For no particular reason other than a paucity of creative imagination, I was earlier thinking about my train spotting career of the mid 1960s, and the lads that used to accompany me on some of the epic voyages we made on the uncharted ocean of British Railways when there were still ways and it didn't stop at British Rail. Not really fair to call us train spotters, either, as we had long past and outgrown just taking numbers and ticking them off in the Book*. We preferred the term 'Railway Enthusiasts', which in those heady days had slightly more cachet, though now it is equally derogatory. In the later years we called ourselves 'Gricers', although the origin of this term is lost in the mythical mystical misty mist, mister. Gricer, though, implies the sort of itinerant existence I will shortly describe.

There were 4 of us, classmates, and for 5 years between '63 and '68, we left an impressive trail of toffee and Mars Bar wrappers the length and breadth of England. There were others who came on some trips, but we were the hardcore, the team, the Railway Lads, and we had developed into a finely oiled machine for the purpose of living rough for next to nothing over a weekend when we might cover over 1000 miles in a day. We were 11 years old in '63, and consequently 16 in '68, and exploited opportunities which are unimaginable to modern teenagers-imagine the reaction of the parents of one of today's 13 year olds on being told on Friday evening at 8 o'clock 'Finished my homework, so I'm catching the 5 past midnight Liverpool, see you sometime Sunday evening!'. Even our parents gibbed a bit at first, but rapidly came to recognize that we were good at this, gave us each a shilling for emergency phone calls (never used), and let us get on with it. What they would have done had we ever rung them up from, say, Huddersfield late on a Sunday evening with school in the morning and no means of support is not something I suspect they had thought completely through. As you will see, we'd have probably coped without difficulty.

We did not conform exactly to the nerd image, either. Graham Thomas was what they call in Somerset a 'gert lummox of a lad' who played school rugby in the front row, where things could get a bit brutal. Andy McEnzie, Mac, was another rugby player, a small, fast, clever outside half who could think on his feet. Lewis Bevan, Scab (he had impetigunous issues), was what they called in those days 'gangly', an odd collection of seemingly disconnected limbs and torsos and glasses that flew in loose formation, but certainly flew-he would frequently win cross-country events: though there was never any style or grace to his running, one of his generally associated bits would get over the line first and the rest would turn up eventually. And, hard though it is to believe now (even I have difficulty), I was a fair hack tennis player.

Graham, as you might expect, was a bit out of his depth unless something heavy had to be lifted; Mac was the intellectual, capable of doing the calculation neccessary to work out the speed of a train from the timing between 1/4 mile posts in his head without drooling. Scab was the engineer. He had an impressive Rolleiflex medium format camera he'd inherited from his late father, who had in turn inherited it from a late German at Monte Cassino-word was that Bevan senior, on spotting the Rollei, had made himself instrumental in occasioning the hapless German's lateness-anyway, the point of this was that Scab had made a tripod for this beast himself, out of scrap bike bits! I was the philosopher of the group, and if you don't think such a thing was neccessary, I can only say that someone had to have a moral standpoint in order to stop the blagging going too far...

The name of the game was Steam Engines. These were already becoming thin on the ground (there weren't many on railway lines either) locally in '63, and thier eventual extinction in '68 saw a steady retreat of the borders of thier habitat to firstly the Midlands, then the North of England and finally to Lancashire, coming full circle from Robert Stephenson, the 'Rocket' and the Liverpool and Manchester Railway. Initially, the tool of the trade was bicycles. We would set off across the Gwent levels with the wind behind us heading for Severn Tunnel Junction via the Newport Transporter Bridge, stopping fairly frequently for Graham to catch up. He was physically the strongest, but while the rest of us had 5-speed 'racers', he had to make do with a thing called a Triumph Palm Beach. This was practically standard issue for schoolboys at the time, 26" wheels, 3-speed Sturmey Archer, fitted steel mudguards and a chainguard. It was bombproof, but weighed many tons, and Graham never got the hang of cycling efficiently. Our business at the Tunnel completed, we would go for tea and biccies in the little buffet they once had there, which had an impressive poster extolling the delights of travelling to New York on the long scrapped Mauretania. Tired and with a headwind to face, we would catch a train home, having saved maybe ninepence on the single over the cheap day return fare. Guards were mostly sympathetic about bicycles....

