contrex
Member
I lived at Herne Hill, south London, and from the age of about 10 during the school holidays my mother encouraged me to come up to Victoria to meet her from work. From the age of 11 I used to travel to & from school by train from Tulse Hill, and the summer I was 12 (1964) I discovered Southern Region Rail Rovers, which gave a choice of a day's unlimited travel in one of three areas. My favourite was the central one, roughly everything within Waterloo-Guildford-Redhill-London Bridge. My mother's chief worry was that I might not have a decent lunch. There was one awkward moment once in the Gents toilet on the Up & Down Slow island platform at Balham, but I just legged it out of there. A train to Sutton via Mitcham Junction was arriving at the time and I boarded it along with some adults. I did not tell my mother about that! The SR rovers were discontinued the year after, so I had to switch to LT Twin Rovers.my first solo short train journey was at about ten or eleven, and a year or two after that, I was regularly exploring just about every corner of London on One Day Travelcards. It gave me a lot of confidence in working out how to get around, and stay safe - my parents did a good job of telling me what to do if I ever got into trouble, and I'd been on trains with my mum regularly since I was tiny, so I knew what to expect.
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