Railwayana locations

“When I were a lad,” I found that a love of trains helped with my geography and geography helped me with my love of trains. I gained a little classroom kudos by knowing where places were [those that had sheds, anyway], and getting around the country a bit at a relatively early age probably even earned me a few test marks from time to time.

It just grew and grew until I was a lifer as far as trains were concerned and a geographer, to boot. One avant-garde branch of my subject in the trendy seventies was that of the so-called phenomenologists. What it really boiled down to was a belief that you could not explain the world solely in scientific or objective terms but you had to also take into account the subjective dimension – how people perceive it.

That was interpreted as an apparent weakness in the subject and contributed to accusations that geography wasn’t seriously studying anything very much and gave other disciplines opportunities to be rather sniffy and dismissive of it as a pseudo-science. Before my own formal studies were complete, I remember becoming quite attached to the notion of “a sense of place,” an idea that was thrown into the mix at around the same time and which hinged on a theme borrowed from psychology that “the whole is greater than the sum of its parts.” In our context, I suppose, it meant that each place is unique and has its own characteristics that give it its own distinctive feel, a concept that would be quite difficult to take issue with in the first place but one which still appeals to me today.

I certainly think it helped me to develop a keen sense of place itself, as well as of relative locations. Our country packs in such a wide variety of landscape types into a comparatively small area. There is a whole lifetime of different holidays to be had in the British Isles alone. I’m undertaking my own fieldwork exercises to try to prove it.

Circumstance eventually parachuted me into a very central area of our own landmass. On the downside, we are a long way from the sea. In the plus column, we are tied up in Notts between the A1 and the M1 and therefore fairly handily situated for travelling in every direction. I am also well placed for attending railwayana auctions and for many of the heritage railways. Although we are seven miles from a railhead, once on the trains we benefit from that centrality again.

An early attraction for us was the wide range of essential services available in our steadily expanding commuter village, with its non-expanding main street. That operates now as a kind of restrictive gastric band that is somehow not quite working in the way it is supposed to. We have not yet required the attention of the mole catcher [“No Mole, No Fee,” as the advertisement in the bus shelter reminds us]. Our own moles are still drawing a blank beneath the stone slabs of the patio. The fortune teller on Main Street works Tuesdays only. Our calamities have tended to fall much later on in the week, so on the occasions that we might have benefited from a quick peek into the future to see if we would be able to put things right, we have just had to stick with the tea leaves, instead.

Given that the auction houses that either dabble in, or commit wholeheartedly to, railwayana are also rather far from the extremities within the UK, I really have no excuse for not having visited them all at least once. Taking the Railway Antiques Gazette’s own list of Diary Dates as a starting point and making the proviso right from the off that any notable omissions are my mistake alone, I found that the following outlet locations have been prominent in more recent times, in addition to the swap meets and collector’s fairs:

Wickham [Solent], Templecombe [Talisman], Dorking [home base for online auction railwayana.net, now aligned with GCRA], London, Bristol, Pershore [GWRA], Stoneleigh and Bloxham [both GCRA], Birmingham, Newark [Talisman again], Stafford, Crewe, Poynton [GNRA] and Thirsk [now showing in the north east after Malton, Scarborough and Kirbymoorside]. Closures [Sheffield], transferred locations [Cotswold], takeovers [GCRA] and recent additions [Poynton], all indicate a fairly dynamic situation overall.

If you take out the sales that are not exclusively railwayana, like Thirsk, and the specialist sales like those in London and Birmingham [tickets], you are left with a swathe of main auctions that are still very much concentrated in northern and central England, from Poynton by way of Crewe, Stafford and Newark to Stoneleigh, Bloxham and Pershore, with a southern extension to Bristol, Templecombe and Wickham. Wales, Scotland and the far south west remain out of the picture altogether.

No doubt this pattern owes much to accidents of history, as was the case for many of our greatest industries, in times gone by. As might be expected, where enthusiasts originally identified a need that they thought that they could meet, they found that there were a surprising number of potential customers prepared to travel some distance to take advantage of the new provision. Most of the large centres of population in the country are quite well served as a result.

I have regularly been to Newark, Pershore and Stoneleigh and in “the old days” many times to Sheffield and Malton. I went recently to Solent for the first time, having heard only nice things about it. Of course, as a geographer, of sorts, I relied on my road map and not on sat’ nav’ to get me there. 

[Adapted from an article that first appeared in the Railway Antiques Gazette, with thanks to the editor, Tim Petchey]