The bikes were used for local evening outings to Radyr and East Dock sheds, where steam engines lingered until the summer of '65, but it was obvious that bigger, longer, better expeditions were gonna be needed. These could only be done by train, and we all got paper rounds to finance the enterprise, so the bikes were still essential. Until '66, day trips could be done to take in the various engine sheds around Birmingham, and some action was even to be had at Gloucester if you only had an afternoon, but after that, Crewe was the nearest-but once past that point, for 2 years, one entered a magical land where steam engines were still the norm on goods trains and could even be found on some passenger trains! But the clock was ticking and we knew it. Every month Railway Magazine published lists of loco withdrawals, closed or deiselised sheds, and new, closer, predictions of the End of Steam, or in other words life as we knew it. Problem was having enough time in this magical land to see anything much, and the solution was the 00.05 Cardiff-Liverpool.

This was not a fast train. It ran to a timetable probably unaltered since the opening of the Hereford-Shrewsbury line in the 1870s, and consisted of one passenger coach next the loco and a hefty string of parcels vans. Loading and unloading of these was performed at the stops, i.e. everywhere, and at Hereford and Shrewsbury vans were attached and detached. None of this mattered, as the purpose of this part of the trip was to sleep. Once you got to Crewe, at about half 5 in the morning, the whole wide grim world of 'oop North' lay before you, and there were connections to all of it within the next hour. At this point a fiendishly complex itinerary, worked out by me usually, swung (swang?) into operation, which would certainly take in the sights (steam engine, of course) of either Liverpool or Manchester, and then onward to Preston, Bolton, Carnforth, Carlisle, maybe a stop at Tebay to see the Shap bankers, then back over the Settle and Carlisle for Leeds and Huddersfield, until summer '67 when Yorkshire went steamless. Saturday was for steam trains in action, working, the harder the better, and there was, for a few short years, plenty. Saturday night introduced us to such places as Newton Heath, Manchester, or Neville Hall, Leeds, where there were carriage sidings full of carriages which would be our accomodation for the night. The railway staff knew and turned a blind eye. Here one would meet other lads with the same idea, from Scotland, or Kent, or Devon, East Anglia and London. Public Schoolboys mixed with lads from the Gorbals with holes in thier shoes, or farm hands from Sussex, and mostly I remember lots of laughing. The carriage cleaners would wake us up when the Sunday day shift started, we'd grab a cup of tea in thier messrooms, and move on to the Sunday business, which was Engine Sheds. Sometimes we would even encounter the shadowy, legendary, figures of the Master Neverers Association, a secret organisation whose purpose it was to sneak into engine sheds, trespassing of course but again the railwaymen turned a blind eye, and illicitly clean the engines, then dissappear back into the darkness whence they came.**

We rode free on ECS, empty coaching stock, empty trains not in the timetable but which we had heard about from sympathetic railwaymen or other gricers. Drivers cheerfully stopped by word of mouth arrangement to pick us up or drop us off to connect with timetable trains. We lived off the land, learning early that it was poinless taking supplies with you-they'd be eaten before you got to Newport. Greasy spoon caffs, factory canteens, bus depot messrooms kept us going, onward, ever onward as exhaustion set in and Sunday pm started getting dark. We travelled light-our knapsacks or duffle bags containing a spare jumper, pencil sharpener, notebook and pencil (never a biro, we needed things that worked even in the freezing chill of a Yorkshire winter morning), Mars Bar, maybe a Melton Mowbray Pork Pie, Tizer***, the fuel on which railway enthusiasm ran, and, of course, the Book*. We wore duffle coats in winter and sport jackets in summer; anoraks were unknown to me until 1969, prior to which they were called snorkels and only worn by Mods on scooters. Some of the farm lads had donkey jackets, which smelled as if they were made of real donkeys.The ultimate goal was the reaching of Crewe before 20 past 8, when the Cardiff train left, and we never missed this, ever. We would commandeer a compartment, finish the Tizer, eat whatever remained in bags and pockets, hopefully food though we often past caring by then, and sleep all the way home. Parents, mine or Graham's, would meet us off the train at 11.35 and ferry us all home, where the experienced mother had a boiler of bath water heated up for thier now indescribably filthy offspring to delouse in, and a basket for the even filthier clothes, worn now for 2 days. Trains were never clean in those days, and we'd been living rough around steam engines, remember... This seems a good point to remind you that we were 14 or 15 years old at the time.

