth, climbing into the distance. They were spread out and branched off beyond the bridge; close up I could see the worn silver of the rail surface and the dark steel of the chairs and the wood of the cross-sleepers. In the dusk the tracks looked like lines of mercury on the oil-stained timber and gravel.
The thirteen-year-old Lomax became possessed by this ‘animated, mechanical, mysterious paradise’. Exploring the tangled lines around the Scottish capital, he ‘felt like Darwin on the Galapagos’. Number-taking was for lightweights; Lomax’s railway was ‘a scholarly passion, a “subject” as valid as mathematics or French, and I took it just as seriously as any specialist’.
A common response to this sense that railways mattered was to record them photographically. For the broadest portrait of life and work on the railways, the best source is usually the material taken for record or publicity purposes by the companies themselves, or (in the twentieth century) by news agencies. Here will be found everything from new infrastructure to long-obsolete working practices, captured with equipment of professional standards and taken with all the advantages of privileged access. But this is not to deny the impact of the conventional three-quarter view of a steam-hauled train in full cry, with a fine plume of exhaust to supply the effect of frozen movement. The best of these photographs convey a strong sense of place, locating the railway in its landscape or townscape, or simply in the self-contained world of ballasted track, signal gantries and sooty retaining walls. For railway initiates, the wind-bleached eastern fells of Cumberland and Westmorland will always be associated with the camera-work of the Rev. Eric Treacy, while the lusher landscapes of east Somerset and inland Dorset are inseparable from the name of Ivo Peters (1915–89), who recorded the steeply graded Somerset & Dorset Joint Railway – the southern railway enthusiast’s Anglia perdita – in its late heyday and last decline. Scotland had its own masters: W. J. V. Anderson in the Highlands, Derek Cross in the Ayrshire coalfields and the wilds of Dumfries and Galloway. Examples could be multiplied.
Other cameras were attracted not from any devotion to the steam-age railway as such, but because of the formal, incidental or atmospheric opportunities it offered. The Anglo-German modernist photographer Bill Brandt (1904–83) captured the smoke-laden railway ambience of northern English cities as early as the 1930s. In contrast to Brandt’s gathering darkness, Eric de Maré (1910–2002) and Edwin Smith (1912–71) engaged more explicitly with the heroic presence of railway architecture and the human paraphernalia of station platforms.
All these strains came together in the work of some younger railway photographers, just in time for the last years of steam. The representative figure in this movement was Colin Gifford (born 1936), a graphic designer and former art student who joined Ian Allan’s publishing operation in the early 1960s. Gifford’s day job included the restyling of Allan’s ABCs and magazines to have a more modern look. Much of his spare time was spent in pursuit of a corresponding modernist aesthetic in railway imagery, with the Swiss photographer Jean-Michel Hartmann’s anthology Magie du Rail (1959) as his chief inspiration. Gifford’s pictorial manifesto, Decline of Steam, appeared in 1965, priced by Ian Allan at a luxurious three guineas. Pattern, silhouette and mood were now legitimate subjects too; compositions ranged from crepuscular landscapes animated by the white plume of a distant train to still-lifes of piled-up brake lamps. Readers expecting the usual enthusiasts’ diet of hyper-specific information had to make do with minimal captions, bunched provocatively at the back of the book.
Railway World magazine soon began to present other examples of the so-called New Approach, including four-page selections under the heading ‘Take Four’ (the modern-jazz echo was presumably deliberate). Colour film and advanced equipment played a part too, like the telephoto lenses associated with the work of Paul Riley, hell-raiser, part-time folk roadie and leading light of the Midland Neverers Association. Named from their objective of going ticketless when travelling by train, the Neverers paid their quixotic dues to BR by acting as voluntary engine cleaners, working through the night with ladders and oily rags so that boilers and cabsides would have the right kind of dull shine in photographs taken on the following day. The last year of steam was a frantic time, as the few remaining services through the northern fells were chased by car-loads of devotees with tripods and light meters, overtaking and snapping the same trains again and again. The most dedicated photographers watched for the dawn, sleeping in their vehicles, in sodden tents, or dossing illicitly in platelayers’ huts.
Riley’s luck ran out in 1976, at the Severn Valley Railway’s Victoria Bridge. Awaiting another master shot, he stretched out on the parapet to sleep. Somehow he then rolled off the edge, falling to his death. By that time the bohemian-modernist moment of British railway photography had passed, leaving some outstanding images among its outpourings of grainy greys and velvety blacks. Work by Gifford and his fellow iconoclasts will be searched for in vain in the national collection at the Victoria & Albert Museum – perhaps to be a self-identified ‘railway photographer’ is an automatic disqualification – but five of Gifford’s train portraits were honoured by the Royal Mail on a stamp issue in 1994.
