Railways I have loved - Dennis Hamley
Yes, so many of them - and from such an early age too. I remember watching the old 'push-and pull' chuff past my bedroom window before I was five - two green Southern Railway coaches with, between them in a steam sandwich, a 'Terrier' tank engine from the old London, Brighton and South Coast Railway. Sadly not a sandwich, but redolent of those times none the less. Then a mighty experience: an epic (to six-year-old me) journey to the Lake District from St Pancras (Euston had been bombed) - an unconscionably long train of maroon coaches hauled by a hissing monster which seemed to me to be too large for this puny world. This wasn't a holiday: my father, a Post Office engineer, badly shell-shocked after the air raid on Biggin Hill, was being sent there to recuperate by the Air Ministry, who wanted him back at work in a fit state. In black and white as contemporary technology demanded. But it certainly wasn't black and white to me. And then, when the ...