The engine of love

Nicholas Whittaker – Platform Souls: The Trainspotter as Twentieth-Cenury Hero (Gollancz, £14.99)

I have never been ashamed to admit it: I was a trainspotter. I’d go further: I loved trainspotting. I devoted most of my early teens to it. I had an anorak, and I loved that too, “Trainspotter” and “anorak” are now shorthand for all-round nerdishness. LibDem activists at the Littleborough and Saddleworth byelection were said to resemble “trainspotters on acid”; a recent advert for teledating guaranteed “no anoraks, no trainspotters and no quiche-eaters”; and John Major has been likened to a children’s television character called Anorak Man – “a dim-witted trainspotter in a windcheater and woolly hat; a prat, a wimp, a wally. The sort of gump who probably wears his shirt inside his underpants.” You get the picture.

Trainspotters are fair game these days because there are so few of them, perhaps only 20,000. But when my love affair began – in South Wales in the early 1970s – we were a mighty army, hundreds of thousands strong, thronging the stations, raiding the railway sheds, ordering our lives through our immaculately kept “combines”, which listed every train in service, each ready to be ticked off. Thinking about it now, trainspotting is a rather odd term. Birdwatching you can understand – a tiny horn-rimmed throat warbler obviously take a bit of looking for as it flits among the rushes of some East Anglian marsh. But a 130-ton diesel was difficult to miss even in the drizzly mist that usually enshrouded Newport station. Non-trainspotters just don’t understand the attraction; hence the derision and the cheap signifiers – Thermos flasks, acne, greasy hair, spectacles held together with Sellotape. Psychologists have even had the temerity to group trainspotting with other types of compulsive behaviour and attribute it to Asperger’s Syndrome. They must be mad.

Nicholas Whittaker, a lifelong trainspotter, seeks to lead the fightback – to show how the quest for train numbers involved travel, adventure, derring-do. He started in the dying days of steam in the 1960s and then grew to love diesel. But as diesel trains were replaced by “multiple units” and execrable sprinters – nothing more than boring collections of carriages – there was nowhere for the trainspotter to go, no proper engine to love. So trainspotters became heritage freaks, abandoning the platforms of windswept stations for those awful, twee preservation railways with silly names like Bluebell and Watercress. There are no boys spotting trains any more, just affable middle-aged men looking for a steamy whiff of nostalgia. Once there were hordes of boys (never, in my experience, girls, though Whittaker claims to have met one or two). Take this report from the Manchester Guardian of 27 August 1962: “Five hundred determined trainspotters played hide and seek with harassed railway police at Crewe at the weekend. In train after train they poured into the Cheshire junction – to be met by a handful of police with orders to get rid of them.” Wimps?

Trainspotting may be moribund, but interest in the subculture is flourishing. Stephen Dinsdale offered a sympathetic send-up in his play Anorak of Fire, and York University has just introduced the first academic course in the subject – it attracted 120 applications within a month. All those 1970s kids are now thirtysomethings trying to explain their passion, those grey but glorious Saturdays at Crewe, frantically jotting down numbers while listening to the football results on some rabid Manchester United fan’s tinny tranny. The patron saint of the genre is Nick Hornby, no trainspotter despite the name, but the founder of contemporary obsessionalism. Football, music, stamp collecting, trains – man as the eternal small boy seeking to make sense of a crazy world. Everywhere the search for order, logic, classification. League tables, music charts, Stanley Gibbons catalogues, and lists of train numbers classified by type.

At the age of 14, I travelled all over the country in pursuit of numbers, including one memorable weekend trip with a trainspotting club that took in Tinsley in Sehffield, Bradford, Goole, Immingham, Doncaster and Barrow Hill. Train sheds on Sunday, as Whittaker explains, were the best: fewer trains in service meant they were full of trains waiting to be “copped”, claimed, climbed over. The Toton depot in Nottingham was wonderful: the 10 named “Peaks” – Scafell Pike, Helvellyn, Skiddaw, Great Gable, Cross Fell, Whernside, Ingleborough, Penyghent, Snowdon, Tryfan – lined up, usually in numerical order.

Trains worked out of their home depots, so you could devise a systematic method of finding them – if you were prepared to travel and to break the law to get into the sheds. I was almost arrested when I was caught wondering around Derby Research Works, where the Advanced Passenger Train was being built. But, in retrospect, it was all surprisingly easy, with few dodgy characters to disturb adolescent fantasy. The only really disconcerting moment was on Bristol Temple Meads station when a man in his sixties came up to a friend of mine and asked him whether he was his son. Oddly enough, he was.

The cynics would say it wouldn’t, couldn’t, shouldn’t happen now, teenagers roaming the land, endangering their safety. But of course it does: they just have more money and go to football matches or concerts or raves instead. And most of them still come home. But the innocence has gone, the poetry, the sense of place, the search for meaning, the soggy ham and lettuce sandwiches. Old buffers have a point.

Whittaker, guilty of many a clanking cliché, is no Hornby as a writer or as a chronicler of life. He attempts a rites-of-passage narrative, delineates his friends, his relationships, but his heart isn’t in it. This is writing by numbers – but oh, those wonderful numbers.

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