In 2008, the National Railway Museum wanted to commemorate
the fortieth anniversary of the end of steam on British Railways and especially
the running of the Fifteen Guinea Special from Liverpool Lime Street in August
of that year. My friend John Beck replied to their advert in the railway press
and we were invited to join in the celebrations at York.
We met some of the retired enginemen who had been employed
on the day in 1968, and our own recollections were filmed for posterity by the
NRM. We contributed to a series of Radio Five interviews for a programme
marking the event, which was broadcast after most peoples’ bedtime. I felt glad
to be so closely associated with the event - though our only contribution on
the day had been to go and say goodbye to No. 45110.
I was asked to write a piece describing our reminiscences
for the museum’s archive, where it is already likely to be gathering dust. In
it, I wrote that as a result of an early introduction by my Dad, together with
our school railway society trips,
“the
beauty, excitement, camaraderie and atmosphere of the steam railway was set
alight in us……...” and that the events of 1968………. “brought an end to an era that
had really only recently begun for us …... Overall, I felt a bit cheated,
because I was born just a few years too late to make full use of the glorious
1950s and early 1960s steam heyday. It was to be all over on this day and we
were still teenagers……… We trooped back home, a disconsolate bunch.
We have made the most of it since, of course, preservation
and all that and the magnificent return of express steam to the main line. I’m
still proud to have been a train spotter. It is the magic of steam. Either you
feel it or you don’t.”
[Based on an extract from my book, Train Spotters]
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