Time Travel

The idea that it is only time that separates us from witnessing amazing events is a recurring theme in popular literature, of course. I’ve had that feeling a few times, for example, when standing in the same room in which Churchill met Stalin, at Cecilienhof, Potsdam and turning the same door handle that he turned to enter the talks.

More recently, we were enjoying a summer’s evening drink on the picnic tables outside the Bromley at Fiskerton, a riverside pub overlooking the Trent. It is a peaceful location frequented by gastro-pub grubbers and a range of aquatic birds, including the occasional kingfisher. The frontage looks over flat fields on the opposite bank of a wide bend in the river. The hilltop village of East Stoke is a mile or so across the floodplain to the east. It is a tranquil spot.

It was not always so. If we had been sitting in the same position 529 years earlier, we would have watched Yorkist soldiers fleeing for their lives after being routed by the Lancastrians at the Battle of Stoke Field. The battlefield site itself is just beyond the trees at the top of the river bluff. Estimates suggest that 4,000 men were killed in an engagement that lasted just 3 hours.

The remnants of the defeated army, fled in disarray. Many of them did not make it down the ravine that became known as the Red Gutter, as they tried to reach the river. The Trent was at that time not just lower, but more evidently seasonal - an altogether less controlled affair than it is today and even ford-able at Fiskerton, at times. Those who made it that far, attempted to swim or wade across to where we were now sitting with two pints of lager and some cheese and onion crisps. Their pursuers hacked them down as they went. From where we were positioned, we could have heard them dying and watched the river turning red.

It is sometimes just time that separate us from events of some magnitude – ones that have forged the course of modern history. Isn’t that just a mind-boggling notion?

On a different scale and with only my own self-indulgence firmly in mind once more, I sometimes re-create railway scenarios for myself, either remembering instances from my own time, or inventing them from my retrospective wish list. I am ably assisted by the railway heritage movement in this regard, naturally, and for railway modellers, surely the same is true? They re-construct a past reality down to the last detail that they feel comfortable with, whether they were actually there to see it in the first place, or not.

I sometimes like to whisk myself back to Exmouth Junction sheds - to a depot full of engines beginning with a 3, when, before that holiday, I had only ever recorded one such number, and that was on a special train at Crewe. I thought I was in heaven.

Now, I am standing at the south end of Preston station and seeing a succession of steam-hauled expresses approaching from the main line to the south. Am I right in thinking that they often came at the platforms quite quickly here, and actually braked fairly fiercely, as a result, whereas those approaching from the east were slowed in comparison by a tight bend just outside the station?

Nearer to home, and I’m being invited up into the cab of an ex-LMS tank at the buffer stops at Liverpool Central High Level and the driver is actually asking my dad if it’s OK for me to go up the tunnel with them to Brunswick and back? IS IT OK???

Those were the real ones. My made-up ones would include me joining my friends on their family holidays; to South Brent when the lines to the west were dominated by Kings and Castles, or going around Haymarket sheds in Edinburgh for rarities beginning with a 6, or spending some time on Perth station in similar pursuit, when I had never actually set foot in Scotland and wouldn’t do so for a few more years. No Waverley route for me then………. Or is there?   

A sight I can’t remember ever having seen – a steam train in Wallasey Grove Road station, in a photo taken by John Dyer, to whom I am very grateful, both for making the image available to me and for firing my retrospective imagination. Collett 0-6-0 panier tank No. 3749 heads a Wrexham to New Brighton service, 26^th April 1962.