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Images from the train burned into the memory (but not your local area)

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70014IronDuke

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Thinking about the "last normal service" thread that is out there at the moment, I began to think of the route out of Sheffield Victoria towards Penistone. I was on the line about a week before the end of through electric passenger services to Man Picc - so I couldn't include myself in that thread.

But it reminded me of the ramshackle consists - an EM1 and six or seven assorted Mk 1s, some Southern green, some maroon and some blue+grey that used to rattle out of Victoria and away, up the valley, past Sheffield Wednesday's ground (quite modern, IIRC, in the late 60s) and up away from the western suburbs of Sheffield. I did it a few times from 68, and it had a tremendous appeal, that run, and it still sticks in the memory.

Funny, another strong image from the train - VERY strong for me - was the route north from Sheffield Midland at night in the 60s, past the steel works on the west side, shards of yellow light, produced from molten steel, blazing out into the night across the line at 01.30 as the down St Pancras - Glasgow sleeper stormed up the bank behind a Class 45 with the controller on full power.
(Suppose I was lucky - I read in here how folks drool over a 156 or 158 or some such.)

But made me wonder - what images from the train are burned into the memories on this group? Only, not from your local area - that could fill up the the Cloud - has to be away from your home stomping grounds by, say, at least 20 miles.
 
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yorksrob

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For me it would have to be long, boozy, crowded cross country trips between Leeds and Reading in about 2001/02. Usually a Mk2 if I was lucky. A Mk2 vestibule floor if unlucky. Also saw the Voyagers when new.

I was having a bad time at work, so the train journey was a relief before it started again.
 

Crossover

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Not sure if it strictly counts, but I can still picture various bits of my first solo train journey in my first year of uni (I wasn't really an enthusiast back then - it was probably in me but hadn't been found!). a Virgin Voyager from Stafford to Manchester which I can distinctly recall had virtually no mobile signal (this was back in 2007 so probably before the boosters were put in) and pondering what the hell I needed to do at Piccadilly to make my connection. How times have changed since then!
 

70014IronDuke

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Sorry chaps, but these don't count. You are describing (and rather vaguely at that) the memories of long journies that are burned in your bonces.

I wanted you to come up with images, looking out of the train, and far more specific - YorksRob, you can't have Leeds to Reading - that's 200 miles! And you don't describe a single image from the train.
Not even 1/2 out of 10 for this thread.
You have to work harder on this, I'm afraid :)
 

Crossover

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Sorry chaps, but these don't count. You are describing (and rather vaguely at that) the memories of long journies that are burned in your bonces.

I was replying to my interpretation of the question - didn't realise you meant physical images!
 

Bletchleyite

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At Old Roan on the day of the IRA bomb threat on the Grand National, the platform packed like Bank in the evening rush hour (probably the only time that station has ever been like that, it's quite a quiet one normally) and a long queue stretching off down the road. BR (for it was them) had said anyone involved could go anywhere in the country for free, as they had all been evacuated quickly with no time to grab wallets etc, let alone car keys.
 

Cowley

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I’ve got so many from my local area, but I’ll stick with the theme.

1) Stepping out of a sleeper cabin in the 1990s as the train crossed the watery (and foggy) Tay coming into Dundee. There was an enormous red headed guy with a kilt on in the corridor staring out of the window wistfully. He looked at me like he wanted to throw me over the side.

2) Sitting in a mk1 in the gloom of a tunnel outside New Street in a Mk1 probably in the 1970s. There were no lights on in the coach, and it was a busy train.
The only light was from the end of my fathers cigarette as he puffed away.

3) Going on the Underground with my grandmother in the 1970s and seeing red tube trains somewhere. Maybe Hainault?
Absolutely fascinating going on the tube as a kid.
 

