Waiting at our rendezvous point in Surrey Quays, I reread an email from Simon, whose website I had stumbled onto when digging into a Google thread about trainspotting: ‘In this cold weather, I am wearing green padded winter trousers, a red jacket over a grey fleece jacket and a black circular hat.’
Just as I am wondering what a square or triangular hat might look like, the conventional circular-brimmed hat floats along the windowsill and walks into Starbucks.
‘Simon – over here.’ I beckon to him.
He sits down opposite me and stares expectantly from behind 1980s glasses, which magnify his eyes and give him a look of permanent surprise.
‘I know this station well because I used to come here a lot to film the trains when it was part of the London Underground.’
Carefully pronouncing each word and talking in a steady chug, Simon explains that he was born in east London and still lives there now at the age of fifty-four. He can’t recall when his love for trains began, but distinctly remembers holidays in Europe in his early childhood, when all he wanted to do was take pictures of his three loves: trains, trams and trolleybuses. It got to the point where his parents had to confiscate his camera.
‘Do they like trains too?’
‘No,’ he laughs, ‘they thought I was nuts. I’m not a number taker,’ he explains, almost defensively. ‘I take pictures and videos, or just observe. I go to special events like historical carriages running, or new carriages that use old routes. I have been stopped by police a few times, but when they realise I’m a trainspotter, they run a mile.’
Simon has volunteered at an old people’s home every Saturday for the last thirty years. Aside from this, he spends most of his time making his YouTube videos. He doesn’t have a job at the moment, but he hopes to make some money producing a DVD mixing his old footage of trains and trams in Berlin with new footage he will take later this year.
‘I got very annoyed when they stopped supplying the zone-two-to-six travelcard,’ he says, pushing his glasses up his nose. ‘It’s all part of a wider government plan to stop us moving around so much. They want to control us.’ He pushes his glasses even further up his nose, squashing his eyelashes against the lenses. ‘They are moving in, bit by bit, to keep us under control.’
‘Who are “they”? The New World Order?’
Something seems to come alive in Simon. ‘Exactly! They are trying to keep us away from life force.’ His eyes widen, and he leans in closer.
‘We have all been enslaved by the New World Order,’ he continues. ‘They steal kids and take them away on ships to film snuff movies and perform satanic rituals. The Galactic Federation of Light are planning a rescue mission.’
He looks around furtively, and, remembering we are in the middle of Starbucks, lowers his voice. ‘If you type “Zero Point Energy” into Google, you will be dead within a week.’ (For some reason I am too scared to do this myself, so I ask my friend Rob to when I get home. It gets 67.6 million Google hits. The killer must be a very busy person.)
Simon’s mobile phone goes off. It is a call from someone who reminds him that they won’t be able to contact him between 15.45 and 16.00 because they have a dental appointment. He won’t reveal who the call is from. ‘I don’t like talking about my family in case they realise I’m on to them.’
We both take a sip of coffee.
‘There is a hidden civilisation underneath Antarctica,’ he goes on, distracted by something he has seen through the window.
He looks back at me with a start, as if he has just remembered something really important.
‘Aliens are coming next year, to Moscow.’
A few weeks later I receive an email from Simon:
Hello Lucy,
Something which may be of interest to you has cropped up.
As you may know, the Underground is part way through a programme of replacing 40+-year-old trains with newer trains. Next Monday the last of the old trains will be used on the Circle and Hammersmith & City lines, and it is possible that there will be some sort of special happening at the Hammersmith station which is used by these lines.
I plan to be at Hammersmith to see these last trains, and I expect there to be ‘quite a few’ other trainspotters there as well.
Below is the message about this which I received in my email inbox. Below that are a few more links for you – not just about trains, but also one to the flying saucer which I photographed!
On the day of the event, a young security guard is playing a game on his mobile phone at the gate of the old Metropolitan line station at Hammersmith.
‘Do you know anything about a “happening” here this afternoon?’ I ask him, realising, for the first time, that I have no idea what I am here for.
He sighs loudly and slowly looks up at me with the same look of confusion my friends give me when I freeze leftover cabbage. ‘What do you mean, happening?’
‘Well, I’m not really sure. But I think it has something to do with the last of the C Stock running into this station.’
‘I have no idea what you are talking about,’ he says, going back to his phone.
‘Well, have you seen any trainspotter types hanging around?’ I get desperate. ‘I’m here to meet a… friend.’
He scans me up and down, furrowing his brow.
I decide that the only way this rude prick is going to help me is if I try and get him on side. I lean into him conspiratorially, and in a shameful act of betrayal, whisper, ‘I’m writing a book about trainspotters. But don’t worry, I’m not actually one of them.’ I give him a dramatic wink, which is both confusing and unnecessary.
