An Introduction To Trainspotting

"A Short Guide For Those Who Would Like To Embrace The Gentle Faith But Don't Know How"

If, as may well be the case, you are not yet a trainspotter and have not approached this terrain with the intention of converting to that creed, it could well be that you don't actually know what a trainspotter is and may indeed be labouring under the media induced impression that the genre encompasses nerds rather than Godheads, and even that those practitioners of this much maligned art are a bunch of geeky losers, with no lives, whom society has marked as outcasts and lepers, worthy only of contempt and ridicule. You may even be under the even more mistaken impression that trainspotting was ‘an unrelenting powerhouse of a novel that marked the arrival of a major new talent’, an everyday saga of drug-taking Scots folk by a chap named Irvine Welsh, in which case - like the Sunday Times - you probably believe that trainspotting is “the voice of Punk grown up, grown wiser and grown more eloquent”.
In this event you would be mistaken.
Rather than a fashionable cast of junkies, rentboys, pimps, muggers and drug dealers, the trainspotting community encompasses a much more glamorous cast, a braver more noble, more aloof dramatis personae, whose nomenclature we now unfold in the hope not only of exploding the popular myths that surround our platform heroes - those dreary jokes about anoraks and flasks of tea - but also in the hope that we may tempt you to join our select brotherhood and sample for yourself the delights of the unforbidden but much scorned fruit upon which we are wont to feast.
Welcome then, welcome to trainspotting!
Those of you who come amongst us as freshmen may choose initially to start as  simple takers of numbers, and with this end in mind three items of equipment will be necessary: a contemporary stocklist, a notebook and a pen. We recommend the NREA Spotter’s Companion, which lists all Locomotives, Multiple Units and hauled stock including those hideous channel tunnel trains that look like Donald Duck crossed with a cruise missile; the ones  that everyone seems to be cluttering up the platforms at Kensington Olympia in search of. The Spotter’s Companion is A6 softback format, about 1cm thick and almost completely free of bogus ‘helpful’ data of the type so revered by other publishers. Lists of kettles passed for mainline running or SNCF locos that might work through the tunnel are happily absent, but I digress and am lapsing into the kind of  jargon which will defeat the object of this piece, which is of course intended to explain the rites to the layman, although God knows they don’t deserve the privilege! So let us continue......
This book will be your constant companion, so keep it up to date with Typex and data sifted out from the fatty tissue of the mainstream railway journals and try to personalise it with a new cover - perhaps some gaily coloured sticky-backed plastic or a montage of photographs by G.M. Hill of highly desirable locomotives in improbable liveries. Your Spotter’s Companion will soon prove its worth, and as it fills up with inky underlinings - did I forget to mention that the mostt rudimentary of all spotter’s techniques is the ticking off of numbers as you spot them? - will become a valuable distraction in times of need, such as bus journeys, Post Office queues and boring conversations about rock music or football. Soon your little heart will leap at the very thought of the kleptomaniacal thrills it has to offer. How can you resist!
In time, when your travels about the system have enabled you to underline almost everything in the book - except that elusive Derby based GUV that no amount of surreptitious phone calls to your contacts with TOPS computers in the railway industry can track down, or the Allerton based shunter that is likely to be anywhere BUT Allerton since they changed the rules - you may choose to graduate to one of the more specialised branches of the Brotherhood. You may even, if your beer consumption is improbably large, elect to become an Haulage Enthusiast, or ‘basher’ as these arm-flailing unlovables are known. Collectors of mileage behind individual traction units, bashers are the unwitting tools of shady backroom controllers, whose seemingly casual release of TOPS data hides some sinister purpose, the only visible manifestation of which is the sudden appearance of large groups of unruly cranks at New Street station at 06.30 hrs, scant minutes before the arrival of the Bristol - York train, whose twin-tank duff has expired and necessitated the substitution of 58045, which just happened to be standing spare at Saltley. These railborne gangsters converge on rare locomotive hauled trains and clog up the corridors with beery farts and cries of “My Lords!”. It was this clique that besmirched the streets of Weymouth when a special train was run down the branch to the quayside. Feasting before hand on curries and cabbages they ruthlessly ignored the ‘do not flush’ signs and unleashed a noisome barrage upon the High Street as the train made its stately progress along the tramway. They always seem to know when and where to be to scratch the rare haulage, and can conceive of no goal higher than the addition of miles and chains to their dreadful tallies. It is normal to pursue one specific class of engine with greater ardour than others, and whilst those types of traction not regularly assigned to passenger duties are most sought after, even the humble ‘Torvil and Deans’ have their devotees these days!
