|
There couldn’t be a better platform (or Forum) for repeating this oft told tale.
I was brought up - some would say thrown up - in Thornton Heath but our nearest railway station was Norbury. On a bitterly cold winter’s day in the early fifties I had alighted from a stopper from the London direction and headed towards the platform’s exit which was (and still is) at the London end of the platform and stopped to see and hear a Fairburn 2-6-4T pounding up the short but very steep climb from Streatham Common. To my utter amazement I witnessed enormous lumps of coal being heaved out of from the footplate onto the ballast ‘twixt the up slow and down fast lines which, fortuitously, are quite a distance apart as they spread out to accommodate Norbury’s wide island platform on a curve.
It was years later that a local railway enthusiast explained that I hadn’t fantasised as it was a regular occurrence. Both Thornton Heath in the one direction and Streatham Common in the other had goods yards from which coal for heating purposes could be appropriated but Norbury had no such facility and so waiting room and staff office heating were supplied unofficially by passing footplate crews.
Memories are made of this as the well known song goes.
Mike
|