Dawlish

From 1979 to 1986 we took our young family each year to the south west, starting off at Teignmouth, then Dawlish and finally St Ives. Repeatedly poor August weather eventually drove us to France, where we spent every summer holiday until 1999.

Dawlish has a special place in the minds of the railway fraternity. The line between Exeter and Newton Abbot skirts the coast on the route built by Brunel. It provides one of the most scenic stretches of railway anywhere in the country.

I spent many hours on Dawlish beaches, watching trains between splashing in the sea, building sandcastles with my children and the compulsory visits to the rock pools. I took no photographs of the trains and did not carry a notebook to record what was passing, relying instead on a pocket loco-shed book to make sure that I was not missing any diesels that were new to me on the sea wall.

During an additional break in July 1998, we broke our journey by road and returned briefly to Dawlish to see a King Class locomotive that was due to pass through on a special train. I had never seen steam on the main line west of Exeter before. We arrived just in time to photograph No. 6024 King Edward I. Was this the most stupid headboard ever carried by a special train – The Clotted King?