Alderley Edge

This is the best picture I could get which would include the two essential items of the story, so sorry about all the trees. This is Alderley Edge, where I stayed with my Mum and Dad as a toddler in the early 1950s, at the home of my grandmother in Trafford Road. My Dad pushed me in my pushchair to the park next to the main line from Manchester to London Euston via Crewe. It provided me with my first memories of the steam railway.

Dad told me later that from the swing park - then not hidden so completely from the line by that row of trees and foliage - I watched named trains like The Mancunian, The Comet and The Pines Express speed past. In fact, he told me about it so many times as I was growing up that in the end I don’t know if its my memory or his telling of the story that I can see in my mind’s eye. I imagine myself at the top of the slide as an un-rebuilt Patriot powers into view under the bridge from where the picture is taken. Fact or imagination, it doesn’t matter. I’m just grateful that he took me at all and that it kick started my lifelong interest in the railway.