He continues to stare back at me blankly, shrugging his shoulders, presumably thinking I have just escaped from somewhere.
We both stand in silence for a moment, staring at the barrier, before he finally accepts that I am not going away. ‘Well, I suppose you can come in and have a look around,’ he groans reluctantly, touching his card on the Oyster pad to open the barriers with an angry thud.
I wander around the platforms for the next few minutes, confused and guilt-ridden for needlessly disavowing Simon. Unable to see any sign of a ‘happening’ I give up and make my way back to the entrance. As I get closer to the gate, security guy beckons to me and points at the opposite platform. And there he is, his camera poised alongside two other men clutching notepads.
‘Simon!’ I yell and wave, walking excitedly over to him, wondering whether or not to go in for the hug. He glances up, puts a finger in the air to shush me and goes back to his filming. We stand in silence for a few minutes while I scan around uncomfortably, not having any idea what I am supposed to be looking at.
‘Have you heard about the Farsight Institute?’ Simon says without preamble, his eyes remaining locked on his viewfinder.
‘Erm… no.’
‘Remote viewing. You can see things through the eyes of another being even when you are hundreds of miles away.’
There is a distant sound of an engine and one of the notepad men suddenly looks animated. ‘There she is, coming into the loading bay.’
Panic descends, and everyone runs across to the other platform. Suddenly about twenty other men appear out of the shadows to join the commotion like bats from a cave. They all scramble for the best view, pushing each other out of the way in silence.
‘I’m going up to the footbridge to get a shot of it leaving,’ says a tall younger chap called Geoff, who tells me he is filming for the London Transport Museum.
I relay this information to Simon. ‘The footbridge!’ he exclaims, clapping his hand to his head before sprinting up the platform towards the bridge, closely followed by about fifteen men with cameras.
I follow behind and observe them all jostling to get the best position to film, still not knowing what I am supposed to be looking at. I squeeze in between Geoff and Simon and try to follow their gaze. Geoff leans behind me to talk to Simon. ‘What are you filming for?’
‘Citytransportinfo,’ Simon chirps the name of his website and popular YouTube channel, without adjusting his gaze.
Geoff is star-struck. ‘You are citytransportinfo?’
‘Yes.’ Simon fiddles with his camera.
‘I asked you for some footage of some S Stock for a project for the Transport Museum,’ Geoff says. ‘Do you know who I am?’
Simon thinks for a while… ‘Geoff?’ The two of them share a moment of mutual respect, talking about trains for a while in a language I don’t understand. Then Simon starts to stray. ‘I have other interests too…’ he says.
‘He lost me when he started getting political,’ Geoff tells me half an hour later as we sit in the Starbucks opposite. I am waiting for him to tell me a story that ‘I simply have to hear’. Wearing a black beanie hat and a London Transport Museum fleece dotted with biscuit crumbs, he leans into my Dictaphone and says, ‘Hello, Lucy.’
I ask him about his love for trains, and he launches into an excited monologue. ‘I do a comedy gig at the Fringe Festival about my life and trains and how I don’t really understand why I am interested in them,’ he explains, his rubber face full of expression as he continues to talk to my Dictaphone rather than me.
‘I have a mild OCD,’ he continues. ‘I need things to be straight, I need lids to be on pens properly, I need them to be neat and tidy and the right way up in the pot. So maybe that is where the train thing comes from for me. The efficiency of it all, the way it just… works.’
Brimming with energy, Geoff is sociable and easy to talk to and makes a point of telling me how sociable and easy to talk to he is. Presumably a rare personality type in this circle, he seems keen on proving this to me.
‘I am somewhere on “the spectrum”,’ he says. ‘I tip on and off of it… Most people on the spectrum are male. They think it must have something to do with the Y chromosome; that’s why almost all train geeks are men.’ He looks up at me. ‘When I saw you with all of them today, I knew there was something different going on, so when you told me you were writing a book, I was like, “Aha!”’
I am still in suspense about what Geoff brought me here to tell me. ‘What is the amazing thing I need to hear, Geoff?’
‘OK. Are you ready for it?’ He pauses for effect, leaning even closer to the Dictaphone. ‘I hold the world record for travelling through all the Tube stations in the fastest time possible.’
He gives me a moment to let this soak in.
‘Sixteen hours, twenty minutes and twenty-seven seconds.’
OK. This is kind of cool.
The ‘Tube challenge’, recognised by the Guinness World Record Association, is over 270 Tube stations, excluding the DLR and the Overground. Geoff has held the record twice now, having made twenty-five attempts in total, with his committed support team bringing him food, tracking delays and planning toilet stops, sometimes involving empty bottles.
