I grew up in East Anglia though my family originated on the southern end of the West Coast Main Line. My first real memories of trains are probably being with my cousins in the park at Berkhamsted and at my Great Nan's house that was alongside the line at North Wembley where we could stand at the end of the back garden and watch the trains. So my earliest memories of "real" trains were ones with pantographs, and a constant procession of them. The first loco name I ever remember seeing was 86206 City Of Stoke On Trent. My dad was an enthusiast too and took me to various museums and preserved lines from a very early age but they weren't the same as express trains on the big railway.
I didn't know about train spotting until I joined the scouts in Stowmarket and met some other boys there that were train spotters, mainly on a walk into town one evening alongside the railway when they were talking about a 'foreign' 47 and I didn't understand what they meant (a non-Stratford one it turned out). From then on I was hooked on numbers and learning what all these locos were, discovering in the process that my Diesel was in fact a Triang Hornby Class 31. From then on my evenings and weekends found me a very regular visitor to Stowmarket station, then joining the local railway club too.
My Grandma lived in London and I was allowed to go to London to see her without Mum so that was the first outings to the big termini on my own, watching the overhead wires into Liverpool St, discovering that I only needed the last three numbers of any Eastern EMU, then Euston was heaven, my beloved electrics! I cleared all the ACs for sight long before any diesel class... Paddington was strange long things with flat fronts, but thankfully all the right way up now! As for Clapham Junction... so many trains, where do you look, at what on earth was that strange shaped thing in the sidings next to the shed? (the PEP unit) and Cromptons and EDs, very odd to my Anglian eyes, used to 31s, 37s and 47s.
Getting into the Midlands via Peterborough where we found Deltics then further north and west to Sheffield, 20s, 40s, PEAKS, things I'd only ever seen in photos, that couldn't describe the whistle or thrum of the EE beasts. Further afield once I joined BR in 1985 and had free travel, now Scotland beckoned, 47/7s, 26s, 27s, that was where I really felt a foreigner railwaywise. Meanwhile my electric locos now came to me with the electrification of the GE mainline to Norwich
I moved to Charing Cross in 1988 and became a driver, by now I was not so much into number collecting, having graduated to haulage instead, but gradually lost a lot of interest by the mid 90s as it settled into being a job instead of a hobby. I have never stopped looking at loco numbers but I very rarely write anything down now. I left the railway in 97 and moved to Cheltenham. I don't think I did anything railway related for 2 or three years, then finally made my way into Cheltenham Model Centre and it all started again. Dagworth was reborn, a reincarnation of a layout I'd had in a caravan in my Mum's garden, and I joined DEMU and then a very young RMweb in its first days of existence. The rest is history and while I still look at trains and will normally point the phone camera at anything that isn't a unit my main interest now is recreating those glory years in my mind of the West Coast Main Line with Ravensclyffe and my early years on the railway with Ipswich.
Andi
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