My interest had a sad but serendipitous start . . .
In the very early 1970s, my grandmother died at a relatively young age and was buried in Wigan Cemetery, located just on the other side of the WCML to Springs Branch depot.
For the first year or so after the funeral, my grandad paid regular visits to her graveside. As well as being a dedicated husband, he had also been a lifelong cyclist and was keen to induct his grandson into the cycling 'Cause'. Since I'd acquired a new bike as a birthday present and was just about old enough to manage the ride, he encouraged me to go along with him on his cemetery visits.
I was happy to do this, especially in the summer school holidays, but the delights of cemetery visits very quickly waned for a late-primary school age lad. So, while my grandad spent his half-hour or so by the graveside, I waited outside at the Cemetery Road overbridge watching the trains go by.
Initially this was just to fill in the time, but these visits soon started to become more and more interesting for me. On the bike ride there, I would anticipate what trains might be seen today. Sometimes you would see nothing at all; other times there might be six or more trains passing in less than thirty minutes.
When there
were trains about, there was an eclectic and unpredictable mixture. At one end of the spectrum were clanking, squealing loose-coupled coal trains hauled by a Class 24 or 25 diesel, 2-car DMUs pottering to and fro on the route to Lime St and a procession of light engines and Class 08 shunters going to and from Springs Branch TMD.
At the less mundane end were 12 or 13-coach Inter City expresses, often double-headed by nearly new Class 50s, or Motorail and parcels trains, Freightliners, trainloads of new cars on unenclosed Cartic wagons, heavy lumbering oil trains and old-style mixed freight trains running between yards such as Carlisle, Willesden or Severn Tunnel Junction (although I didn't know any of these destinations at the time). Always interesting and quite often something new would come along which you hadn't seen before.
This was all before electrification of that part of the WCML and there was lots of steam era infrastructure still around. So, in addition to the main line trains there were background sounds of levers crashing and bells tinging in the nearby Springs Branch No.2 signal box, and groups of shunters 'working' at Ince Moss Sidings who seemed to spend most of their shifts raucously playing cards inside the shunters' hut, with a Class 08 idling away outside.
It wasn't long before I started to visit on my own, independently to my grandad's cemetery visits, and to seek out other railway viewing spots in the vicinity.
One day I met a boy, a year or two older than me, who I recognised from school. He introduced me to the concept of collecting loco numbers, so I got into that - my dad provided a sturdy, increasingly grubby notebook for use 'in the field', with numbers later transposed to red underlinings in a second-hand Combined Volume which was kept safely at home.
The final nudge which converted me from a sunny day, school holiday pastime to year-round obsession was the time I was up close to a very oily and work-worn, green liveried, split-headcode Class 40 (still an EE Type 4 at that time). This was stationary for an extended period right beneath the Taylors Lane overbridge on which I was standing - whistling away, emanating gravitas, character and power (at least to a youngster).
Since then, I've found evidence the loco
may have been D344 (later 40 144) and the reason it was lingering there for so long, hindering access to the diesel depot,
may have been because it had derailed. See this picture:
https://www.wiganworld.co.uk/album/photo.php?id=5264
Unlike many other posters here, it was several more years before I made my first significant journey actually
on a main-line train, except for occasional family outings by local DMU from Wigan to Southport or Manchester Victoria.
