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Old 15th February 2007, 17:00
Adey Baker's Avatar
Adey Baker Adey Baker is offline
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Join Date: Dec 2005
Location: Hinckley, Leics., UK
Posts: 378
I suppose you could wax lyrical for ages on this subject!

Our first memories are as children and I guess we're trying to re-capture those far-off days...

The train journey usually meant that you were going on holiday. Staring out of the train window, being almost mesmerised by the constant 'rising and falling' of the telegraph wires as you passed each post. The rising of the bank as you went into a cutting - would it just lead to a bridge then fall again or would it get higher and higher until you plunged into a tunnel!

One of my Aunties always seemed to buy me a train-related gift for Christmas, usually a book. In fact one of her sons, my cousin, Frank Stratford, worked on the railways and eventually wrote a book and magazine articles about his time on the 'Great Central.'

Before I had my own electric train set I remember my father coming home from work one evening with an enormous box full of pre-war Hornby O gauge clockwork stuff - he'd been doing some work at 'the big house' in a neighbouring village and as the son of the house had grown-up the trains had just been gathering dust in the loft, so we might as well have them and get some fun out of them! We sure did, and I wish that I still had them - I played them into the ground, so to speak!

When I went up to secondary school in autumn 1959 train-spotting was very much accepted as a great hobby for lads as it was a legitimate reason to get out and about - it's amazing how far youngsters of 11, 12, 13, would go without a thought of any danger they might have been in.

Nowadays it's decidedly 'uncool' for young teenagers to be seen as having an interest in trains, yet back then, it was a great way to find your way around with your mates rather than you parents, using your initiatve to see as much stuff as possible whilst still making sure you got home at the correct time so that you could go again another day - no national rail website in those days; you had to understand the timetables to make sure you'd allowed sufficient time to make your connections and get back in time to catch the bus home in time for your evening meal!

Most enthusiasts today seem to be 'of a certain age' and I'm sure they're trying to re-live those good old days to some extent - we've all got cameras nowadays, of course, which is something most of us didn't have then, so when we get too old we can at least re-live today's scene!
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