Wondered into being by: Michael Copson and Peter Mugridge
Wonderspan: 10 min
To experience this wonder at its best: Click on the full-screen icon and make sure you can hear the sound.
Well, I really struggled to hunt out today’s wonder but it’s one of my favourites for the whole year. The theme is trainspotting. No, I’m not joking.
I’ve been fascinated with trainspotters for a long time. What they do has seemed completely pointless and dull but as impossible to ignore as an unscratchable itch.
Trainspotters get laughed at alot - their own websites say so - and it's not hard to see why. They're just not rock-n-roll. They really do wear anoraks; they shuffle about and seem socially awkward; they don’t know what team they support and they don’t care what car they drive. The hipster trainspotter has yet to be found and if he were (can we say 'he'?) he would be still be a rule-proving exception. For other folks who want to feel a bit better about themselves, maybe laughing at a trainspotter seems to help. And yet, is someone wearing an anorak really that funny? If we’re looking for a laugh there ought to be better ways of finding one.
It's the very same oddbod quality of trainspotters that makes them interesting. By ‘odd’ I mean unusual rather than wrong. And by 'interesting' I’m not referring to the detached curiosity of, say, an antique collector who’s found a quirky artefact. I mean that I could happily sit with a trainspotter in the Pumpkin Cafe on Crewe Station, say ‘Tell me something about trains,’ and vicariously enjoy the leftfield passion as something worth the listening.
Not convinced? Well, let’s consider the anoraked trainspotter of our imagination, fascinated as he is with trains, the machinations of systems, and being in amongst the infrastructure. He spends, let's say, a couple of hours on a Saturday afternoon watching nothing very much pass along the tracks at Willesden Junction. His is a watching activity. Now, millions of people who think of themselves as normal and well-adjusted frequently find themselves watching any of the following --
- daytime television
- Prime Minister's Questions and the accompanying cattle-mooing of MPs
- the shop windows of Oxford Street or the Bull Ring
- the man or woman who's just about to reduce the thing you want at the supermarket
- your Facebook feed, itself quite like a virtual train but without any numbers to write down
I’m not a trainspotter – I really don’t find the diesel commuter train from West Drayton to Paddington anything but pretty ugly and boringly designed and I don’t want to be wondering about what number it has today. But a trainspotter has a passion for something which harms no-one (and I’ll bet that anything in the bullet-point list above does more damage, in various ways, to people and society than trainspotting will ever do). And had I to choose between a conversation with Joe Bloggs about what happened on some reality TV show last night, and a chat with a trainspotter at Crewe telling me why he misses the old slamdoor stock, I’d take the latter.
One of the intriguing things about trainspotting is that it remains largely unexplained, including by rail enthusiasts (their preferred term) themselves. I remember hearing a radio interview with a young enthusiast at Birmingham New Street. It went like this:
Interviewer: So what train is that, then?Here the interview ended - he just couldn't say why he want to see the next train coming in. But why should there be a ‘why’? The slightly mysterious character of their pastime makes trainspotters quite unlike a group of aficionados who won’t take you seriously if you don’t ‘get’ their passion – say, for football. As rail enthusiast Peter Mugridge says in the film we're about to see:
Enthusiast: It’s a [numbersandlettersandstuff]
I: Have you seen one of those before?
E: Oh yeah.
I: So why do you want to see it again?
E: Err...
'Some people like fast cars, I like trains. Some people like watching football, I like watching trains.'You can't say fairer than that. Trainspotters just like trains and that may be bit odd but it's also a way of loving. And just imagine Doncaster or Crewe station without trainspotters – the world would be slightly less interesting than it is now, wouldn't it? Go on, admit it!
Anyway, it has been really difficult to find something wonderful that represents rail enthusiasts in a way that isn’t a cheap laugh, but eventually I hit upon Michael Copson’s straightforward film. My favourite bit is the family scene -- no need for Peter to join the crowds of the supposedly 'well-adjusted'. Here he is:
My special extra trainspotting research just for you...
I invite you to be curious for a few minutes more about this kooky pastime. Let's start with some of the lingo:
- Track-bashing: travelling on as much of a particular railway line as possible, and ticking that one off
- Gricing: attempting to travel the entire railway network.
- Foamer: derogative term for a trainspotter, used in the US by rail workers and based on the imagined tendency of trainspotters to foam at the mouth when a train approaches.
- Basher: a trainspotter’s term for a trainspotter.
- Stick: a signal
- Railwayana: stuff collected from the railways, such as finial orbs (the decorative pieces on top of old-fashioned signals).
- Cattle: commuters
- A normal: a non-enthusiast
- Special train: a train that’s not usual, like a steam train
- Motorcading: chasing a special train in a car
- Worst: a First Great Western train (allegedly they’re not very good, don’t know why)
- SPAD: Signal Passed At Danger (i.e. someone jumped a red light)
One of the more curious things I found is 'Sensible Train Spotting', the world’s first and probably last trainspotting simulator computer game. You have limited time to tick off a list of train identification numbers in your virtual notebook as you watch trains pass through the station. Start missing them and it’s Game Over. The program is still available but as it was made for the obsolete Commodore Amiga computer you’ll need an emulator to run it.
If that’s just too much waiting around (and it obviously is) then you can try this online trainspotting experience, whose array of interactive options include blinking, turning around and going home. Although this is poking a bit of fun at rail enthusiasts I hope they won’t mind it too much: www.ratbike.org/tspotsim/sim.html
Another way to live vicariously is via www.railroadradio.net where you can listen in real-time to the radio feed reaching driver’s cabs all over the US. I sometimes put this on while working from home – there’s often a lot of hiss and then suddenly you’re listening in on a conversation on the other side of the world, wondering what it all means. Try http://www.railroadradio.net/content/playlist/nj.asx for some busy conversations in the New Jersey area. While I was listening in I got ‘You guys ready to move, over? Proceed east to no. 2 track in the out-of-service zone.’ And ‘Have you seen a UP5942 east, over? Is that you, UP5942 over? Hey guys, what’s your location, over?’ and ‘You wouldn’t be hanging out in the East End, would you? It’s just I need to get an Amtrack around you.’ If you like a quieter life, try the Castle Rock railroad radio in the US ‘Mountain Zone’ for a gentle static hiss only occasionally interrupted by a laid-back train driver wanting company: http://www.railroadradio.net/content/playlist/castlerock.asx Listening to this one I got ‘I’m going to have to flag you there, give me a call when you get to 5002.’
Extra…
Here’s a trainspotter's sense of humour:
And here’s what a trainspotter’s film actually looks like once he's taken it home and edited it together:
Committed rail enthusiasts could until recently visit www.railenthusiast.co.uk, which ‘caters for the ongoing needs of the committed enthusiast’ by providing access to details of 11,158 trains, 4,153 photos of same and 31,495 ‘history events’. Sadly it's now offline.
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