A life on the rails

You could always find us on the end of the platform, sitting on a porter's iron-wheeled goods barrow.

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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.

If it rained, we took cover under the glass canopy, probably irritating the "proper" passengers who were travelling somewhere - and the porters anxiously looking for tips.

But we never invaded the sanctity of the waiting room. Not because we scorned the welcoming coal fire but because you couldn't see the trains there.

And the whole purpose was to spot as many as possible, record them in a notebook and then underline their numbers in the Ian Allan books listing all British Rail locomotives.

An engine seen for the first time was a "cop" and we counted it a very good day out when we "copped" a dozen, especially if they were "foreigners" from a different BR region. It all sounds very innocent, naive even, today, and the truth is it was.

But it was also life-enhancing. Trainspotting got teenage boys into a bigger world than the town where they lived.

The local station may be where it began, but in time we travelled far and wide to see the trains and their engines.

For me, it was Doncaster, York and Leeds. But then I ventured to Crewe, Darlington, Manchester, Birmingham and eventually Scotland, as far as Inverness and Thurso.

I first travelled to London with a gang of lads on the overnight train from Leeds at the age of 14, sleeping on the overhead luggage rack.

Uncomfortable, but it worked. And I learned how to work the Underground system.

Trainspotting taught resilience, geography, and the skill of travelling to unknown parts of the country: a sense of adventure. And it was safe. As one ardent spotter has written: