BARTLEBY

Watching the wheels

When our kids were little we used to spend a lot of time playing trains. At first we had the most basic wooden set, with a couple of engines that went round in endless circles, through a cityscape of wooden blocks. Being the driver of this train to Nowhere could get a little wearing so there was great celebration among the adults in the house when we snagged a sack of unwanted Brio track at a school fete. From this point it was as though Brunel had moved into the sitting room. Tracks snaked here, there and everywhere, through bridges and tunnels. A station sprang up; signals, crossings…

While his sister had other interests, the young lad was focused pretty strongly on trains. If he wasn’t playing trains he was watching them on TV (if you ever want me to divulge a secret, threaten me with Thomas the Tank Engine). For a treat, or when he was incurably grisly, I would pop him in his pushchair and we would bumble down the hill to the station. As soon as we got onto the platform he would cheer up and begin looking around with interest. Trainspotting.

This was not, I have to say, something I’d ever imagined doing. I did spend a lot of time as a teenager sitting at stations, but always with travel in mind. We used to have these wheezy old one-carriage trundlers that crawled from village to village bearing passengers too young, too old or too peculiar to drive. Now and again I would make my way to a mainline station to take an Intercity 125 to London, and when I was old enough I travelled a few times by train around Europe.

Generally broke, and always poorly organised, I would head in vague fashion to places that seemed interesting and cheap. Odd things would happen. At a station cafe in a small town in Hungary I selected at random from a menu I couldn’t read the language and was presented by a solemn waiter with a plate of minced beef and tinned pears. There were uncomfortable journeys, even frightening ones, but I never gave the actual business of travelling by train a moment’s thought. Rail travel may be expensive and sometimes annoying but I always preferred it to driving, and until Covid arrived I was probably at Temple Meads three mornings a week, heading somewhere for work.

Since March 2020 I’ve driven almost everywhere. Who wouldn’t? You just walk out of the house, climb in to your car and climb out at the other end of the journey. Easy. The other day, though, I had something to do in Bath and decided to take the train. And as soon as I left the house and set off down the hill to our local station I began to feel that sense of expectation that comes with even the most humdrum train journey.

I quickened my pace and was at the platform in good time. And as I waited I remembered an incident that happened once, when my son and I were in the exact same spot, and he was intently studying the track from the vantage point of his pushchair. Passing trains were few and far between, but eventually a local bus-on-rails creaked to a halt at our platform, paused while nobody alighted or boarded, and went on its way. A minute later a woman came running up the ramp but slowed when she saw us.

‘Oh good,’ she said, ‘I thought I’d missed it, then I saw you…’ ‘I’m afraid you have missed it,’ I told her, embarrassed. ‘We’re not actually waiting for a train.’ I paused, unsure what to say next, at which my son stuck his head round the side of his pushchair and fixed the would-be passenger with a stern eye. ‘We watching trains,’ he said, then turned away to peer down the track, waiting for the next one. ■

THE BRISTOL

MAGAZINE

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