1948 - 2008 Why trains? ......................................




Why indeed. I often wonder. I've had an on-again, off-again love affair with trains for 60+ years. I chose 1948 because that may have been the year my grandfather first took me to Farnborough station to watch the trains. I suspect he was as happy to watch them as I was.

How do you explain the fascination that men, young and old, have with trains? Especially steam trains. If you don't have it, then you don't. All of us (well, most males I think) seem to have a passion for things mechanical; cars, ships, aircraft, trains.We are perhaps awed by power and speed.

I've had a thing for three of the four (cars seem merely to be a means of transport - my transport and anyway "anybody" can drive mere cars). But steam trains were my first love I think and may well be my last. Ships of the Nelson era and aircraft held my attention for a while now and then but I seem now to had got stuck with the iron horse and its environment.

My earliest memory of railways and trains actually dates back to wartime. 194something, perhaps returning with my grandmother from a train journey. As we emerged from the railway station in Sevenoaks, Kent, I must have been delighted by the scene - during shunting in the station's goods yard the locomotive had pushed some of its wagons through the buffers and into the station approach road. Just that one detail retained all these years.

Next, the above mentioned visits to Farnborough station with my grandfather. Just to watch the trains. 1948 was the year the government nationalised the railways and the big four, the GWR, the SR, the LMS and the LNER merged, to become British Railways. Farnborough was on the SR, the Southern Railway, but I remember nothing of the changeover ... just the big, noisy, rushing, hissing locomotives and their trains!

Over the rest of my childhood, well into my teens my big passion was "collecting engine numbers." I was a trainspotter! Terms now long gone and mostly a subject of ridicule over the years. The awesome facination with the steam locomotive that gripped so many of that generation. Harmless, healthy preoccupation which demanded nothing more than a pencil, a notebook and and Ian Allen Locospotter's Book.

Now that every "child" from three to nineteen has a computer, a playstation (whatever that is), an I-pod(whatever that is, an MP3(whatever that is), a cellphone and heaven knows what up and coming gadget welded to their person my childhood seems simple beyond belief.

Somewhere in my latter teens the world of the steam engine seems to have slipped away from me. Replaced by an interest in aviation and then, far too soon, with premature marriage.

In 1968 the last of British Railways' steam locomotive was withdrawn. Sadly I missed those last ten years simply by being "otherwise engaged."

In 1985 (I think) I was in London on a Sunday on a 'family tree research trip'. I was on Victoria station and a small ad' caught my eye. It invited the public to come to the Mid-Hants Railway and travel back in time etc. etc. Having nothing really to do, I heeded the call and travelled to Alton.

Is epiphany the word? There at the station stood a T9 waiting to carry me back into long lost way-back-when world.

I was hooked. Almost a quarter of a century later I'm still hooked. Modelling Farnborough, slowly, carefully, sometimes frustratedly. Locomotives, coaches, wagons, buildings, scenery, track. Cutting, filing, soldering, gluing, painting all the many skills, major and minor that make up this wonderful hobby.

I'm sure I'm a source of tolerant amusement to most but I'm happy. I once tried to explain to Andrea (who is always busy with really important stuff, like all grown-ups) that:

If I build a working, beautifully finished model locomotive in three months it's called playing.
If a clockmaker spends the same time building a clock it's called skilled work.

Why trains? 'Coz I love 'em.