CHUFFING BRILLIANT

PAUL ROUTLEDGE MARKS THE BICENTENARY OF THE WORLD'S FIRST PUBLIC RAILWAY

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VETERAN journalist Paul Routledge has enjoyed a lifelong passion for trains and has enchanting memories of the boyhood trainspotting that launched his railway mania.

He celebrates the “iron road” in his new book For the Love of Trains and says: “As a railwayman’s son I am chuffed to write a book in celebration of trains for the bicentenary year of the world’s first public railway. Covering every aspect from the Victorian railway mania, the heyday and end of steam, the railway at war and my boyhood passion of trainspotting, to the triumph and debacle of HS1 and HS2.”

Paul fell in love with trains as a young lad. He says: “You could always find us on the end of the platform, sitting on a porter’s iron-wheeled goods barrow. With a biro and notebook in one hand and a bottle of pop in the other, we looked expectantly down the line.

“But we weren't there to catch a train. We were there to record the number - and name, if it had one - of the engine. In the 1950s, no self-respecting main line station was complete without a motley crew of schoolboys gathered for the hobby of our generation: trainspotting.