Return to Donny

Three years ago, I took a day trip to Doncaster. It was the first time for fifty-two years that I had spent any length of time on the station, other than for changing trains whilst travelling through.

Class A1 No. 60128 Bongrace was one of the first engines we saw when we arrived, one day in early June, 1963. If my memory serves me, she was drifting down towards the sheds alongside the main London King’s Cross-bound platform, passing an English Electric Type 4 on the up fast centre road and a DMU at the opposite platform. The presence of the Deltics and the EE4s was the main reason that we only saw one A4, No. 60018 Sparrowhawk, when we bunked round the sheds later on in the day. We weren’t keen on the EE4s. It was their fault that the Prinnies had already all gone, and the Semis, which had shared the crack expresses out of Liverpool Lime Street with them, would also soon be a thing of the past.

Moving on half a century, or so, I rolled up at Newark Northgate in plenty of time for the 10.33 to York. Its imminent arrival was announced on the public-address system at 10.25. The digital clock above platform 1 showed 10.11 and the famous old Potts of Leeds clock that has featured in so many photographs over the years had gone completely potty, claiming it was 11.14. At least it was consistently wrong, showing exactly the same time on both faces.

Doncaster was every bit as busy as it was in 1963. It was still attracting the spotters, too. I counted at least one for every year I had been away, almost all of them around my age. Some had brought their fold-up camping chairs with them. I wondered if any of them were also present when I last sat here.

I decided that Grand Central’s black and orange was the most attractive and certainly the most stately, express passenger livery on show, since the demise of the navy blue of the former GNER.

Taken from roughly the same spot, overlooking the four-track main line between the two island platforms, and with the overhead power lines being the most obvious addition to the scene over the intervening decades, a First Trans Pennine Class 185 unit leaves the station in the direction of Sheffield.