[Dynamo]

It always amazes me how few pheasants actually get hit by trains. When I used to drive to Boulby potash mine, there was always dozens of the stupid birds dotted about all over the railway and I'd go blazing through them at about 25mph. On the return trip I'd expect to see total carnage, but very few were ever actually hit.

Crows are always difficult to hit as well, but I did hit one once, with the middle windscreen on a Class 37. When I got to York, the guard, who had been in the back cab, beckoned me over to point out the crow which had suddenly fallen out of the sky en route, and landed right in the middle of the first wagon.

I always thought that I'd never ever hit a cat cos they always seemed to get away in time. That was until I hit three in a week.

Once when I was driving a Middlesbrough to Newcastle train, at Cemetry North in Hartlepool, I hit about half a dozen dogs that were chasing a bitch on heat. They didn't half make a bang. When driving back past the signalbox on my return journey I expected to see total carnage once again with dogs lying limbless all over the place. I couldn't have been more wrong though cos the same half a dozen dogs were still running about after the lady.

I can't compete with hitting an elephant, but the next story still takes some beating. I hadn't been on the footplate very long and I was second man to a grizzled old driver at Darlington. Our job was to take a train to Tyne Yard, and then to bring one back. The shift was pretty uneventful, but the driver never spoke a word to me all shift so I just carried on regardless. Our return train was a class 8 partially fitted train with a Class 31. We had a length of about 60, of which about the first half a dozen wagons were braked, but the others weren't, and we had a guards van at the back.

Now this was in about 1978 when the High Speed Trains had only just started running up the East Coast Mainline. Suddenly, for the first time in the shift, and after about five hours working together and we had just passed Ferryhill, the driver suddenly turned to me and took his dog end out of his mouth and said "I wonder what would happen if one of them there High Speed Trains hit a bullock!" I was a bit taken aback by this statement, but I answered it as best I could by surmising that because the trains were pretty light, and because of the wedge shape at the front, the bullock would probably lift the train off the tracks. He said "Aye. I was thinking the same thing" and then he put his fag back in his gob and continued to drive. About half a minute later after rounding a bend and coming under a couple of bridges, we came upon a cow that was stood in the four foot. The cow saw us and put its head down to charge and the driver made an emergency brake application. Of course we didn't stop and we hit the poor thing. Deja vu or what?