From
The Telegraph:
With the National Railway Museum launching its first trainspotting season, the hobby is back in fashion
At 4.33pm on the southern tip of York station^s platform six, Mike Cooke raises his binoculars to focus on a distant rust-brown train rattling down the track. ^Class 60 diesel engine pulling coal,^ murmurs the 72-year-old.
It is a far from spectacular sighting, not even enough to warrant him pulling out the British Railways Locomotives 2014 handbook from his rucksack. That is reserved for the day^s big arrival: at 5.35pm another Class 60 ^ but this time pulling a steel train ^ is expected to trundle through.
As we stand on the platform surrounded by a gaggle of other trainspotters, we attract curious glances from passengers in the inter-city trains whizzing by. Cooke, thick-skinned under his Yorkshire white rose sweatshirt, shrugs it off. ^I don^t mind the quizzical looks, although once I overheard two women on a train calling us 'anoraks^. To me, sitting in front of Coronation Street every night is a more futile activity. It^s a nice outdoor pastime that hopefully doesn^t upset anybody and the railways are an absolutely huge part of our history.^
Britain^s trains might be a national obsession, but those who chronicle them have never made it into the mainstream. Trainspotting remains a much misunderstood, and occasionally maligned, hobby.
This month, however, all that is set to change. The National Railway Museum in York is launching its first-ever trainspotting season to celebrate those who are known as ^ferroequinologists^ (students of iron horses). Earlier this year, the museum issued a call to Britain^s trainspotters to come forward with their stories (some 300 responded), and archivists last week announced that they had discovered evidence of the earliest ever proponent of the hobby: a 14-year-old named Fanny Johnson, who kept a notebook of the locomotives roaring through London^s Westbourne Park in 1861. In her book, entitled ^Names of Engines on the Great Western that I have Seen^, she painstakingly recorded nameplates such as Morning Star, Firefly and Eclipse.
Prior to the museum^s discovery, trainspotting had been regarded as a largely 20th century activity, beginning with the publication of E Nesbit^s The Railway Children in 1906, and peaking in the Fifties and Sixties, before the country^s last mainline steam train service stopped in 1968. By then, the axe wielded by British Railways board chairman Dr Richard Beeching, in his restructuring of the network, had already begun to fall: a third of Britain^s 7,000 stations was eventually lost, along with 6,000 of the 18,000 existing route miles, and 70,000 jobs. With ever fewer trains to see, many spotters drifted away.
But now, after years of decline, the industry is finally attempting to catch up with a boom in passenger miles, which grew by a staggering 91 per cent between 1966 and 2012. There is an acceptance that more lines are required, be they HS2▸ or a resurrection of those closed by Beeching. Network Rail is spending ^38 billion on improvements over the next five years.
It has been described as the biggest investment since Victorian times, and one that is drawing trainspotters back in their droves. ^We are entering a new railway age,^ says Amy Banks, exhibition manager at the York Museum.
So spotters are updating their image as well, bolstered by promises of an improved fleet and new technology. ^We have got trainspotters who started out with notebooks; now they use iPads and digital cameras,^ explains Banks. On the East Coast mainline from London to York, I see spotters wielding smart, SLR cameras on every platform ^ particularly Doncaster, where several lines converge and there is a greater proportion of freight (passenger trains are of little interest). In truth, it is mainly older men in anoraks, but there is a growing number of twentysomethings.
Natalie Marsh, an 18-year-old studying rolling and fabrication at Doncaster College, bucks the trend as a female trainspotter. ^When I was really little, my dad used to take me out diesel spotting,^ she says. ^I go now about once or twice a month. There are quite a few young people involved.^
In the post-war years, railway platforms swarmed with knock-kneed children clutching dog-eared copies of Ian Allen^s railway notebook. Such was the interest that a whole lexicon sprang up around trains: shed bunking (sneaking into a locomotive shed); copping (spotting) a train; and cabbing (getting a ride with drivers, who in those days were minor celebrities).
^I would get the bus down to York railway station and sit on platform nine,^ says David Quarrie, 68, of York, who volunteers at the museum. ^Sometimes there were four of us, sometimes two dozen. I would always take a packed lunch and tea ^ pork pie, sausage roll and Smith^s Salt ^ Shake crisps ^ and be there all day.^
Chris White, a pony-tailed 26-year-old, has also found the habit hard to kick. He ^officially^ gave up spotting a few years ago, in the first year of his politics and economics degree at York University, but still heads down to the platforms every now and then for a peek. For him, the attraction has always been the same. ^What you are out there for is something new and exciting,^ he says. ^These tracks are connected to every single locomotive in the country that you have ever wanted to see ^ it^s just a matter of finding them.^
