Watching trains go by when you were young

[Darius43]

With apologies to those who still are (or consider themselves to be) young.

 

Between 1970 and 1978 my Dad and I used to drive to a lay-by on a country lane by the WCML at Stableford near Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire - a place we called “The Trains” to watch the trains go by.

 

I can still hear the singing of the rails and then the wires of the lineside fence heralding an approaching train.  Usually it was a Class 81 or 86 hauling an express but occasionally it was something different.  Happy days…

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

Edited January 26, 2022 by Darius43

[Paul H Vigor]

12 minutes ago, Darius43 said:

With apologies to those who still are (or consider themselves to be) young.

 

Between 1970 and 1978 my Dad and I used to drive to a lay-by on a country lane by the WCML at Stableford near Newcastle-under-Lyme in Staffordshire - a place we called “The Trains” to watch the trains go by.

 

I can still hear the singing of the rails and then the wires of the lineside fence heralding an approaching train.  Usually it was a Class 81 or 86 hauling an express but occasionally it was something different.  Happy days…

 

 

 

Cheers

 

Darius

My favourite childhood train train watching place was Ladycross/Woodfidley on the New Forest, Hampshire (Bournemouth mainline) 

[LMS2968]

Mid-1950s, and I would be on my way theoretically to visit my Grandmother, but rarely got there. We had to go down Bankhall Lane in Liverpool, overlooking the ex-L&YR Southport line with the junction from the Preston / Wigan line a few hundred yards in the distance. The wall at one point was low enough to allow a very young lad to look over it, and that's as far as I'd get. 

 

Most of the traffic below involved the LMS 1938 e.m.u. stock, and so of no interest. But also below was the marshalling and coal yards, and I could watch the engines wagon bashing for hours.

 

I liked to see the odd steam-hauled train go through but the shunting was continuous sight - and sound. All gone now, of course, except for a pair of third rail electrified tracks still running between Southport and Liverpool, although no longer Exchange.

[Nearholmer]

Growing up three miles from the nearest line, and that with only one loco hauled service each way every day by the time I was old enough to escape unsupervised, options were a bit limited, until I could escape further. When I could, I tended to ramble about by train, rather than spend extended periods in one place, but Tonbridge and Redhill provided surprising variety at pocket money ticket prices.

[LimboBrit]

At school in Stafford we could look across the sports field (now a big Tesco's car park) and see all the main line traffic going through the town. Usually class 86 and 87 passenger trains, EMUs, DMUs and freight pulled by classes 31,40, 47 and 50. Very, very occasionally something more exotic would pass by like a Peak or a Western . In the lunch break we would sometimes venture out of school (not really allowed in the first couple of years at the Grama Skool) to go to the railway bridge on the Newport Road to spot the numbers. One day we were caught and sent to the headmaster. It was the closest I ever got to feeling the cane.

Edited January 27, 2022 by LimboBrit
Forgot the class 50s

[TheQ]

By the time I was old enough to go for a wander to see the trains, there was one a day and the through line had been cut 2 years before in 1961..

Got a few lifts on locos as they ran round to push the stock into the yard though.

[Legend]

Berwick -Upon -Tweed .  Back in 1979 I was there on holiday . The Penmanshiel tunnel north of Berwick had collapsed tragically killing two workers. As a result trains terminated at Berwick and passengers were bussed to Dunbar . Anyway it was my first memorable encounter with HSTs . I well remember two of them sitting in the station with their high pitched valenta screams .  Whilst others went to the beach I camped out at the station watching these new trains . I also remember 31417 appearing on a local from Newcastle .

 

The thing about Berwick is as well as the station you can watch trains go out over the Royal Border Bridge and watch them snake round the coast past Spittal. So it really is an ideal place with lots of vantage points to see the railway . Visits in later years saw 45,46,47s on locals and freights with Deltic  on the occasional Edinburgh - Newcastle local and on the Penzance train . I remember Crepello and Pinza in particular . By that time 125s were on all the main trains  to KX and it was last days of the Deltic s . Happy days 

[ELTEL]

I also was taken by my dad to Stableford near Newcastle under Lyme and standing on the platform at Norton Bridge in the 1950s watching the steam engine whizzing past in both directions.

 

For sometime in the 1980s Stafford Railway Circles annual exhibition was held at GEC Stychfields right next to the WCML

 

Even now (under lockdown I have spent time watching the trains go by in the local area as described above.