Books listing the exact mileage between all parts of the system are available to accurately record your score. Strange rites of passage have been known to accompany such milestone events as the logging of the 10,000th mile behind a specific favourite engine, or bagging off your final 144 set on the last train out of York. Drink has been consumed and oaths sworn over these events and be they ever so humble, at the end of the day it’s all numbers in the book, and that’s what we’re really after.
If bashing strikes you as too transient or ethereal a pastime - although the faerie qualities of most bashers of my acquaintance are not immediately apparent - you may turn your hand to photography, of which art the trainspotting community possesses two main branches: those who go to the trains, and those who let the trains come to them.......
The former, like many bashers, are abusers of inside information, although generally with less success as the freight trains they lie in wait for operate to a specialised form of temporal distortion known as the ‘working timetable’, which highly classified official document, should you have the good fortune to gain access to it, will tell you things like “the 12.48 Glazebrook-Port Clarence Oil train will pass Milford Jct at 15.55”, when in reality of course, no such event will come to pass, unless you are changing film, or slinking into the bush to relieve yourself, in which case the temporal field will automatically adjust and allow you to miss the shot. This pursuit is not unlike fishing in many ways, inasmuch as hours of inactivity can be interspersed with sudden moments of frenzy. Long languid days spent picking your nose while waiting for 4L79 to show, flower-lulled in sleepy grass, feeling the cool lapse of hours pass can become all too somnambulistic when even the great ‘Freightmaster’ guide to freight workings is fallible, and a day spent north of Skipton could easily yield no catch greater than a 156 or 144 Sprinter - the equivalent of minnows and stickleback in our fishy metaphor.
Such painstaking efforts can yield good results, of course, and with this end in mind the strange windswept practitioners of the lineside art generally prefer black and white film and SLR cameras with large knobbly lenses. Some locations, being bottlenecks for today’s all too rare freight traffic, become overcrowded, which can be vexing, especially somewhere lush like Milford Junction, where the chap in the blue anorak keeps standing in front of everyone, or Barnetby, where the Semaphore signals attract them like flies around the traditional cowpat. Still there are plenty of lonely bridges and remote locations for the surly and non-gregarious, so if you hate your fellow man  (or vice-versa) this could be for you.
On the other hand, having spotted and underlined all the locos on the system, you may decide you want to photograph them all and to this end - popular, as it retains that essentiall kleptomaniac element - you may find yourself frequenting Traction Maintenance Depots with, failing a positive response to your humble request for admission, trespass in mind!
Now, generations of spotters have been bunking sheds so I don’t want to hear any self-righteous platitudes from predictable quarters about this particular practice. Like Corky the Cat putting one over on the water bailiff, it is frequently little more than a harmless bending of some pointless rules, the maintenance of which in many cases benefits no one. There is stupidity on both sides of this argument. Only an idiot (or Parksy) would expect to be allowed to  wander around Crewe diesel holding sidings on a weekday evening, but ‘Safety’ is a silly excuse for denying access to a remote site on a Sunday when the engines are all switched off and nothing is due to move until the next day. In this day and age when our whole society is being stifled by the fear of litigation and insurance claims, it is everyone’s responsibility to say that enough is enough, and endeavor to curb these ludicrous bureaucratic restraints on our freedom. If permits were available, one could understand the dim view that authority takes of unofficial visits. Most people would gladly pay for a trip to, say, Immingham, or Cardiff Canton (except Parksy), but what has changed in recent history that puts sheds like Old Oak Common or Eastleigh out of bounds, when up until a couple of years ago visitors were made welcome and everyone was happy? What has changed? Have these places become more dangerous? Why? We should be told, and until we are given a good reason, I don’t see why either railway staff or spotters should respect exhortations to amend a tradition made venerable with practice so long as common sense and courtesy prevail.
Where permits are readily available, they should be respected, although the ‘minimum 10 to a party’ rule is nonsense. Thornaby shed on Teeside had the right idea in the good old days, with permits issued to individuals more or less on request, and well worth the £5 they cost. This is a stark contrast to that other former Loadhaul stronghold, Doncaster Carr, where even traincrew from other depots have been made unwelcome, and spotters are threatened with dire consequences before getting even a sniff of a loco.
Not many people know this, but Carr is really the cover for a top secret underground Nazi rocket base. The adjacent ballast sidings mask the excavations, and all the Locomotives in the yard are plywood dummies. This explains the robust and merciless attitude to security at this site. Watch out for the stern-jawed GEHEIMELOKSKOMMANDO, who are authorized, should they catch you in the vicinity, to drag you underground and enslave you to their dreadful purpose.