GusB

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Most of my rail travel was when I was a nipper going to visit grandparents. The first image I can think of was emerging from underneath the A9 into Inverness and seeing the Stakis Hotel and the Presto supermarket on Millburn road, with the adjacent level crossing, and of course the Blue Circle cement facility on the other side of the line. Funnily enough the other image I can think of also includes a Presto supermarket, this time at Stirling - with the busy road and blue buses instead of yellow ones. Perhaps it's because of the excitement that we were "nearly there".

Similarly, I have an image of the journey home and leaving Inverness (in compartment stock), with the sun setting and reflecting off the mud-flats along the inner Moray Firth.
 

Springs Branch

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200 miles away from home, so I guess it meets the criteria - a vivid image is my first experience of the London Underground.

It was in the early 1970s on a school trip to London, arriving by Inter-City into Euston. For some reason, before visiting for the first time, my expectation of London had been a slick, modern and clean city, with a Swinging 60's vibe of good-looking people zipping down some Chelsea mews in a sports car (must have been watching too much of The Saint or Avengers on TV).

My very first impression on arrival was the platforms at Euston - a lot gloomier & austere than expected and horribly cluttered with BRUTE trolleys, but never mind.

The teachers then corralled our party on the main concourse, and it was down the escalator to the Tube for an evening rush hour ride on the Victoria Line.

The jostling, sweaty crowds in the Euston Underground ticket hall, everyone getting in everyone else's way, people barging in front of you at the barrier (remember the yellow tickets with the magnetic brown back?), the impossibility of getting on board trains with luggage in peak hour and the claustrophobic, cramped size and noise of Tube rolling stock were all a big, unexpected shock to me.

It was my own (admittedly mild) version of Paris Syndrome. Luckily I soon got over it and enjoyed our three day visit after that bad introduction on the Tube.

Oh wait - I'll be in trouble with the OP because that's not strictly an image from the train.

OK - that would be my first train trip to East Anglia, and the mile after mile of wide, empty, desolate fen landscape, seen from a rattling Cravens DMU bouncing along jointed track around March and Ely. Every so often we passed a lonely, draughty-looking signal box next to a level crossing in the middle of nowhere.

On the same journey I remember seeing schoolboys boarding the train wearing old-fashioned school caps. I hadn't realized school caps still existed, since nobody would ever dare to wear one on the mean streets of Wigan.
 
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Having grown up in the age of privatisation, my nostalgia is relatively scant. A few things that do spring to mind:
  • Pulling up the blind on the Caledonian sleeper first-thing in the morning, somewhere near Tarbet, and discovering the grubby suburbs of North London the night before have been quietly replaced with lochs, glens and vast coniferous forests. Leaning out of the window, hoping to take in the crisp morning air; but getting nothing but a mouthful of clag from the 37 up front.
  • Going up to York for the first time and spending a considerable time intently looking out for the Mallard speed-record marker. Seeing it flash by for the briefest of moments, backed against the parched, gold fields of Lincolnshire in late Summer, was a particualrly fond if not fleeting memory.
  • Sitting in a third-class sleeping carriage, somewhere in Russia, and simply watching the vastness of Siberia stretch into the distance for days on end. Each day rolled into the next without change, as if the train was simply following a large circle, with no indication of ever progressing towards somewhere new.
 

Calthrop

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Hoping that this might be within the OP's criteria: a vivid image, but from a long time ago; and my attitudes to its subject matter, having changed a lot since initial witnessing of it. And -- the OP's very same commencing subject, or all-but...

