Death of a stationmaster

[Pacific231G]

I found this quirky little tale today

 

http://www.telegraph.co.uk/news/worldnews/asia/japan/11700372/Japan-mourns-death-of-Tama-the-train-stationmaster-cat.html

 

Definite shades of T.S. Eliot's Scrimbleshanks but the idea of 55 000 people a year travelling on a rural railway for the chance of seeing a particular moggie suggests that the Japanese may be even more daft about both railways and cats than we are.

 

I used to travel on the ECML quite often on trains that stopped at Grantham and on several occasions saw a particular cat strutting about on the up side platform where the main buildings. This cat clearly owned the station but didn't have a statonmaster's cap.

[pete_mcfarlane]

The Grantham cat, IIRC, got run over a good 15 years or so ago. There's a memorial to him on platform 1.

[Pacific231G]

The Grantham cat, IIRC, got run over a good 15 years or so ago. There's a memorial to him on platform 1.

That's really sad and the timing is right for that to have been the cat I remember there. Was it run over by a train?

[pete_mcfarlane]

In the car park I think. There was a story in the local paper at the time.

[Pacific231G]

In the car park I think. There was a story in the local paper at the time.

Says it all really. Cats and other creatures can coexist quite happily with trains (wonderful British development, boon to mankind etc) but get slaughtered by motor cars (nasty dangerous despoiling German invention)

 

This is the memorial to the Grantham station cat (whose name cannot be written here)

 

https://www.flickr.com/photos/geshmally/5065918664/

 

Apparently Sh*g quite often turned up at King's Cross- well there are plenty of rats in London and any cat could evade revenue protection with consummate ease- and had to be put on the train home.