 

Last cop of any note being the HST sei in Blue Pullman livery heading south towards Stafford

 

Happy Days

 

Terry 

 

[AY Mod]

43 minutes ago, LimboBrit said:

At school in Stafford we could look across the sports field (now a big Tesco's car park) and see all the main line traffic going through the town. Usually class 86 and 87 passenger trains, EMUs, DMUs and freight pulled by classes 31,40 and 47. Very, very occasionally something more exotic would pass by like a Peak or a Western . In the lunch break we would sometimes venture out of school (not really allowed in the first couple of years at the Grama Skool) to go to the railway bridge on the Newport Road to spot the numbers. One day we were caught and sent to the headmaster. It was the closest I ever got to feeling the cane.

 

I was the other side of the line at Blessed Bill's with the science block overlooking the passage of everything through to APTs and, on a single occasion, a space shuttle on the back of a 747 (more interesting than a train). It's no wonder I failed Physics first time round. As sixth formers we'd have to pick up some fags for the head from The Eagle and have a pint with our biology teacher. 

 

Different times; happy days.

[33C]

From my bedroom window from the day I was born, class 302's, 308's and class 31 and 37 on paper and parcel trains, all in plain, dirty blue! Lovely! You cannot beat the smell of brakedust and horsehair, which I last smelt in the downside,  porters room at Benfleet Station.......bottle it! 

[caradoc]

In the early 70s, after family trips to the swimming pool at Hinksey, Oxford, I would pester my parents to take us to the nearby footbridge over Hinksey Yard, promising them that a train would soon come as the signals said 'go'; None of us realising that as the relevant signalboxes were switched out on Sundays the signals always said 'go' ! We did see the occasional train however, Hymeks, Westerns etc....

 

[hayfield]

My dad had an allotment behind our home just south of Bushey & Oxhey station (now called Bushey) on the Euston mail line, I had a photo of me at 2 years old watching trains. When old enough we would go and play on what we called the bank ( the railway was in a cutting). Nothing better than seeing a steam train with smoke and steam billowing out speeding past, with 6 tracks including the DC lines always something going past, especially in the days when the goods yard was working with coal for the gas works

[Oldddudders]

Born in Surrey in Nationalisation year, our rented cottage was only a field away from the Redhill-Guildford- Reading line of the former SER, so trains were always on my horizon. They were steam, too, until shortly before we moved in 1965. On the south side of the house, from my parents' bedroom, a couple of miles away I could see the ex-LBSCR route to Horsham and thence the Mid-Sussex, with 12-car 1930s electrics heading for Bognor and Portsmouth.

 

Our second house was even closer to both routes, being in a Dorking cul-de-sac only 100 yards from the bridge where the former crossed the latter. Is it any wonder that at 17, with a couple of A Levels, I joined BR and stayed in the industry for 38 years?

[Fat Controller]

I was brought up with a view of the lower reaches of the Llanelly and Mynydd Mawr from my bedroom; my primary school was immediately adjacent to the line. Later, I remember going to visit my grand-mother's siblings who all lived next to the main line (and the yard) at Pembrey & Burry Port. I remember seeing the Pembroke Coast Express on more than one occasion. Later there would be Motorails, milk trains and the impressive 100t tanks....

[60021 Pen-y-Ghent]

My favourite spot was by the Leeds to Skipton (and beyond) line at Bingley sat on the wall of the delightfully named Treacle Cock Alley - long since gone under the Aire Valley trunk road - near the 3 rise locks. This was the early 60s.

[phil_sutters]

Our favorite spot was beside the up mail pick-up point, just north of Highbridge station.

[Rivercider]

When I was small my mum would take me in my pushchair to watch the trains. Our house was within sight of Exmouth Junction shed in Exeter. Our walk would take us to a back alley with a view across the marshalling yard, the yard pilot at the time would have been 30954 (known as Dolly by the local railway staff), though I cannot remember that. I find the sound of shunting trucks very nostalgic as a consequence, we could hear them from home

We actually had a distant glimpse of the Salisbury to Exeter line from our little front garden and have a distinct memory of an unrebuilt WC/BB on a west bound freight train. A couple of years later me and my younger brother would spend hours at weekends and school holidays in the playing field a couple of doors down from our house. By then the Waterloo - Exeter services were in the hands of Warships, while D63XXs (class 22s) worked the daily Chard Junction milk trains.

 

Years later I returned to Exeter and walked down the back alley to take another photo.

Plymouth DMU set P470 passes Exmouth Junction on a service to Exmouth 15/5/79. 

In 1967 Western Fuels took over the site of the former concrete works and a couple of the sidings of the former up yard for their CCD (coal concentration depot). 

