This much I know
Ian Allan, trainspotter, 83, Lyne, Surrey
The Observer, Sunday 15 February 2004
http://www.theguardian.com/theobserver/2004/feb/15/magazine.features7
Trainspotting is an innocent pursuit. We only ever had one criminal case, I think, involving an older Locospotters' Club member interfering with younger chaps. The sight and sound of a steam locomotive in full cry was normally excitement enough for everyone in trousers, short or long.
An obsession with numbers is not such a daft thing. I published my first locospotters' guide, the ABC of Southern Locomotives, in 1943. Printed 2,000 for a print bill of £42. Sold out immediately at 1/- [5p] a copy. My first business adventure. It hadn't been hard to put the book together; I knew all the Southern engine details - wheel diameters, cylinder bores, boiler pressures, names and numbers - by heart.
Nothing beats running your own railway. My boyhood ambition was to be station master, Waterloo, graduating to general manager, Southern Railway. I ended up as a junior assistant in the railway's PR department; 15/- [75p] a week, August 1939. Now, in my eighties, I'm chairman of the Great Cockcrow Railway, Surrey. All two miles of it. The tracks are 7.25 inches apart, but, all up, the trains weigh the mainline equivalent of 425 tonnes, and run at scale speeds of 70mph. It's a microcosm of the real thing. Except, our trains are always clean, and we haven't had an accident worth reporting since we opened 35 years ago.
Never retire: it's the best way to get ill, depressed or drop off your perch prematurely. Engine drivers would, famously, die shortly after they collected their carriage clock. How could you go from the footplate of the Golden Arrow one week to moping about the house the next? I'm in the office at Shepperton five days a week. My sons run the Ian Allan Group these days, but I like to do my bit.
One leg will do nicely. I lost my left leg when I was 15, during exercises with the OTC. Catastrophe - I wouldn't be able to pass the Southern Railway's medical for traffic apprentices. No general managership for me. They needed at least the two legs, they said. I did wonder how I was going to ride my bicycle to go and look at trains, but I was up, about and on my bike within six weeks. Had to be careful at Waterloo, though, crossing the 650 volt tracks during the blackout; if I'd brushed the electric rail with my tin leg, that would have been the only bit left of the young Ian Allan.
Everyone has a favourite number. Mine is 909, with 913 coming a close second. [Southern Railway Schools class 3-cylinder 4-4-0s, St Paul's and Christ's Hospital.]
Trainspotters weren't always thought of as anoraks. They were quite respectable in the Forties, Fifties and Sixties, especially after an incident in 1944, when spotters laid pennies on the tracks of the West Coast mainline at Tamworth, so that passing trains would flatten them; we formed the Ian Allan Locospotters' Club to keep them in order. Members had to sign a pledge of good behaviour on railway property. We ended up with 260,000 members and took them the length and breadth of Britain by Ian Allan steam specials.
Trainspotting and religion go together like the number 4472 and the Flying Scotsman. I'm dedicated CofE; come from a long line of clerics. Eric Treacy, late Bishop of Wakefield, was one of the great railway photographers. His mitre used to hang in the palace hall alongside an oily engineman's cap.
Railway enthusiasm is classless. The great heroes of the steam age were not just legendary locomotive designers, nor great company bosses, but engine drivers like Bill Hoole [LNER/BR Eastern Region]. Hoole held the post-war record for British steam [112mph]. We published a biography of him. Sold jolly well. Don't think anyone would be interested in the life of an engine driver today, unless he or she happened to be an off-duty mad axe murderer.
You could never, ever mistake a railway enthusiast for a spy. Railways have never been state secrets in Britain; we published our first guides during the Second World War. Spotters went everywhere at the time, taking numbers. On the continent they would have been arrested. Still are in some parts of the world.
There was never a Golden Age of the railway. I can remember a 'late-running arrivals board' at Euston before the war. It read up to 99 minutes late. One day in 1939, every slot on the board was full. We southern types called the LMS 'ell of a mess'. The recent privatisation has been a much bigger mess. If there was anything like a Golden Age, it was between 1900 and 1920, before the car got into its stride.
Never put the mockers on the next generation. There may be better times around the corner. Who knows, we might even begin to learn to love our mainline railways again.