In early childhood in the first half of the 1950s, I travelled several times -- maternally accompanied -- by rail between Spalding in Lincolnshire, where we lived; and Manchester -- thence on to Chester, to stay with relatives thereabouts. The Harwich -- Manchester boat train was used for this purpose, getting us Spalding -- Manchester without changing. As a child, I loved the "passing scene" viewed from the window, between Spalding and Sheffield; the Sheffield (?Penistone?)-to-Manchester bit, though, I came to dread -- actually IIRC, to the point of tears. I loathed what was to my five-or-six-year-old eyes, the traversed hideous dead-looking moonscape in various shades of brown-verging-toward-black, of the "Dark Peak" area of the Pennines: grim peat moors stretching to the horizon, quite unlike the gentler limestone-and-well-wooded "White Peak" further south. I was too young then, for the then-just-published Lord of the Rings; but if I'd been aware of Professor Tolkien's work, I'd have reckoned "the backbone of England" west of Sheffield and east of Manchester, as a dead ringer for Mordor -- with a matching evil "feel" to it. The dimly-recalled "black hole" of the Woodhead Tunnel, didn't help.

Much later in life, I returned to those scenes -- in time to travel again between Sheffield and Manchester via Woodhead in the route's last years -- and have appreciated and enjoyed the magnificence of the Dark Peak, and wondered at my childhood philistinism; but the perceived menacing death-zone ugliness of the bleak moors rolling to the horizon, as thus for me some six and a half decades ago -- will, in parallel, remain with me for life.
 

Bald Rick

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So many to think of here, but I’ll do a brief three:

Going past Warrington en route south back from the Lakes on the morning after the IRA had bombed the gas holders there (Feb ‘93), seeing the huge jagged rent at the top of the cylinder with a large flame licking up the side (I swear I could feel the radiated heat, although that seems unlikely). The tracks were thick with the police combing for evidence, all in uniform and none in Orange, and us going through at caution.

My first cab ride, on a coal train, and thinking how different the railway looks from the front seat: in particular how undulating the line can be, something you can rarely sense as a passenger. On the way back from the power station I spotted a TSR sign over a weak bridge, knew what it was, asked the driver why he wasn’t slowing and he said that didn’t apply to empties o_O

And finally, my first trans-pennine trip via Huddersfield, going east to west. Beautiful crisp spring morning in Yorkshire, heading up through the lush green valley to Standedge, looking forward to seeing the Lancashire side and Saddleworth Moor once through the tunnel, and then popping out at Diggle into fog, drizzle and general greyness.
 

Arglwydd Golau

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70014IronDuke...by coincidence your burning memory is exactly at the same location(s) as mine! October 1965, I was 10 and heading up to Glasgow for a railtour the following day with my father and older brother. We caught the 'Thames-Clyde Express' at Kettering, and I was looking forward to some trainspotting on a route that I had never been on before. I have only vague memories of most of that journey, jolted by looking at my old notebooks but that stretch of line north of Sheffield! What a sight! In retrospect I now realise that all my journeys up to that point were of rather more bucolic landscapes, annual holidays on the 'CCE' to Pwllheli, trips to see relatives in Southampton and the occasional jaunt elsewhere. I had never been 'up north' before or seen such an industrial landscape....the West Midlands on the 'CCE' left no lasting impression at all'
We were obviously at the droplight windows noting all we saw, so much steam including many industrial locos. It was absolutely filthy, I'd never experienced anything like it ...and it wasn't just the images, also the smell that seemed to permeate everywhere, a sort of gaseous aroma that felt so heavy as we stuck our heads out of the window (safely, of course!). There was no colour, dirty heaps of presumably ash and coal, decrepit (it seemed) buildings and the occasional flash of flame mixed in with the smoke and dust. It seemed to go on for miles! As Calthrop suggests, had I read Tolkien by then - that was to come a few years later - Mordor would have been an apt descriptive name for the area. It was so far removed from the quaint villages and rurality of Huntingdonshire that I was far more used to. I couldn't imagine anyone living there.....and of course at the end of the journey spending a couple of nights in Glasgow where I encountered my first drunks weaving along the street as Dad and I headed for a bus to wander around the filth of Eastfield shed in the evening (wonderful)
I can't think of any other early railway image that has stayed with me so memorably...in fact when my daughter started a relationship with a guy from Sheffield it was the first thing I started talking about and we had a good conversation about how things had changed,
 

Gwenllian2001

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The beautiful vista that opened out immediately after leaving Torpantau Tunnel, It was spectacular whatever the season.
 