It is also arguable that those publications which decry trespass while accepting contraband photographs for publication should keep their mouths shut.
We are now getting down to the depths of obscurity, and those really specialised spotter’s trends that are rarely condoned by anyone, even their brethren. ‘Trackbashers’ are a strange and dedicated breed whose aim is to travel over every inch of track on the railway system, including loops, points, sidings and crossovers. Most spotters, especially haulage fiends, take note of which lines they have travelled over, but hard-core members of the branch line fraternity regularly travel at the extreme ends of enthusiast’s specials, to make sure they cover every precious available inch of track. Some have been known to alight and walk the last few yards should the stock not make it all the way down some rarely penetrated cul-de-sac. Some have even been known to lick the surface of the rails in frenzy after scoring something particularly juicy. There are many mansions in our  Father’s house. Some of them are silly, but it is with these amazing creatures in mind that the planners of excursions generally try to include a bit of rare track as well as some lusty traction up front for the bashers.
Right at the bottom of the pecking order, misunderstood by all and pandered to only by a couple of publishers who have seized this particularly dead-end corner of the market are the wagon spotters. These obsessives never satisfy the urge to collect numbers and are fired by a constant need to ‘cop’ something new. Having cleared all diesel and electric locomotives and multiple units, hauled stock, vans and Plassers, they turn to freight wagons as a new source upon which to expend their seed. Collecting the seven digit numbers from a rake of 40 wagons moving at speed is a feat to tax the most dextrous, so tape recorders are the norm with these excitable and emotional folk. Most God-fearing spotters avoid this practice, but it can be cruelly addictive (like bus spotting) and ruin your life. Be careful out there.
Back in the realm of reality, nowadays there are a lot of diesel loving types involved in the preservation movement, and privately owned ex-BR diesel locos actually outnumber their steam powered predecessors (you know, those funny pipes on wheels that all look the same). With over 400 assorted examples in various stages of restoration, those of a nostalgic bent have ample opportunity to indulge themselves with the ghosts of diesels past. You may choose to invest your time and money in the acquisition of a clapped out old duff from the powers that be, and returning it to a state of grace, or you may prefer to let others do the dirty work and just turn up to sample the traction when the job is done. Alternatively you may be fed up with seeing the same old locos and decide that your resources are better allocated to following the death-throes of whatever class of engine is about to be struck off the books and get your arse down to Warrington or Rugby while there are still some Type 2s left with a bit of muck on them..........
On the other hand, you may not become a trainspotter at all. You may become a surly old railwayman, of the type that hates trainspotters, waves V signs out of loco cab windows and writes disparaging graffiti about them on the walls of staff toilets at TMDs (check out those at Tyseley). You may, if you lack imagination, remain an ignorant pleb, of the type whom, on encountering by chance a group of photographers at a lineside location, will ask: “Ooooooh is there a steam engine coming along?” To which the only sensible response is to point out that steam traction was phased out thirty years ago actually, so it is extremely unlikely, and that as you are waiting for a class 56, you’ll be very disappointed if a black five or an 8F shows up instead.
Of course they won’t know what you mean. If it’s not The Flying Scotsman than it can’t be a train.
Such people have no reason to live, however there are worse! After all your efforts in the field, you may have the misfortune to end up as a professional railway journalist. If you do, and God forbid, you will suddenly find yourself manifesting a mature and responsible interest in all aspects of railway operation. You will no longer care what number “that 47 on the tanks” was, but will instead turn your attention to signalling, level-crossings and eventually “European on-train catering”, about which you will research and write lengthy articles. Terms like ‘commonwealth bogie’ and ‘Aptis Portis’ will cease to be a mystery to you, and you will no longer want to ride in the front coach on railtours, but will travel with the stewards at everyone else’s expense. You will appreciate the ‘better-ride’ qualities of Turbo trains, know where Jewellery Quarter station is, even though it is not frequented by storming great Grids, and will think that the RES corporate image and stupid logo were really exciting and go ahead. If this happens to you, you are no longer a trainspotter and neither will you care as you will have become something entirely different, a ‘Railway Enthusiast’ - or to quote the dictionary definition: ‘One who tries to pretend that their love of trains is grown up really’. By the time you are fifty you will probably be assistant editor on a golfing magazine and will no longer know what a train is, all your friends will live near Reigate, and you will have piles. Serve you jolly well right!

Many thanks go to Joseph Porter  and Gary Hatcher of http://www.blythpower.co.uk/ for their kind permission to reproduce this article.