By the age of nine I was what I suppose you might call a ‘partly-fledged’ trainspotter, with a regular lineside routine and an Abc Combined Volume (still unfortunately underlined in freehand, but care and precision would come with age). My knowledge of railways, their variety, shedcodes and the imminent arrival of diesels continued to grow, yet to become a ‘real’ trainspotter I would need to travel further afield. The older lads proudly displayed their well-kept Combines boasting of visits to Crewe, Leeds and Doncaster and, of course we younger ones were filled with envy.
Truth to tell I wasn’t a particularly adventurous child, having a strong sense of danger, but also keenly aware of not getting on the wrong side of my father whose word, in typical 1950s fashion, was law. With my close friend Alan Woodward, we asked our mothers to be allowed to accompany his older brother and some of the bigger lads on one of their day trips to Doncaster: the curt answer came that we were too young. Duly big brother Dennis returned full of excitement at his huge range of ‘cops’ of ‘A4s’, ‘Als’, ‘A2s’ and ‘B16s’, ‘Shires’, ‘Hunts’, ‘Directors’ and so on. All were exotic beasts to us novices. How jealous we were! Being only nine, we lacked genuine persuasive power, but decided to scale back our ambitions (for the time being anyway) and begged to be allowed to catch the train to Royston & Notton, the next station north of Cudworth and about two miles distant. As Alan had previously lived there and we promised not to stray too far from the station itself, our parents finally succumbed.
In the scheme of things this was small beer indeed, but as a step on the way to growing up and becoming independent it was a major event. I suspect it must have been a half-term holiday as it was a weekday and wasn’t in the long summer break so I would guess it would most likely be May 1958. We were going only for the afternoon, so with
