Chuff-Chuff

Today

Yesterday, in accordance with a long-held wish of Paul's. we took the train to Hastings to look at the places Paul remembered from his childhood.

Suffice it to say, we realised that Hastings has not just seen better days - it's probably long ago seen its best. It's a modern comment that our most enjoyable interlude was a pit stop at Kassa - a Persian coffee shop where the smells of cooking were so enticing that we had a snack of dhal, chickpeas, spinach and potatoes with rice with our coffee.

The train journey was fun, though. The train from Brighton still stops twice at Hampden Park and runs along the beach at St Leonards. There was a little boy most excited about the tunnels who pretended that it was night time and he had to go to sleep.

"I used to do that", I said to Paul.

In My Day

Train journeys were of three basic types when I was little. We routinely took the train from West Norwood into Victoria for almost all journeys into central London that couldn't be accomplished by bus. I only learnt later that these trains were what is known as "electrical multiple units". I did know that the trains ran on electric rails. That dangers of the third rail were very clearly spelled out to us. These trains were often half-empty and had a strange smell which you still sometimes find on preserved lines. You couldn't get from one compartment to another without leaving the train and there were special "Ladies only" compartments. Occasionally we went to London Bridge from Crystal Palace high level station. The trains were the same but the stations had strange names with which we played - "Peckham Rye" became "Peck 'em dry", "Nunhead" and I put Daddy's hat over my face, etc.

Then, often enough, we went to the South Coast by train. Commonly we went to Brighton but Eastbourne and Hastings also featured. Depending on what time we got to the station we either got the fast train (only stopping at Haywards Heath) or the slow, which took ages but was quite fun. The fast ones allowed us to feel superior to people standing at the stations we whizzed through - I really understood Reginald Gardiner's assertion that people have been standing on those stations for years and years.

It was incredibly exciting to be the first to "see the sea" and to be so close to it that you felt you could lean out and touch the waves.

The compartments were often decorated with pictures of other destinations - Bude or Bournemouth, which seemed almost foreign. The pictures were very stylised and resembled painting by numbers in the flat pastel shades they used.

Just occasionally there'd be an "Excursion" train. This would be a special train, often steam, heading for the coast. Daddy would buy tickets and we'd pile on with the rest of London and end up at Littlehampton, Whistable or Torquay. I remember little about the destinations but much about the crowded journeys. The trains were "corridor" trains which meant that you could go from one compartment or even one carriage to another. Doing the latter involved a scary trip in which you had to step across rattling plates between very insubstantial walls, looking with horror through gaps at the rails beneath. And they were often funny colours - not the grass green I was used to. One excusrion I remember was the last steam train on British railways.

Now that the trains run on time (and they never seemed to when I was little) it's still a great way to travel. There's very little magic involved, though.