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MY HOLIDAYS – TRAINS AND SHIPS
My own summer holidays were very different. