It was about two o’clock in the morning, warm and slightly humid and I was sitting on a railway rail, sipping a mug of sweet lemon tea that had been brewed in a cauldron over an open fire, desperately trying to keep my eyes open as I had been working for eighteen hours. Sleep was slowly winning; I felt I just needed to shut my eyes for a few minutes and I would be fine when a crash of breaking crockery and harsh voices shouting in the Cantonese dialect brought me fully awake. In that split second between being asleep and awake the thought occurred to me – what am I, a British Railways officer, doing here, in the New Territories of Hong Kong surrounded by a Kowloon Canton Railway (KCR) breakdown gang and a gang of Communists, who were helping at my request, on the shore of Tolo Harbour near Horse Pissing Station on the Kowloon Canton Railway (KCR). Then I remembered that wagons on a freight train of the Chinese People’s Republic Railway, hauled by a KCR locomotive, running from Canton to Kowloon had derailed and I was trying to rerail them to clear the single track. Normally a derailment, unless very large, was not serious, but it was different this time, it was 1967 and the Cultural Revolution was raging in China and the KCR was in the middle of it. So how did I get here?
It goes back to 1963 and it seems so long ago that I find it difficult to remember all that happened; however, the events surrounding the Beeching Report are very clear although very depressing. Apart from the Report, I was lucky that I saw this period of British Railways as it still had a culture of service from the days of the private railway companies and had many of the men who
