The three of us – Bob, Chris and me, trainspotters extraordinaire, caught our usual train for an afternoon’s spotting at Witham on the main London line departing Braintree at 2.17pm, arriving Witham 2.34pm having called at the tiny intermediate stations of Cressing and White Notley, both, to the delight of John Betjeman, being examples of his beloved poetical ‘oil-lit halts’.
It became a habit for at least one of us to lean out of the compartment carriage window to deter any further passengers entering; sometimes it worked, sometimes not, but the ‘2.17’ was never very busy and rarely collected any passengers en route. It’s not that we didn’t welcome fellow travellers but an empty compartment on the ancient (c1907) dirty brown carriages allowed us free reign to move from one side to the other, particularly if there was some engine activity to spot as we crawled round the tight curve to enter Witham main line station. Besides, the dusty seats with springs that had long gone bang were most uncomfortable so standing was the best option.
It was 1956. Up front a wheezy, steamleaking ex-Great Eastern Railway F5 or F6 2-4-2 tank engine would be chuffing merrily along the rails. The only exception to this happy performance was either type’s inability to haul the odd weekly ‘tradition’ of adding two more of the ancient coaches to the standard two-coach length on the 7.39am ex-Braintree train on Saturday mornings. This was a mystery to everyone until someone told us the coaches sat in the siding all week and needed to ‘turn a wheel just in case they were needed for immediate use’. So, after an agonisingly slow start, the engine, with no chance of gaining any decent speed, would crawl to a stall on the 1 in 70 short climb soon after leaving the station over Rose Hill and up to the Mill Road underbridges. After a ‘blow-up’, liberal amounts of sand applied
