PAUL ROUTLEDGE: 'Trainspotting made me a lifelong railway fan - a puffer nutter'
Self-confessed ‘Puffer Nutter’ and railwayman’s son Paul Routledge has enjoyed a lifelong passion for trains. Celebrating the bicentenary year of the world’s first public railway in his new book For The Love Of Trains, here the veteran Mirror journalist shares his enchanting memories of the boyhood trainspotting that launched his railway mania.
Political columnist Paul Routledge is a Fleet Street legend who joined the Mirror in 1998
You could always find us on the end of the platform, sitting on a porter's iron-wheeled goods barrow.
With a biro and notebook in one hand and a bottle of pop in the other, we looked expectantly down the line.
But we weren't there to catch a train. We were there to record the number – and name, if it had one – of the engine. Had you looked carefully, you might have seen me among them.
In the 1950s, no self-respecting main line station was complete without a motley crew of schoolboys gathered for the hobby of our generation: trainspotting.
READ MORE: 'I went on UK rail route named world's most beautiful and it lived up to the hype'READ MORE: Trainspotting cast now and one actor who no one would recognise now in huge roleIf it rained, we took cover under the glass canopy, probably irritating the “proper” passengers who were travelling somewhere – and the porters anxiously looking for tips.
But we never invaded the sanctity of the waiting room. Not because we scorned the welcoming coal fire but because you couldn't see the trains there.
And the whole purpose was to spot as many as possible, record them in a notebook and then underline their numbers in the Ian Allan books listing all British Rail locomotives.
An engine seen for the first time was a “cop” and we counted it a very good day out when we “copped” a dozen, especially if they were “foreigners” from a different BR region.
It all sounds very innocent, naïve even, today, and truth is it was.
But it was also life-enhancing. Trainspotting got teenage boys into a bigger world than the town where they lived.
The local station may be where it began, but in time we travelled far and wide to see the trains and their engines. For me, it was Doncaster, York and Leeds. But then I ventured to Crewe, Darlington, Manchester, Birmingham and eventually Scotland, as far as Inverness and Thurso.
I first travelled to London with a gang of lads on the overnight train from Leeds at the age of 14, sleeping on the overhead luggage rack. Uncomfortable, but it worked. And I learned how to work the Underground system.
Trainspotting taught resilience, geography, and the skill of travelling to unknown parts of the country : a sense of adventure. And it was safe. As one ardent spotter has written :”We were teenagers and teenagers in those days had little fear of anything or anyone.”
We also learned history, of our nation's heroes and empire, its industrial development and the science of transport. From the days of the first passenger railway from Darlington to Stockton two hundred years ago this month, the railway mania of the 1840s, the great days of steam in the 1920's, and the role of trains in two world wars.
Trainspotting was an education, and more fun than a stuffy classroom. Our Ian Allan books taught us about the great locomotive builders like Sir Nigel Gresley and the spread of “the iron road” throughout Britain by pioneers such as the "railway king George Hudson and Isambard Kingdom Brunel throughout Britain.
They made this country the workshop of the world, and exported a transport revolution round the globe, and we admired their giants of the track.
There was danger, however. Really determined spotters “bashed” the locomotive power depots - sheds where the engines were serviced – because that's where you found the largest number of engines, sometimes upwards of a hundred.
Admission was officially forbidden, with “Trespassers Will Be Prosecuted” notices at the entrance. You could secure an official permit to enter these hallowed halls, with turntables, cooling towers and all the industrial paraphernalia of steam. But that meant writing to the BR public relations office, with the endorsement of a responsible adult.
MPDs were dangerous places – the men who worked there were sometimes injured or even killed. Long lines of engines stood over deep ash pits, tempting the unwise to jump across the rails.
But the lure of the shed was greater than the sense of caution for a spotter in search of a “cop.” I admit to trespassing many times at the shed in my home town of Normanton, west Yorkshire – coded 20D, and then 55E – many times, either by climbing up an outside ash tip or sneaking under the foreman's window.
There were never more than twenty locomotives on site, and mostly goods and shunting types, but there was always the chance of a visiting Stanier “Jubilee” class named after a famous sea battle, Royal Navy Admiral or a far-flung country of Empire. Or a Gresley “Antelope” called after the various wild beasts of South Africa.
Today, the spotting scene has changed utterly. You still see groups of men, rather than boys, gathered on the platform ends, some in regulation anoraks but with miniature sound and even video recorders.
And they are more likely to drink real ale than Tizer. What's more, in an age of defacing graffiti, the privatised “train care depots” are like Alcatraz on rails.
Except for the long-haul goods system, there are very few locomotive-hauled trains, but the new express electric sets have numbers and sometimes names. The first LNER Azuma train in 2023 was named Century, to commemorate a hundred years of the company brand.
Trains like these continue to excite a sizeable following: an older generation inspired by railway tradition. I imagine very few remember the era of steam traction. Sadly, it expired in 1968, in the name of modernisation.
And like everything else, the hobby has gone digital. More than two million fans follow social media personality Francis Bourgeois, whose light-hearted and humorous trainspotting videos feature on Tik-Tok and Instagram. He is an ambassador for GB Rail Freight, appears on TV and has even written an autobiographical novel.
So, love of the railway is far from dead. It thrives still and you can relive the great days of steam in dozens of heritage railways across the country from Aviemore in the Scottish Highlands to deepest Devon.
Chiefly manned and operated by enthusiasts, they attract more than a million visitors a year.
Here, you can find more three hundred former BR locomotives that were saved from the cutter's torch. Most have been painstakingly restored to working – or, at any rate, cosmetic – order.
These journeys, of up to eighteen miles on the West Somerset from Minehead to the outskirts of Taunton, can feel like a second childhood, but a better one, with more money, if you're lucky. You can still take down the numbers, and the Ian Allan books have been reprinted, as vastly higher prices of course.
My favourite is the Keighley and Worth Valley, a five-mile run from the former textile town up to Haworth, birthplace of the Bronte sisters, and on to Oxenhope. I've heard it said that more visitors come for the steam trains than the historic Bronte Parsonage museum, but maybe that's just train talk.
With the sounds, smells and noises of our railway childhood, it's like the 1950s all over again. Memory track, not lane. All aboard for The Flying Nostalgia!
For The Love of Trains by Paul Routledge (Mirror Books) is out on Thursday, September 11