The Railway Monster awakens.

It was at Southampton University in the early 80’s that my interest in trains increased thanks to the arrival of a girlfriend in my life. Teresa: the girlfriend I married and to whom I am still married.

Trains were though very expensive to use, even with rail cards. As a university student, I recall hitching from Lyme Regis to London and from Oxford to Southampton rather than go by train. Trains were also not always convenient, for instance to get to Axminster station from Lyme Regis you first had to get a lift by car or catch a bus and many a rail trip was abandoned due to the bus running late and the connection being missed. Arriving five minutes late was useless when there was only a train from Axminster every two hours. (Even now with the addition of some extra track there is still only an hourly service.)

Approaching Salisbury from the West. Change at Salisbury for a train to Southampton

Trains were, however, the most obvious means of getting to see my girlfriend Teresa and for her to get to see me at times when we were not both in Southampton. The trip to Teresa’s parents’ house involved travelling on suburban services in SE London to get to Mottingham on the Dartford via Sidcup line.

Teresa waiting for a London train at Mottingham in 1981

Then trains became more interesting still when Teresa went to Germany for the summer vacation and getting to see her there now involved ferries and boat trains through Belgium to Cologne. That journey was one that made you stare out the window and pay attention to where you were and what the trains were doing. The fact that I’d be seeing Teresa at the end of the trip may also have contributed to the journey being enjoyable!

As for when Teresa had to spend a year at Tours in France, well trains then really entered the picture. I guess I went over to see her ten times and became very familiar with the rolling stock, fast expresses, the routes, the best places to sit, the interesting things to look out for, to say nothing of the busy Parisian stations at the Gare du Nord and Gare d’Austerlitz, and the Metro lines between the two.

While Teresa was in France lots of our university friends were also in France or Germany and, when one of them held a party to celebrate his 21st birthday in January 1981 a couple of dozen people decided to travel to Germany by train in to attend. Teresa and I opted to get an Interrail and go to the party and then be able to do even more travelling. Thus, in addition to going to Diez for the party, and to Koblenz en route, we also had some mini trips, usually to see friends in Wurzburg, Hamburg near Basel, in the Schwarzwald and in Angers. In a few weeks we experienced a lot of efficient modern trains and spent a lot of time enjoying views from train windows and, when waiting for connections, observing what went on at stations.

Heading north through the Black Forest near Donaueschingen in 1981

When I was in Tours I would often walk over to the main Terminus station if Teresa was busy. There I’d get to see the unfamiliar, including something unusual too, as that was where I first saw a TGV train. This was only 1981, still a while before TGV services were introduced and the first high speed line to Lyon was not even finished, so the TGV set that I saw was one of the test trains. The test train regularly came to Tours as testing at quite fast speeds was possible on the conventional tracks of the line between Paris and Bordeaux.

While in Tours Teresa did a project about the city, part of which involved an old street map from the early nineteen hundreds. On this map were assorted railway lines that no longer existed so we used to go for walks to investigate. Somehow this got me interested in routes and lines and planning as it started making me draw sketch maps etc. of where lines were, had been and might be. I began to get for railways. Back in the UK I started writing letters to BR with suggestions about reopening lines or stations, but not in some sort of nostalgic “Reverse the Beeching Cuts” way, more suggestions for how to improve services.

My interest in matters related to rail was thus now so large at this time, when I was unemployed, that, when I saw that Sir Peter Parker the Chairman of British Rail was to retire, I wrote to him asking how I should go about becoming his replacement. I got a very basic reply saying they would get back to me, then I received a reply from the British Railways Board saying that my enquiry about job opportunities at BR had been forwarded to my regional office at Waterloo.

I also wrote to the head of the GLC, a certain Ken Livingstone, with a vaguely similar question. And he replied in person, saying that, if I wanted to run British Rail, they I should either try and get a job at BR and get promoted up the ladder or try and become an MP in the hope that I might one day be made Minister of Transport. (I did keep the letter, but don’t seem to be able to find it.)

The real problem was that there were most definitely no jobs on the railway in Lyme Regis.