Readers’ Letters
Recalling spotting trips Sir: I have enjoyed reading the reminisces of ancient spotting trips in your magazine. They reminded me of day trips to Newton Abbot on summer Saturdays, to Exeter to experience Southern motive power and to Bristol and Bath in the early sixties, but most of all a trip a friend and I made to London as 13-year-olds on a day return ticket from Plymouth We left on the midnight train which left Plymouth ten minutes before the sleeper on the Saturday night and arrived in Paddington at 7.30am. Armed with a shed book guide, our first journey was to Willesden Junction, where it was relatively easy to get round the very quiet sheds at Willesden and Old Oak Common just down the road. We stayed north of the river for the rest of the morning and toured Kentish Town before setting off for Stratford. Access to Stratford was hindered by a staffed booth, so we had to wander around the back streets before we found a back entrance to the shed where we found all nine members of the ‘D5900’ class, which had been withdrawn for some reason.
We then headed south, leaving King’s Cross and Euston sheds to the evening. We found our way to Nine Elms but the mass of lines in front of the shed made it inaccessible, so we tried the local back streets and found a fence at the back of the works had been partially removed, allowing access. We then moved on to Stewarts Lane which we could find no way in as it appeared to be in the middle of a triangle of different railway tracks. We next made our way further south to Hither Green where access to the shed was off the south end of the platform, and disappointedly was full of the ‘D6500’ class and no steam. We had spent so much time travelling on the suburban network it was now Sunday evening and we had two more sheds to try and crack – Chalk Farm was easy to find and enter, but King’s Cross was a different story. We wandered around in the dark of the goods yard, hopelessly lost, and had to give up and get back to Paddington to catch the midnight train back to Plymouth.
We had had a wonderful day, our hunger assuaged by pasties and corned beef sandwiches, but obviously very tiring as we slept through the entire journey and had to be woken up by others in the compartment when the train reached Plymouth. S M Daniell (by email)
Broadened horizons with a Lancashire trainspotter: No 7773 Sir: In regard to a comment made in the above article (September issue) I can hopefully clarify the deduction made by Chris Forrest concerning ‘Y1’ 0-4-0T No 7773.