Gwenllian2001

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The beautiful vista that opened out immediately after leaving Torpantau Tunnel, It was spectacular whatever the season.
 

kevconnor

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Being on a Mk2 Cross Country service between Manchester - Brighton sat just outside Gatwick Airport seeing an airplane fly overhead as it came in to land and thinking it was going to scrape the top of the train it felt that close (it probably wasn't)

Being again on a Mk2 Cross Country and being stuck in Birmingham New Street due to delays, feeling like we were in a dark tunnel.

Not on a train but at a stations on way to Blackpool from Manchester Piccadilly being stood on P14 seeing the Manchester Polytechnic sign on what is now MMU.

Being in a queue to join the train at Blackpool north that didn't move till the train was in and few mins from departure time (we were near the back of the queue and thinking wouldn't get on that train).

Being on a Craven Stock Iarnrod Eireann train at Killarney and being confused by seeing the loco running around to leave the station. Then being doubly confused seeing it run around again to head up to Tralee.
 

oldchap

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The intercity liveried coaches in front curving around the corner onto the Tay Bridge on many family holidays south from Aberdeen. I was fascinated by the length of the train being enough that I could see the rest of it like that as a child.
 

AndyB28

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I was a student at Newcastle Polytechnic between 1983 - 85 and used to regularly do the run between Birmingham NS and Newcastle. Don't remember much of the journeys except for the southbound run into Sheffield. In amongst the devastation that was Sheffield back then - I'll never forget - the nosecone of a Vulcan bomber sitting in a scrapyard!!! I still find it quite bizarre so I'd be very relieved if anyone else can remember it.
 

yorksrob

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Sorry chaps, but these don't count. You are describing (and rather vaguely at that) the memories of long journies that are burned in your bonces.

I wanted you to come up with images, looking out of the train, and far more specific - YorksRob, you can't have Leeds to Reading - that's 200 miles! And you don't describe a single image from the train.
Not even 1/2 out of 10 for this thread.
You have to work harder on this, I'm afraid :)

I saw a lass get off of my train at Kettering and vomit outside of my window once. That was quite vivid !

On a more pleasant note, this was quite difficult to come up with as I like so much railway scenery, however I'll never forget by first train trip to Brighton, and in particular the breathtaking view from London Road viaduct.

It's an approach that still excites me over thirty years later.
 
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Sad Sprinter

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It would have to be one of my earliest memories; probably about three years old, in a 125 at what I later found to be Swindon, and looking up at the large BR logo at the top of the tower block adjacent to the station and wondering what on Earth it was.

But for a more detailed memory, it would have to be a few years ago returning from East Midlands Parkway to St. Pancras during a July early evening. Sitting in an empty first class MK3 carriage (cheap weekend advance fares meant it was cheaper than standard on that day) with my complementary cup of tea from the buffet car, I remember looking out over the rolling green fields of Northamptonshire as the light began to dim away as dusk approached. There was a light rain shower in the distance and a thin film of grey hung over the fields and the small villages on the forizon. The small pin pricks of orange street lights and lamps in sitting rooms and conservatories has come on as the train rushed passed, giving an autumnal, almost christmasy feel to the summer evening. I remember in astonishment how green the grass was, probably due to heavy summer rain showers and thinking how could anyone not travel by train. For some reason Britain (at least the countryside) looks so beautiful out of a train window-particularly from a MK3, and I couldn’t think of any reason why I would want to drive.
 

Palatine

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On my wedding day in the early 1970's we were seen off from Barnham station by friends and family who threw confetti at us. The view from the window as we left Barnham was of my best man having been handed a brush by one of the platform staff sweeping confetti off the platform. Fellow passengers, my wife and I had a good laugh.
 