Other kinds of recording grew in popularity too. Film was increasingly affordable, although simultaneous sound recording was beyond the means of most. Unaccompanied sound was cheaper, and enthusiasts crammed the leading carriages of steam-hauled trains to hold their microphones out of the window, or waited by the lin
eside to immortalise the passing of steam, in both senses of the phrase.
The top player in this game was the eminent sound recordist Peter Handford (1919–2007). Handford’s other location work ranges from the authentic din of battle, captured in the aftermath of D-Day, to a share in many acclaimed post-war films, including works directed by Hitchcock, Tony Richardson and Joseph Losey. Karel Reisz’s Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, with its episode of background shunting noises (see Chapter 13), is another on the list. All this would have been quite enough for most people, except that Handford’s dearest love was trains. Having founded his own record company, Transacord, he tested the railway market in 1955 with two 78 rpm pressings. They were well received. He also gave up full-time employment in favour of freelancing, to allow more time to capture the soundscapes of the railway. Earnings from work on Jack Clayton’s Room at the Top (1959) allowed Handford to buy one of the earliest stereo tape recorders. The first Transacord 12-inch LPs appeared in 1960, one of which covered the ever-popular Somerset & Dorset. Later discs were issued through the esoteric Argo company, best remembered for its spoken-word output and its coverage of British jazz.
A Transacord 7-inch single from 1965. The sleeve shows the Talyllyn Railway in North Wales, the first line to be rescued and run by volunteers
Railway sales in all Transacord formats peaked at 40,000 per year in the 1960s, 7-inch singles included. Their sleeve notes are a genre in their own right, sometimes raising incongruous echoes of opera-scene summaries:
A branch line train from Audley End and Saffron Walden is approaching Bartlow, a rural junction on the Cambridge–Haverhill line,*** on an April afternoon in 1956; a ‘G5’ class 0–4–4 Tank engine, No. 67279, heads the two coach push and pull train down the gradient, round a curve and squeaks to a stop at the branch line platform where a small boy greets his friend, the engine driver; the driver exchanges local gossip with the porter, while the engine brake pump sighs impatiently.
In his New York home, the poet W. H. Auden used to listen to British railway recordings to assuage occasional feelings of homesickness. Perhaps the sounds also called to mind the verses he had contributed to one of the earliest and finest of all British railway documentaries, the GPO Film Unit’s visionary Night Mail (1936).
A less tangible form of recording was train timing. Equipped with a stopwatch, the train-timer calculates the range of speeds achieved over the course of a journey by watching the lineside for mileposts and other landmarks. The performance of the locomotive or multiple unit – it is usually a locomotive – is then assessed against the challenges posed by load, gradients, signal stops, speed restrictions and other variables such as slippery rails and coal quality. Comparisons can thus be made with the performance of other types over the same route, past and present. The hobby should not be confused with the railways’ own scientific investigations of locomotive efficiency, for which special recording carriages and static testing plants were brought into play, allowing calculations of the crucial ratio between power output and fuel consumed (a factor most train-timers ignored). The appeal of train-timing may be compared instead to the speculative rivalries and statistical number-crunching associated with certain sports, especially cricket. In truth, many railway enthusiasts find it boring, flipping through the Practice & Performance pages of the Railway Magazine (‘The world’s longest-running railway series, established in 1901’) with a mere glance at the pictures.
The obverse of this fetish for detail is a fascination with the roles of driver and fireman, whose names and sheds are sometimes published in train-timers’ accounts. Here is the adult quantification of boyhood reverence, of the kind which inspired the seven-year-old Adrian Vaughan to buy cups of tea from the refreshment room at Reading station and carry them solemnly to the drivers of trains waiting at the platforms. Outside interest in what the engineman’s job was actually like was satisfied first by reportage pieces, then by a growing number of published accounts from the workers themselves.
The 1950s fell somewhere between, as witness Patrick Ransome-Wallis’s Men of the Footplate (1954). Its pages present the railway autobiographies of four drivers, one from each of the old companies. All had long service behind them, a reminder that express driving was then no job for a youngster; as often as not, the object of boyish hero-worship was ‘a solid man in his early sixties’, in the words of one footplateman-author. Unfortunately, Ransome-Wallis’s quartet all come out sounding exactly the same, as if ventriloquized (and did driver Albert Young of Camden shed really say ‘I feel indeed a gay sense of pride and well-being as we speed along’?). Following official direction, Ransome-Wallis also suppressed any political content. Nothing here, then, to deter ‘boys about to leave school’.
