Three times a year, we would benefit from what the school termed a “field day”, and on these occasions, our club would often be free to roam the rails. Limited by the timings of a normal school day, we could rarely travel too far from home, but Swindon and Didcot offered a convenient round trip from Worcester with a route out via Gloucester and back via Oxford. Being based in Worcester, these trips would rarely yield much in the way of cops or new experiences, but they were nonetheless welcome breaks from the classroom, and one was always optimistic for the odd surprise.
On Friday, March 19th, 1982, our trip included a visit to the mighty Western Region bastion of Swindon Works, while on Friday, June 4th, we travelled via Swindon once more but this time to visit the Great Western Society at Didcot, now known as the Didcot Railway Centre. Our group could always come up with some spurious educational reason for an excursion, so in March, we were studying the history of the Railway Works and Museum in Swindon. The June visit to the GWR museum and steam centre at Didcot was an easy sell. The fact that both destinations would be good spotting locations was purely coincidental.
Both Swindon and Didcot are straightforward journeys from Worcester with easy through trains. They also make for a nice circuit and on March 19th we headed directly to Swindon, first on a DMU service from Worcester. On this occasion, it was appropriately on a Swindon-built Class 120 cross country
