Off My Trolley

Of all the items that crop up at railwayana auctions, I can honestly say I don’t remember ever seeing a platform trolley. Hardly surprising, I suppose. Substantial, heavy and rather unwieldy affairs, but they are absolutely central to my reminiscences of platform dwelling in the 1960s. Sitting on the raised, metal rimmed edge surrounding the carrying area of the trolley itself cut off the circulation to your lower legs quite effectively, so you had to put in quite a lot of wriggling time to avoid deep vein thrombosis in the course of a whole day’s train spotting.

We assumed that the unpainted and not noticeably labelled variety were the railway’s own property. Many were more obviously Post Office trolleys, painted pillar box red and with altogether smoother boards, come to think of it. Of those, some were surrounded by wire cages, so they were no use to us at all. We did not want to be enclosed like animals at the zoo. We needed to stretch out a bit more than that – and we required a more frequent feeding regime.

Profusions of both types, however, could be seen stacked up to about eight feet off the ground with sacks full of parcels. The Christmas rush from the Arctic Circle, maybe? Of course, they were provided for staff to use and not the travelling public, directly. After all, that was what the station porters were there for, lugging stuff around for passengers. Station porters – there were millions of them!

Trolleys were moved by pulling the handle down to waist height to release the brake on the far axle. At rest, the pole and handle were in the upright position and slightly inclined towards the trolley surface. I assume that this position automatically applied the brake, so the trolley presented us with a seat which was often much closer to the platform end than the last official platform bench, which was always an advantage. It was definitely a case of location, location, location.

Platform ends were always preferable. If you were almost anywhere else on the station you could miss a loco’ passing by on another track, because the view was blocked off by the train that was standing at your own platform. Platform ends gave you the best chance of seeing everything that came through.

Although the brake was on, there was often some give on the wheels at the un-braked end where the handle was, especially if the trolley had been parked with those leading wheels a bit awry. This allowed us to sit on the trolley and rock it just a short distance, but everybody knows how comforting rocking chairs can be and we never tired of gently swaying the thing backward and forward a few inches, backward and forward, hour after hour.  

The platform trolley became home base at many a station, but especially at Crewe, Chester and Shrewsbury. Being mildly rebellious by not conforming to the occupation of a standard British Railways platform bench would have appealed to us as well. From our chosen perch we would sort out all the world’s problems. We would agonise indignantly at the injustice of the latest omission of Colin Harvey of Everton from the England football team and ponder over our rank order for over-weight county cricketers, who were rubbish at fielding.

 

We were also prepared to share our trolley with more deserving causes on occasions. Mail bags could get a bit lumpy to lean on, but you could sometimes fashion a little nest out of them that afforded a degree of back support and relative comfort. The wicker frames of pigeon baskets would emit much rustling and creaking and their submissive contents would go in for sporadic collective cooing to draw our attention to their imprisonment, but we largely ignored their plight. We had more pressing issues to attend to.

We were rarely disturbed by officialdom. If so, it was most likely to be a relatively polite request to “Shift” or an occasional “Come on, hop it.” Being the well-mannered and easy-going youngsters we were, we would have sprung to our feet and abandoned our base, quickly stuffing loco-shed book, notebook and pen, butty box and R. Whites lemonade bottle into the army surplus rucksack with the straps that would never stay taut, however carefully you tried to secure them.

Sometimes, a whole train of trolleys would snake its way along the platform, pulled by a diminutive motorised contraption, bearing a railway employee in a peaked hat. In some cases, a few trolleys strung together would be hauled by hand, with a little difficulty, by a porter or PO worker, clattering along, winding in and out of piles of suitcases and knots of passengers.

On occasions that we were probably engrossed in teasing each other, trolleys would sometimes take us by surprise, arriving in convoy, packed high with mail bags or cardboard boxes, in readiness for the impending visit of an express. On its arrival, the double doors on the brake van would fly open and a brief bout of energetic activity would interrupt the usual sedentary pace of the day. Doors would eventually be slammed, accompanied by a rapid exchange of unintelligible messages bellowed insistently between the staff, followed by impatient whistling from the locomotive, as if the whole process had taken far too long for its liking. Then the train was hurriedly on its way again, perhaps slipping on wet rails after an over-eager jerk on the regulator handle. 

Trolleys were not comfortable. You could easily get a splinter in your bum or on the end of your finger. Why did they always go up your finger nail? Painful. Nevertheless, we adorned them for hours and for days, breaking our occupancy for an occasional enforced trip to the loo, or at times of particular extravagance, to the station buffet. Sometimes we would make these forays in shifts, so as not to abandon “our” trolley to other groups of trolley covetous youths.

The only other reason for possibly leaving base would be if an engine had surreptitiously slipped off the shed and had appeared light engine in a bay or was simply loitering at the far end of the station. In case it disappeared in the direction it had come from, someone was going to have to go and find out what it was. Even then, we might see someone else trotting off to do our work for us and depend on quizzing him on his return, instead of bothering to make the journey ourselves.

Trolley conversation largely revolved around girls, football and music and probably in that order. Not that there were any girls around, nor would we have wanted that. This was a male only preserve, as far as we were concerned. Real life was quite competitive enough on that front and this was time out from the intensity of Friday night at youth club, which could be quite a fraught environment from time to time.

Here, at least, we could disseminate female attractions more objectively, with scoring systems and wistful observations on the physical attributes of the girls who we knew were just out of reach, literally, either because they were a year or two older than us, a grade or too better looking than us, or attached to someone that we knew was quite a lot harder than us.

We sang our way through our chosen repertoire of pop songs, concentrating on the Kinks, the Animals, the Beach Boys and the Who and avoiding the likes of Matt Munro, the Seekers and Jim Reeves like the plague. We chewed over the ongoing rivalry between the Beatles and the Stones. We made up the lyrics where no-one could remember them or where we ourselves had not yet quite deciphered them from some scratched and crackly 45s. We purposely adapted the words to make fun of the innocents standing nearby and waiting for trains, who, unless they were particularly attentive, would never know they had been the butt of our humour at all.

Finally, we vacated our lair to make for home, ready to stand in the corridor stock, taking turns with heads out of the window, risking temporary blindness and even a full frontal lobotomy in case we missed a cop passing us on the up line on our way back to Birkenhead Woodside. In this collective good cause, we gradually blackened up with smoke and grit, illustrating to those at home the determined lengths we were prepared to go to in the quest for yet more new numbers. Temporarily, I was off my trolley again - but we would be back.