So, what got you interested in railways?

[redgreggie]

my love of trains..........probably because I lived in a back to back house in Dronfield, outside the front door was the main road from Chesterfield to Sheffield and round the back was the main railway line.

the house was very old, we lived there with our great grandma and our parents, early in my life we moved to a village a few miles away Dronfield Woodhouse.

we went to visit, and help gran once a week and I use to remember the train number of any train that went roaring through Dronfield, so at an early age I was trainspotting.

a few years later I would go to Dronfield with a couple of mates in the school holidays and spend the day getting up to mischief and trainspotting, no parental control for the whole time, it was wonderful.

remember once, it was getting rather late, we knew that a train was due, I was with 2 mates, one decided he couldn't stay and started to make his way home, I stayed with George, we went down the embankment, this was at the bottom of Stubley Hollow, and close to the track, the train that went through was Warspite, an engine we had never seen before in all our years of trainspotting.
We use to get certain engines that went through in great regularity, Gilbert & Ellis Islands, Green Howards, being a couple that spring to mind, we were overjoyed to have waited and seen Warspite.







ray............in Batley.

what was the service that went through our region, was it LNER, or LMS? I can never remember.

[chrisrussell]

Hi - I am looking to find out what a Thames Train driver, and a FGW driver would have been wearing in the 1990s....is anyone able to help?? The basic clothing - colours and any accessories that they would have had

Many Thanks!

[SouthEastern-465]

My first post!

My interest in railways started back in the late 90s when I was a youngster, I remeber standing at London Bridge and several 'Slamdoor units (CIGs, CEPs, VEPs) passing by and stopping, all in NSE livery.

Another good memory of mine is standing at Stratford around the year 2000 and seeing Cl312s, Cl315s in Firt Great Eastern livery.

[desirokma]

My love for the railway has been there since I was a little girl (ok so im only 21 but hey we all start somewhere)
My life long dream has been to become a train driver and im hoping to live my dream very soon
My favourite all time train in an XC 220 voyager but also take a fancy to:
,150
323
170
350
172

Xxx

[decoupled]

Not exactly unusual, but a small train set with a small blue tank engine did the trick at about 6 year old. I still have some of the old stock and flexible track (bought in my teens) and had a half attempt to put it back together a few years ago, but didn't finish, as the kids thought it was boring !!

Found the small blue engine looked like the top had melted a bit and then remembered that I tried to install a smoke box in there at some point, which didn't really go as planned !

[Chuffer]

I grew up in Kent, a part of the country that was served by that division of the Southern Railway that ran from London down to the South East with the London Terminus being Waterloo and Charing Cross, or to be more geographically correct they are the other way around, and at the other end to such places as Ashford, Chatham Hastings and Folkstone.

The house I lived in during those pre eleven plus and more importantly pre Beeching days, backed onto a part of the railway line that formed sections of the goods yard for Tonbridge Station, the only barrier between our garden and the goods yard being a single chain link fence about three feet high.

It did not take long to realise that if I stood at the fence and waved at the drivers and firemen on the engines, as they moved into or out of the goods yard, as often as not they would wave back and some would even sound the whistle as in clouds of dirty black steam they shunted past me. So it was only a very short progression from this to some freinds starting to note the engine numbers and later the engine types down in pages torn from the back of our school exercise books.

I am not sure exactly when how or even by whom it was decided to organise a more formal group, it may have been Phil Walker, who later went on to work for British Railway as a station porter at Tonbridge, but a group was formed and we called ourselves I now recall, somewhat grandly, The Tonbridge Spotters.

So it was that some 59 years ago now I first officially changed from a boy who occasionally waved at passing trains to become a fully fledged member of The Tonbridge Spotters, a group of like minded schoolboys, and more importantly friends, when we all failed the eleven plus exams and collectively left primary school and headed off to the local secondary modern, were to stay together until 1964 when we all left school aged 15 and went to make our own way in the world.

We as a group seemed to vary in membership numbers over the years, some would leave the group and some would join as we all ventured unsteadily through the onset of puberty, discovering the opposite sex and being teenagers during the swinging sixties. The one common bond and interest being trains. The Tonbridge Spotters outings were confined mainly to weekends, school holidays or vary occasionally those long warm summer evenings, but outings we did have and perhaps by today's standards they may not have been very adventurous they were enjoyable.

The outings were often planned during school dinner times in a corner of the bike shed or if raining in the school library and with what we thought to be military precision. They varied from sometimes nothing more simple than all meeting up at Tonbridge station, buying a platform ticket, or sometimes not buying a platform ticket, and spending the day sat at the end of a platform pencil and notebook in hand. Occasionally though the outings saw us range further afield, sometimes we would ride our bikes to some distant station and very occasionally, when our pocket money would allow, we would travel to London to spend a day around some of the engine sheds like Nine Elms, sadly now long gone and the area is a housing estate.