The team spend months planning each attempt, creating a unique code within a system of painstakingly produced spreadsheets to work out the quickest possible route. ‘You have to get yourself fit to run between the ends of each line,’ Geoff explains. ‘For example, when you get to the end of the Piccadilly line at Cockfosters, the next logical place to start is High Barnet, but it’s five kilometres away, so we run it. We have to do fitness training together, and we wear proper running gear on the day.’
Ticking things off a list, challenge, community – every part of this appeals to me. Geoff may have just found a new rival. If nothing else, it would look great on my LinkedIn profile.
My time with Simon and Geoff was enjoyable, but something was missing – I hadn’t yet written down a single number into a pad. I convey this to Simon, who promptly introduces me, over email, to his friend Peter Mugridge, ‘a proper trainspotter’.
As I make the journey to meet Peter at Euston station, the worst happens. Despite leaving fifteen minutes’ grace time for my route, a fault on the Northern line results in an evacuation and a twenty-five-minute delay. Out of breath from running up the stairs, I arrive at the station a whole seven minutes late.
‘I can’t believe you live in London and don’t make allowances for these things,’ Peter says, deadpan. He is wearing a grey waterproof jacket and carries a black shoulder bag, bursting at the seams with God knows what. His dark hair, thinning at the top, is swept back from his face and he wears thick, wire-framed glasses. I look at the floor and mutter an apology like a chastised child.
He runs to the ticketing office, beckoning to me and announcing as we run that we will be travelling to Manchester. We buy our tickets and stand in front of the departure screen – in silence so we can concentrate – waiting for the platform number to be revealed.
Platform 14.
We sprint, leaving fellow travellers in our wake to be the first ones onto the train. Apparently this is incredibly important, ensuring our access to the best possible seats. As I struggle to catch my breath, peeling off my white anorak to try and regulate my soaring body temperature, Peter happily jaunts through each carriage, inspecting each seat for… 1) being on the right-hand side; 2) being at the back part of a long window so you have as much visibility as possible; 3) lining up with the other seats so you can see out of the window on both sides.
Spotting the perfect one, he leaps into it with childish excitement. ‘Bagsy the window seat,’ he says, producing a napkin from his bag and wiping at the window furiously. ‘I always keep one of these with me, to clean the windows,’ he says, holding it up as proof. ‘If I know which seat I will be sitting in, I’ll clean the window on the outside too before getting on the train.’
The train starts to pull away from the station. Before we boarded the train, Peter had pointed out its unique number stencilled on the side.
Following Peter’s lead, I jot down 390 134 in my pad.
Peter has worked for the same market-research company for twenty-nine years and has been trainspotting since he was a young boy. His mother told him that he reached out for a railway magazine when he was still in the pram.
‘If you are wondering why I am not taking the numbers of those trains over there’ – he points out of the opposite window at a cluster of trains sitting just outside Euston station – ‘it’s because I have seen all of them, photographed all of them and ridden on all of them already.’ He grins.
‘How do you know which trains you have and haven’t seen?’
‘They publish a book every year containing the numbers of every single train in the country – locomotives and coaching stock – so you can tick them off as you go. It’s the trainspotters’ bible. The book of numbers.’ He laughs. ‘See, train boffins can make jokes too!’
As we travel, Peter holds a small black plastic box that hangs around his neck up to the window. It tells him the speed of the train and adds up his mileage so he can note it down.
‘How far do you typically travel?’
‘About eleven thousand miles a year is normal. The furthest I have travelled in a year was twenty-five thousand miles. But that was before I got married.’ He points at his wedding ring.
‘How did you meet your wife?’
He is visibly glad I asked this question. ‘Picked her up on a train,’ he says. ‘The first thing I said to her was, “That’s the bridge where the Great Train Robbery happened.”’
As we draw near to our destination, Peter says the name of each station as we pass through it, to no one in particular: ‘Stockport,’ ‘Macclesfield,’ ‘Stoke-on-Trent.’ We pass a few depot yards, and he writes the numbers down.
I write 57 011, 57 018, 57 304 and 77 002 in my pad.
Peter has collected almost all of the numbers in the UK now and carries around a leather wallet containing details of the elusive few, divided across three separate ‘hit lists’:
1. Spotted
2. Photographed
3. Haulage (ridden on)
When he has finished, he will move on to the trains of Paris, which he has already made a dent in.
Within two hours we are standing at Manchester Piccadilly, where Peter escorts me to the information office to sign in, so we’re not accused of loitering.
