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About Me
I grew up on an estate on the edge of Coventry during the seventies and early eighties spending a lot of my free time cycling around the local countryside. I had many happy hours trainspotting at nearby places such as Brinklow, Berkswell and Rugby. When I wasn't out and about, at home from my childhood bedroom window I could see the Rugby to Birmingham railway line and watch a procession of AC electrics in corporate blue.
It was my maternal grandfather who got me interested in railways as a youngster, and his fondness for the LMS rubbed off on me from an early age. I still have some old school exercise books with my doodlings of LMS locos drawn when I was around ten years old! I left Cov in 1987 and now live and work in Northern Ireland.
As well as having an interest in railways past and present, I like to travel, and so far have journeyed by train across Europe, North America, Australia and Japan. I'm also a fan of late-seventies and early-eighties post-punk/New Wave music, like proper beer, cycling and walking, and research and write about historic maps and landscapes. I've thankfully kept my spotting books and notebooks from the good old days, as well as my OS maps used on those cycling / trainspotting trips, all useful for wallowing in a bit of nostalgia!