70014IronDuke

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I saw a lass get off of my train at Kettering and vomit outside of my window once. That was quite vivid !

On a more pleasant note, this was quite difficult to come up with as I like so much railway scenery, however I'll never forget by first train trip to Brighton, and in particular the breathtaking view from London Road viaduct.

It's an approach that still excites me over thirty years later.

You mean the view over the rooftops as you look towards Brighton station? Much better. 5/10.
But you get a minus mark for the 'orrible memory of the puking lassie.

So 4/10 :)
 

70014IronDuke

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70014IronDuke...by coincidence your burning memory is exactly at the same location(s) as mine! October 1965, I was 10 and heading up to Glasgow for a railtour the following day with my father and older brother. We caught the 'Thames-Clyde Express' at Kettering, and I was looking forward to some trainspotting on a route that I had never been on before. I have only vague memories of most of that journey, jolted by looking at my old notebooks but that stretch of line north of Sheffield! What a sight! In retrospect I now realise that all my journeys up to that point were of rather more bucolic landscapes, annual holidays on the 'CCE' to Pwllheli, trips to see relatives in Southampton and the occasional jaunt elsewhere. I had never been 'up north' before or seen such an industrial landscape....the West Midlands on the 'CCE' left no lasting impression at all'
We were obviously at the droplight windows noting all we saw, so much steam including many industrial locos. It was absolutely filthy, I'd never experienced anything like it ...and it wasn't just the images, also the smell that seemed to permeate everywhere, a sort of gaseous aroma that felt so heavy as we stuck our heads out of the window (safely, of course!). There was no colour, dirty heaps of presumably ash and coal, decrepit (it seemed) buildings and the occasional flash of flame mixed in with the smoke and dust. It seemed to go on for miles! ....

Yep. I'm sure it was all that and more. I first did the journey in daylight a month or two before you, in August 65, but after doing it at night in the April, it seemed a disappointment :) Dante's Inferno in real time it was back then.
 

yorksrob

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You mean the view over the rooftops as you look towards Brighton station? Much better. 5/10.
But you get a minus mark for the 'orrible memory of the puking lassie.

So 4/10 :)

Ah, you never said that memories were being graded. Not least by aesthetic beauty.

So I dismiss your grading of my memories.
 
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satisnek

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I've got a good one :)

It's fairly local today, but back in about 1979 this was probably my first big trip 'north of Watford'. An abiding memory is the white fence, formed of horizontal planks, alongside Water Orton station. It was probably quite new then and would later become familiar when I moved to the Midlands. A short length still survives today, just about devoid of paint and it must surely be on borrowed time. It'll be a shame when it finally disappears - it goes back a long way for me.
 
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Fawkes Cat

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For many years I had dreams about being on a tube train and passing through some sort of depot - which was obviously a nonsensical thing for a train in service to do, so it must have been a nightmare / anxiety dream.

Then I got the Bakerloo line to a job interview in Harrow via Queen's Park...

So I must have been there before, and it had certainly burnt itself into my memory!
 

Dr_Paul

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In 1961 I went to a family wedding in Corsham, travelling down there from Paddington behind a Castle class, and back behind a King class. The water troughs to the west of reading -- Cholsey? -- were in operation, and water splashed all over the carriage even though we were some way back from the loco. Two years later I travelled from Ilfracombe to Waterloo; I don't recall what pulled us, but I do remember lots of big advertising signs in lineside fields advertising Strong's beer, 'You're in the Strong Country Now', that sort of slogan. I also have vague memories of travelling on the North London Line in the early 1960s, including the huge glass-house covering Willesden Junction, when the main lines still had platforms, crossing over loads of busy lines along the route (there would still have been quite a bit of freight around then), and the interior of Dalston Junction, which was gloomy even on a bright day. A goods train through went Dalston Junction late one evening, setting off a couple of detonators on the rail, really making me jump.
 
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