It wasn’t until about 1960, when I was nine, that I began to take a more serious interest in railways, other than in just watching trains go by. I was intrigued, through an early and parallel fascination with maps, by the tangle of railway lines routed along the Leen Valley, running north from Nottingham, located not only within sight of, but ‘criss-crossing’, one another. Later study revealed that these had been built by three pre-Grouping companies – the Midland, Great Northern and Great Central – each vying for passengers from the pit villages and market towns and the lucrative coal traffic from the numerous collieries which they passed. In the cases of the MR and GN, coal had been their rationale but it was also to become the lifeblood of the GC in its later years.
My home town of Sutton-in-Ashfield, some 13 miles north of Nottingham, was still largely a mining and engineering community during the 1960s. An old archive map that I subsequently obtained revealed that Sutton had been served by a total of six stations within its modest boundaries before the war. At that time Nottingham had no fewer than 26 stations within a 2½ mile radius of the city centre! Railways and collieries were to be seen everywhere, with the sounds of locomotive whistles, the rhythmic blast of exhaust steam and clanking of buffers from loose-coupled mineral wagons ever present.
By this time, the effects of the British Transport Commission’s 1955 Modernisation Plan were beginning to show. A few years later, Beeching’s report of 1963, The Reshaping of British Railways, aimed partly at addressing the failures of the Modernisation Plan, was poised to have an even more radical effect on the railway industry.
I went through the customary trainspotting induction course and became pretty knowledgeable not only in locomotive matters, but also, railways generally. Unfortunately, as the 1960s progressed, diesels were becoming more and more prevalent on British Railways. It was extremely disheartening, even depressing, to see how many of my rare steam ‘cops’ were disappearing from the Ian Allan ABC Combined Volume with the publication of each successive issue, due to scrapping. I remember feeling physically sick when, upon transferring data into my new summer 1962 edition, I discovered that the entire class of approximately 165 ‘K3s’ that had survived until then had been culled at a stroke. With the list of ‘K1s’ following on directly from the ‘B16s’, it had to be some kind of mistake, a printing error, didn’t it?
Nevertheless, my love of railways continued to hamper academic progress; after all, what was the point of sitting in a classroom wasting time attempting to perform differential calculus, apparently for the sole satisfaction of my, could even now be pounding through Newark? But with the coming of 1964 I decided that the game was just about up as far as number spotting was concerned. The death knell sounded when I found that I was copping more and more entire classes, not because I’d seen all of the engines but because those I hadn’t seen had been withdrawn.