‘I would like to sign in to take pictures of trains,’ he announces to the two pretty young girls in the information office.
‘Oh, we’ve changed our policy, you don’t need to do that any more,’ a petite blonde girl says. ‘The staff are aware that the enthusiasts stand on the end of platform fifteen to take photos, so as long as you stand there, you will be fine.’
Peter looks surprised by this change of protocol. ‘So can I sign in, please?’
‘You don’t need to, you’ll be fine,’ the girl reassures him kindly.
He gets his camera out. It looks about twenty years old. ‘You can see I don’t have a flash,’ he shows them the place where a flash might be, ‘and it doesn’t have a red light.’
‘That’s fine,’ the girl smiles back at him patiently.
‘Even if it did have a red light, I would put a piece of Blu-Tack over it,’ he continues.
‘Thank you,’ the girl says, still smiling.
‘This lady is a writer,’ he points at me. ‘So she will be with me at all times.’
‘That’s fine,’ the girl smiles, her patience wavering ever so slightly.
Peter smiles, waits in silence for a few seconds and decides to check just one more time.
‘So, where do I need to sign?’
When we get to the viewing platform, I spot seven other men scattered around, festooned with cameras and pads. I have never even noticed these people at railway stations before. I guess they’ve always been here; another hidden world that was right in front of my eyes, only visible through a different lens. Peter walks up to a white-haired man wearing a flat cap.
‘Anything interesting this morning?’ Peter asks.
‘Couple of freight trains,’ he responds.
I sidle over to him. ‘How long have you been into trains?’
‘Since I worked as a fireman on the steam trains in the sixties,’ he says, smiling. ‘Wonderful job. Clouds of steam puffing up over the Yorkshire countryside.’
Finally, something I can access – the nostalgic beauty of an old steam train snaking through an emerald valley. It’s a romantic image, no doubt, but the 08:14 from Liverpool Street station just doesn’t have quite the same appeal for me.
Peter abandons us and gets straight to work analysing the trains pulling in and out of the platform. ‘Rats,’ he repeatedly says when all of the trains that go past are trains that he already has.
After half an hour on the platform, we board an electric train he has never ridden on before, a tick for the ‘haulage’ list.
350 407
We ride on it for half a mile, to Manchester Oxford Road, before crossing to another platform and catching another train back again.
150 113
‘Why do you like trainspotting so much?’ I ask on the way back.
‘It’s hard to say.’ Peter looks pained and thinks for a while. ‘But I suppose if you asked a football supporter why he has to go to all of the matches, it would be the same thing.’
Again, we’re back to the idea of collecting things – bird watching, stamp collecting, drinking all the different beers in a microbrewery, communities beginning with different letters of the alphabet – all driven by that same desire to tick things off a list. I guess Peter and I aren’t so different after all.
When we arrive back at Piccadilly, the men on the platform stand alone with metres between them, talking rarely, and only in transactional snippets. ‘Has the 305 70 come past yet?’ ‘Where was the 402 506 going?’
Another train headed for the airport pulls in and Peter’s eyes light up. It is two electric trains joined together, neither of which he has ridden before. He rubs his hands together and smiles, running down the platform to enter the train at the back. He walks through that train, past the cab, and into the front.
‘I can count it as two separate haulages now,’ he says, triumphant in having found a way to game his own system.
350 402
350 404
Peter sits by the window, holding up his trusty GPS device. We travel ten miles, get off, cross the platform, and immediately get on the next train back to Piccadilly.
142 011
I catch a glimpse of my reflection in the grubby window. I look drawn and sapped of energy. Irritated, even. I am trying so hard to understand why you would put yourself through this aimless travelling back and forth. For me, trains are a means to an end, a way of getting somewhere. I look at the other people on the train with a sense of longing, jealous that they all have somewhere to go, desperate for some kind of destination. Perhaps this is another lesson.
‘Enjoy the journey.’ I picture Rory at Findhorn, explaining the importance of my pointless walk to restock the already restocked apartment. I can almost see his face in the window, like Simba being visited by the ghost of his dead father, his long hair billowing in the wind as his eyes crease into an enlightened smile. Have the trainspotters got it sussed? I force myself to smile and wait in vain for the serotonin to kick in.
On the way back to the airport, we whizz past a train we have been looking out for all day, the 170 303, which Peter desperately needs to photograph. He looks crestfallen as we reluctantly board the 15:15 from Piccadilly, the last train that will get us back to London in time for Peter to watch Coronation Street.
390 009
Just as we are about to leave, the 170 303 pulls into a platform on the other side of the station. A look of steely determination settles on Peter’s face. He points in the direction of the train. ‘I’ll get you next time,’ he says.