 

Happy Days

 

cheers

[Cowley 47521]

Scorrier foot crossing in Cornwall when I was very little. I remember Peaks and pre refurbished 50s there but also at Penzance and Redruth.

It’ll always be Dawlish for me though. On the beach, on the station, on the bridge, feeding the ducks in the river etc.

 

 I said my first word - “Train!” on the station platform (my poor mother was not particularly happy about that)…

[wombatofludham]

My family moved to the Tuppenhurst Lane NCB estate in Handsacre in 1964 when I was 1, and our street, Alandale Avenue had the Trent Valley line disappearing under Lichfield Road at the top of the street.  Some of my earliest memories of trains are on walks along the Trent and Mersey canal, which skirted the village, with electrics rushing along the then two track TVL through the countryside which surrounded the village.  In 1968 I started Hayes Meadow primary school in the village which was adjacent the line.  Back then the hourly Liverpool and Manchester expresses ran alternately via the TVL or Birmingham, so there were fewer Inter City trains, but plenty of freight, including traditional wagonload freight looking incongruous behind a 25kV electric.  It was always fun in the summer when the teachers would move us outside for "storytime", which usually coincided with the daily "Brickliner" service, one of the few diesel worked freights, always hauled by two Class 25s roaring their nuts off.  Poor Mrs Niblett would have been made hoarse trying to compete with that.

At the time I would have killed for models of the AL1-AL6 locos I saw howling past in their often grubby blue with white-ish cab roof and yellow bib livery.  Finally, over 50 years later, I've managed to achieve that dream.

[mcowgill]

Grandfather had a clothing factory hard up against Stanningley viaduct on the Bradford Exchange to Leeds line and when I was a youngster Dad would take me down there on a Saturday morning while he caught up on work.  I'd sit on a tall stool in one of the offices adjacent to the line and watch Fairburn tanks and class 24s in amongst DMUs, until I got bored and went to race barrows around the factory (great things, centre axle with jockey wheels under each end front and back, with long wooden floors to charge up and down!)

 

Martin

Edited January 26, 2022 by mcowgill

[Roger Sunderland]

Skew Bridge, just south of Preston on the WCML. 4 tracks and a train every 3-4 minutes (imagine that now), tons of black 5s, 8F, Brits, pats and Scots as well as class 40s, 24,25 etc. we’d set of early from home in Southport, catch the Ribble bus, back home around 7 at night. We were 11 in 1963! Times have certainly changed!

[The Lurker]

When my Grandma came to stay with us - at the same sort of time span as the OP - she would take me down to Paddock Wood station to watch the trains. Usually we'd watch from the Maidstone Road bridge but on at least one occasion we used the waiting room on the up side (the down buildings had gone by then). I remember the stifling heating and the drab grey paint. Trains would have been the usual procession of EMUs and maybe I would have watched the 08 shunting (the transfesa wagons?). An almost certainly false memory is of the Golden Arrow going by; it's possible in theory because I would have been taken from around 1970 onwards but I suspect I have seen a photo and "remembered" that instead. In later years I caught the train to school every day so would watch the trains while waiting for mine; likewise in Tonbridge on the way home. 

[lmsforever]

Started spotting in the late fories when my dad took me to watch Goodmayes yard on the GE main line out of L/pool St we went on his bike and I sat on saddle on the cross bar. Later I watched trains at Wood St and then we moved to N Chingford and I really got stuck in regular visits to the staion and getting rides on the N7 ,s and visits to Liverpool St and seeing, Brits ,B17. B1 ,and J69 plus the swinger emu,s . As time  went on we spotted at Wood Green Kings Cross St Pancras and occasionaly Paddington {we did not like GWR really ! )  I have kept my interest in railways going since 1948 till now and enjoy model railways  its been a wonderful journey and am so glad dad took me to Goodmayes. 

[Legend]

On the down side I remember visiting my Uncle who had a small machinery business which backed onto the Railway at Callendar . Obviously I was being a pest so they told me to go and watch the trains . This would be around 1967 . The trains had stopped in 65!  The rails were still there !

[petrox]

Between 1952 & 1956, at the bottom of our garden on a slight embankment, was the ex-GE line between Enfield Lock &  Waltham Cross - many hours spent noting numbers of Britannia / B1 / B17 locos on express trains, N7 and L1 tanks on locals, WD / K3  on goods, (and I think one day an E4 2-4-0? ).  In spite of this background, I now model WR in South Devon in the same period!

The highlight though, was the day a Gloster Meteor jet (from North Weald?) buzzed down the line about 100 feet up - possibly the pilot was a train enthusiast.

 

Pete