Confessions

Since I moved out of the capital five years ago I have been able to enjoy something I was never really in a position to while living there: going down to London on the train.

I love everything about this. I take a certain satisfaction in booking far enough ahead to obtain a cheap ticket. I sit in the quiet zone in standard class—coach A, seat 28—where I get a little table and a power supply. They've shortened the journey time and radically improved Hotline, the free onboard magazine. But there's something else that I love above all these things.

It is, simply, that I love trains. The train that takes me from Manchester to London in a fraction over two hours is a Pendolino. A nice train, fast, comfortable, fairly reliable. I like it but I don't love it. As the train glides slowly and silently out of Piccadilly and I spot the huddle of middle-aged men near the end of the platform I am reminded of what I do love: old trains. Not steam trains, but diesels and electrics. The locomotives and multiple units I grew up with in the 1970s. The trains I spotted as a boy.



Had I been born ten years earlier I would have fallen in love with steam. As it was, I fell for 08 shunters, Type 2s, Hymeks, Type 4s, Westerns and Deltics. I obsessed over the minor physical differences between the Class 81s, 82s, 83s, 85s and 86s, the leccy locos that pulled the trains to London. I gained extra pleasure from spotting a named engine: Type 4s christened after prefectures in Greece, Class 86s commemorating British cities and statesmen, great artists and regional newspapers. I wrote down the numbers, underlined them in blue in a book. Any engine you hadn't seen before was a "cop." I went to Piccadilly to spot the Peak that pulled the Harwich Boat Train and, if the driver was in an accommodating mood, "cab" it by climbing up alongside him. A cab on top of a cop—that was something.

Among the rows of neat numbers in my book are some that aren't underlined. These represented quarry. I never did spot 40013 (Andania) or 86260 (Driver Wallace Oakes). The quickening I feel, looking at the book now, when I think they might still be out there to find is dampened when I remember that more than 25 years have gone by. The engines will have been scrapped.

From the age of 13, I used to climb over the wall into Longsight depot. Ah, the smell of diesel, the glistening curlicues of grease smeared on a buffer. The thrill of trespass, the threat of being caught and chased off the premises or even arrested. I sat for hours on the parapet at Skelton Junction hoping for a Brush 2 straying over the Pennines. I went on organised trips to the railway works at Crewe and Derby, powerhouses of British locomotive manufacturing. The highlight of family holidays to Cornwall was the chance to meet the sad-eyed gaze of a Western or the last opportunity to see a line of Hymeks at Plymouth Laira.

I was a boy. Boys grow up. Nowadays the notebook I carry is not a spiralbound jotter from WH Smith, but a stitch-bound volume from the Quartet range by Fabriano, sourced for me by a friend at Munich airport, where Fabriano has its only shop outside Italy. In these I record notes, observations, dreams, story ideas and to-do lists. So why, in my current notebook, in between a hastily jotted idea for my novel-in-progress and an order list from the Pizza Express menu are there these two numbers—31018, 47245? Too short for phone numbers, too long for PINs or alarm codes, these are engine numbers from a Brush 2 and a Brush 4 respectively. Because, you see, the thing is, I still write down the numbers. Not only that, but I still check them in the Locoshed Book when I get home—no matter that it's the 1982 edition, more than a quarter of a century out of date. If it's a cop, I get out my little ruler and a nice ballpoint and by the light of my desk lamp in my office all alone at the top of the house, late at night, I underline it. I think to myself that "sad" or "pathetic" do not even begin to do justice to what I'm doing, but it doesn't hurt anyone and I remain connected to my boyhood self in a way that gives me a warm thread of nostalgic pleasure.

I write these words in an old farmhouse in Derbyshire, where I have come with a writer friend to get some serious work done. The house itself is stunning, with its high-walled brick courtyard and long well-kept lawn. Pheasants strut past the ancient leaded windows and impossibly tall Scots pines sway in the breeze that channels through the valley. But for me the most exciting sight since I got off the train at Derby were the two preserved Brush 2s in sidings outside the station: 31459 (Cerberus) and 31454, the former resplendent in pre-BR dark green livery, the latter still sporting the silver swallow insignia of the Intercity brand. I can't wait to get home and check my book. Will these be cops or have I spotted them before? As a boy I craved the cop. As a bigger boy now, I think I would prefer to have seen them before. It helps make sense of the world, imposing a little order on the chaos.