We learned stuff on those outings which is hard for kids today to pick up. We saw some of the worst slums still standing in Britain, and wonderful scenery. We mingled with lads from different worlds, amicably. We met with nothing but friendliness and gratuitous, unlookedfor kindnesses from the folk of the North; tolerance from the poor buggers trying to run the railway in the midst of all this, and bemusement from everyone else, but always friendliness, often from people who had fuck all and would still happily share it with us. Admittedly this friendliness was not always cheerful-there are some miserable bastards oop north-but it was always there and always genuine. We learned how to fend for ourselves, how to deal with problems there was no point in moaning about. We became resourceful and inventive, we got on with it. We put ourselves through not inconsiderable hardships, and we were ecstatically happy. We never ever felt unsafe, and we probably never actually were. And the public schoolboys learned that if you slept in the same carriage as the Gorbals lads, you were the one with the shoes with holes in in the morning, and it didn't matter!

In '68, all this came to an end. The Last Steam Train was booked solid the day it was announced and watched by perhaps a hundred thousand people on it's circular route around Lancashire. I wasn't there. The media suddenly became aware of gricers and began commenting on the phenomenon with thier usual perceptive understanding. if you wanted to see a steam engine you had to go to a preserved railway, abroad, or, as in our case, the local coal mine railways. This meant going back to the bicycles, and as we had now discovered girls and beer, the excesses of life in the carriages were no longer appropriate, so it was perhaps as well. At least by now Graham had got himself a 5 speed! We all missed it though, and were aware that we'd had the time of our lives in a way which could never be re-created by less fortunate generations, even those say 2 years younger. We were of our time, a short time in a doomed, hopeless and shrinking place, and therefore unique.

Symtomatic of the times of course; the nation was disentangling itself from the Empire and adjusting to not being a superpower, and, like the trolleybuses and paddle steamers, many old certainties were being found inconvenient and dispensed with. Even if we threw away the babies with the bathwater, there is no doubt the bathwater had to go-it stunk as much as any of our late Sunday night drainings. British society at the start of the '60s was still pinned to the old shibboleths of 'best in the world', colonialism, class, racism, xenophopia, homophobia, misanthropic and white supremacist mindsets. By 1970 there were no 'proper' steam trains, trolleybuses or paddle steamers, and my world was a poorer place for it, but I'd never for one second have gone back-those shibboleths just mentioned had not been destroyed nor have they yet, but they had been mortally wounded, and the sort of world where you could meet people as different from yourself as is possible in one society while you were kipping in the carriages and having a laugh was exactly among the sort of things that dealt the death blow. I'm glad I was part of it.



*British Railway Locomotives (Combined Volume), published yearly in hardback by Ian Allan, the Bible, a list of locomotives steam, deisel and electric divided into classes with basic information in each class heading. And photos. Known as 'The Combined', it had a companion cloth-covered book, 'British Railways Locomotive Shed Directory', a list of engine sheds, which engines were allocated to them, and, most importantly, how to find them by walking and/or bus from the nearest railway station. Some of these were mini expeditions in themselves.

**This really existed. I'm not making it up.

***Scots lads had Iron Brew. Made in Scotland. From girders.



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Johnboythelostandterminallyconfused