One abiding memory I have to this day of those adventures was the snacks or lunch packs our mothers would prepare for us. Without fail and to a boy they would consist of a couple of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper the fillings would invariably be either cheese, spam, paste or egg. Also included would be, if lucky, a bag of crisps, Smiths with the small blue bag of salt, in those far off days crisps did not come in flavours just plain, if crisps were not included then perhaps a hard boiled egg would be added, this would be accompanied by a thermos flask of tea to wash it all down, the whole epicurean delight being carried in a duffle bag over the shoulder, I wonder now if they still make duffle bags.

Even as comparatively young as we were we always adopted the practice of opening all our sandwich boxes and laying them before us and by sharing we told ourselves that it helped maintain a varied diet. From time to time mishaps occurred, occasionally and without thinking one of us would drop our bag to the ground and then hear a slight clinking sound as the glass inner liner of the thermos flask shattered and the unfortunate individual watched as slowly the brown hot liquid seeped out of the bag to form a puddle on the ground, normally this was greeted by a roar of laughter from the rest of us but we would always end up sharing so the worst thing that would happen was that the individual would have to go home and face his mum and own up that he had broken yet another thermos flask.

When this happened to me, as it did from time to time, I was always given the lecture about carelessness, and asked in a very stern voice did I know how much these things cost and just to teach me a lesson my pocket money would be diverted the very next week to offset the cost of a replacement. It never was and by the next weeks outing of The Tonbridge Spotters I would always have a new flask for carrying my tea.

I live now in the North East and it is now some 59 years later however I am I suppose still a member of The Tonbridge Spotters, I do not ever recall us being formally disbanded we just left school and went our own way, perhaps who knows I may be the sole remaining member of The Tonbridge Spotters.

[pre65]

Hi Chuffer.

I really enjoyed reading about your boyhood experiences. Brought back a few memories I can tell you.

Welcome aboard.

[Silver Fox Phil]

Hi Chuffer, nice story mate. Like Philip it brought back fond memories for me too. Those flasks! mine was always a tartan one! and just like you we laughed when one got broken but all mucked in to ensure no one went without. Jam or salad with salad cream sandwiches were my two favourites! Oh those memories. Thanks for sharing
Regards
Phil

[EuroStar]

Hi Chuffer,

Welcome aboard the forum. I really enjoyed reading about your boyhood memories.

[Dave Rowland]

Originally Posted by Chuffer

One abiding memory I have to this day of those adventures was the snacks or lunch packs our mothers would prepare for us. Without fail and to a boy they would consist of a couple of sandwiches wrapped in greaseproof paper the fillings would invariably be either cheese, spam, paste or egg. Also included would be, if lucky, a bag of crisps, Smiths with the small blue bag of salt, in those far off days crisps did not come in flavours just plain, if crisps were not included then perhaps a hard boiled egg would be added, this would be accompanied by a thermos flask of tea to wash it all down, the whole epicurean delight being carried in a duffle bag over the shoulder, I wonder now if they still make duffle bags.

Memories indeed; personally, I carried my stuff around in a khaki bag designed for holding gas masks in WW2! Oddly enough, I worked on the IOW ferries 1973-86, and one of the blokes used to make great quality duffle bags out of sail canvas, and most of the ferry crews had one. As for crisps being only salted - when I was first introduced to trains, it was when my grandad used to push me to Tilehurst station on Sunday morning. After a while watching trains (c.1952-53), we'd go just up the road to The Roebuck Hotel, and he's park me in the covered bit by the door, and get me a bottle of Pepsi with two straws (which never emerged from the neck of the bottle), and a bag of OXO flavoured crisps! So they DID exist (although they weren't Smiths).
As for flasks - I never bothered; my dad was a chippy on a building site, and I'd drunk enough of the indeterminate brown stuff out of a flask to know that I could live quite happily without it. I always took a bottle of Tizer, a packet of Smiths crisps, a packet of Rolos, a pork pie, and the inevitable Lyon's Individual Fruit Pie (and possibly a banana or apple). I wasn't keen on eggs, but my mate Roger, with whom I did a fair bit of spotting, always produced a hard-boiled egg, which he then cracked on my head to get it started. I still occasionally go with Roger on spotting/photo shoot jaunts, even after all these years - in April we spent a week in Germany, and we're off to the Czech Republic in a months time. My grandad's pre-Sunday lunch pint's got a lot to answer for! Talking of which, in April 2008, I returned to Tilehurst station for the first time in probably 40+ years, in order to get some photos of the trains, and decided to actually go INTO The Roebuck for a pint myself; I was looking forward to explaining that I'd been waiting 55 years to see what the INSIDE of the pub looked like. It was closed for refurbishment.....