Part 2: Day Return to Weybridge, Surrey
At the end of Part One (Steam World, April) Iwas becoming bored with the same old locomotives passing home day after day. It was one of those unwritten truths of trainspotting: if you always spotted in the same place, you would always see the same locomotives.
Though I had begun trainspotting in the garden of The End House, I did not really need to go outside. Inside the house, there was virtually no view of the railway from downstairs but you could certainly hear them, and not just the ‘Q1’ 0-6-0s and the rattling French windows. Ordinary goods trains with 10ft-wheelbase wagons made a pretty substantial noise on the jointed track and there seemed to be a rail-joint right behind the TV! Mum would complain bitterly about what she referred to as ‘square wheels’ as a 50-wagon freight thudded its way past en route to Feltham while she watched Emergency Ward Ten.
I could rush to an upstairs window when I heard a train coming, in order to take the locomotive number, but after a few months it was pointless. We had every ‘Q1’ 0-6-0 and ‘S15’ 4-6-0 underlined. Soon, withdrawals would start to eat in to those numbers we had underlined, and those we had not. For the
