UK - Steamy pleasures (trainspotting!)

[John Ashworth]

Steamy pleasures

Trainspotters get a bad press - and now security concerns threaten to drive them to extinction. A worried Stephen Moss revisits his childhood passion

* Stephen Moss
* The Guardian, Wednesday 18 March 2009


How wonderful to be standing in the sun at King's Cross taking train numbers. I hadn't been trainspotting since the early 1970s but, inspired by reports this week that ultra-security-conscious National Express was considering banning this blissfully innocent activity from its stations, I decided to give it another go and, slightly worryingly, I enjoyed it.

I originally took up trainspotting when I was about 13. Almost everyone I knew was a trainspotter back then. It helped that we had a view of the railway line from our German lesson - spotting passing "Warships" (Type 4, Class 42s, if you insist on accuracy) was more fun than conjugating German verbs. My school was next to the London to South Wales main line, and every lunchtime a gaggle of boys (no girls, ever) would gather on a patch of grass under a flyover and take train numbers. No drugs, binge-drinking or illicit sex - just lots of "Peaks", "Westerns" and those bulbous-nosed Warships, whose yellow fronts you could see approaching from miles away. Each lunchtime I would consume a packet of Ginger Nuts - I was a tubby, breathless child - and spot trains. It was glorious.

Soon, it had become an obsession. Trains operated out of regional "sheds", so to avoid seeing the same ones repeatedly you had to travel - Bristol, Southampton, London, Sheffield, Crewe. On Sundays, when the railways were quieter, by sneaking round the sheds you could get a stack of numbers. In Nottingham, every Sunday, Peaks Nos 1 to 10 - all of which were named after British mountains - would be lined up in numerical order ready for the intrepid spotter who was willing to risk a telling off from a sleepy security man. Now, you would be arrested as a possible al-Qaida operative, or shot on sight.

Then, in about 1973, preoccupied by O-levels and annoyed that British Rail was renumbering its stock - a symbolic breaking down of childhood certainties - I gave up. It always irritated me that a single Warship - Sharpshooter, No 843 - had eluded me, and I made intermittent efforts to track down the decommissioned locomotive over the next 30 years. In essence, though, I'd given up, until this week when I headed down to Ian Allan Book and Model Shop in Waterloo, south London, and bought the 2009 edition of Locomotives and Coaching Stock - the modern equivalent of the trainspotters' bible I used carefully to fill in with luminous yellow marker pens each night.

At first the modern book perplexed me. There are fewer locomotives than in the great days of the 1960s and 70s. Now "train" tends to mean boring "multiple unit" - a collection of coaches with no obvious engine. It was, as Gloria Swanson might have said in explaining this disenchantment, the trains that got small. It is hard to take seriously a trainspotting manual that lists dining saloons, composite catering trailers and miniature buffets.

But then, on platform 11 at Clapham Junction, I meet Richard, who has come to London for the day from Darlington and naturally headed for Britain's busiest station. I had been struggling to know which numbers on the multiple units to take - the one on the front or the ones on the side. He explains the system, shows me the relevant sections in the manual - the trains at Clapham are mainly Class 377 outer suburban units and Class 455 inner suburban units (admittedly, some of the old poetry has gone) - and I'm away. Within minutes, I have a dozen numbers; my book is starting to fill up; I feel the old frisson.

Richard, who is armed with camera, binoculars, notepad and a large rucksack, has been a trainspotter for 35 years. "It is dying; the number of trainspotters is going down because we've had such a bad press," he says. "But I tend to be a loner anyway."

At King's Cross, there are three trainspotters at the end of platform eight (where I used to stand to spot the imperious "Deltics" - Nimbus, Crepello, Alycidon, The Black Watch, what names! - on my teenage visits) and, by coincidence, they are from my home town of Newport. Keith tells me he has been a trainspotter for 40 years. Why has he stuck with it all his life, I ask. "Good question," he says, laughing. "You get out and about, you meet other railway enthusiasts ... "

I want him to say it's the thrill of completing the sets, but it dawns on me that this is not Keith's main motivation. He likes railways and stations, is interested in industrial railways, visits preserved railways. Whereas for me it was all about numbers, for him that is just incidental, a way of cataloguing a lifetime spent standing on the end of platforms. Which is perhaps why my love affair ran out of steam and his never did.