Less mediated accounts have more to offer. One of the earliest took the form of the introduction to Frank McKenna’s A Glossary of Railway-men’s Talk, published as its Pamphlet No. 1 by the History Workshop movement in 1970. Founded by the Marxist historian Raphael Samuel, and drawing strength from the recent achievements of academic labour history, the movement aimed to encourage working people to record and understand their own lives in terms of ‘history from below’. McKenna (1929–2013) was an early luminary: a former driver and ASLEF official, he had taken up a place under Samuel at Ruskin College in Oxford, named in honour of the great critic, where those who have missed out on formal education receive a second chance to study.**** Released from railway service, and with steam now a memory, he was free to chronicle its hardships and penances.
Starting at Carlisle Kingmoor shed in 1946, McKenna was set to work cleaning engines that had accumulated up to a year’s worth of grease, impacted with coal dust and soot. Novice cleaners had the worst of it, taking on the moving parts; senior hands were given the boiler; the head cleaner was usually an ex-footplateman demoted on account of failing eyesight or fading health. No laundry would accept their filthy overalls, which were used for as long as possible before being thrown away. Hand-me-downs from the footplate were sought after, because cleaners still had to provide these outfits themselves. Promotion to fireman brought the new challenge of keeping upright on a jolting, swaying footplate; as McKenna discovered, ‘Everything on a locomotive hurts’. When running fast, speech was impossible, so that driver and fireman communicated by sign language instead. Hot days were something else again, when ‘a curtain of sweat runs continuously from your head’. McKenna was honest, too, about occasional tensions between English, Scottish and Welsh engine-men, racial prejudice towards West Indian newcomers at the London sheds and the mixed responses of his colleagues to his youthful communist idealism: older men thought him precocious or disloyal while most of his peers found ‘the professor’ too clever by half.
If all this is a long way from the blandly reassuring accounts proffered by Ransome-Wallis, McKenna’s testament is atypical too of the coming wave of railway memoirs aimed primarily at enthusiasts. Ottley’s mighty Bibliography of British Railway History, second supplement (1998), lists 103 ‘biographical and autobiographical memoirs of railwaymen’ published between 1981 and 1996 alone, and even this total omits masses of material in periodicals. Many of Ottley’s authors are former steam-age footplatemen, sometimes writing with the help of a ‘ghost’, but managers, inspectors, shed- and stationmasters, mechanical engineers, signalmen (Adrian Vaughan among them), clerks, porters, shunters, guards, carriage painters, boilersmiths, fitters, gangers and storesmen are also represented. By the standards of Ruskin College, these memoirs are often tinted from the rosy end of the spectrum, or otherwise deficient in critical-historical thinking. But this is to miss the broader point: without the existence of an informed lay readership, few railwaymen’s working lives would have ever been written or published in the first place. The result is a historical resource without parallel in British industry.
Just as the flow of memoirs swelled after the end of steam, so did the impulse to collect railway artefacts. Closures and modernisation generated mighty streams of redundant
material, most of which was junked, scrapped or burnt. So much was simply left lying around that the boundary between legitimate rescue and pilfering was not always clear. Aboveboard purchases were made locally, by individual arrangement with collectors; for a long time, even locomotive nameplates could be had at scrap prices.
BR soon woke up to the idea that certain types of redundant asset had a substantial resale value. Six hundred collectors turned up for an auction held at Stoke-on-Trent in 1964, where barrows, seats, signs and lamp-posts were all on offer. In 1969, just after steam’s Year Zero, a weird shop called Collectors’ Corner opened in a dowdy warehouse near Euston station, selling pretty well any portable or detachable object with a railway provenance. Brass buttons from porters’ uniforms were a penny each; big stuff such as station signs was piled up in the front yard. The wider fashion in the 1960s–70s for using bygones as household furnishings must also have encouraged the collecting trend, these being the years in which middle-class kitchen walls were first adorned with rusting or replicated enamelled advertisements, and Victorian rubbish dumps were dug out to retrieve their glass bottles and stoneware jars. Michael Palin’s exploration of the British railway network in a BBC2 travelogue of 1980, which began with confessions of boyhood spotting and ended with his purchase and removal of the enormous 1950s nameboards from Kyle of Lochalsh station, was (in more than one sense) a sign of the times.
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