This stirred my memory pot…

https://www.theguardian.com/uk-news/2020/sep/07/geoffrey-parker-obituary

This touching obituary of a good man stirred my memory pot.

It got me thinking about my early love of train travel encouraged by the train set I was given one early Christmas–I guess 1948.

Set up by Dad in the freezing, little-used Dining room (not a worry to a charged up six year old,) it circled the room leaving plenty of space for the additional furniture of model stations, goods yards overhead signals.

I’d put my chin on the carpet and using my imagination scaled myself down to the size of the perfectly formed little Trix electric engine and its carriages.

Like a little Gulliver I’d watch, transfixed, as it sped pass my nose and rattlied through hand made miniature stations–presents from gifted model making cousins–just like the real thing from Euston Station heading for Scotland.

I thought it was magical.

Dad worked at Euston for the London Midland and Scotland Railway (LMS) which was incorporated into the newly nationalised rail network as British Rail in 1948.

He was entitled to concessionary travel on the extensive home network and in Europe. There were no cheap flights going anywhere; if you went ABROAD you took the train.

In school holidays from the age of seven I was put on the train at Victoria Station bound for Eastbourne on the south coast, where my beloved paternal Grandma met me and we’d spend a week together at her residential hotel on the front.

So grand.

We’d be three for dinner–Granny, her friend, a rather forbidding Mrs Fitzherbert* and 7 year old me.

The summer of 1953 we took the train to the Costa Brava NE Spain.

Train and ferry to Calais; on to Paris taxi across town to the Gare Montparnasse and the journey south through France.

Sit down dinner–so grand! and the barely audible kechik-kecha of the train lulled us to sleep on our couchettes to wake up nearly 700 kilometres later in Toulouse–then south again to the Spanish border and a change of train (different gauge) for the final stage to Barcelona and the beach at Lloret del Mar.

Seven years later a schoolmate and I did our rite of passage pre-uni, nine week Grand Tour of Europe–by train.

Thus trains have always signalled adventure to me. A significant change–of location and often culture.

I knew for sure, as it “thundered” passed my head, triggering my imagination,  that that small but perfectly formed Trix model engine and its beautifully painted carriages was heading for a mysterious  place called “Elsewhere” and I wanted to be on board.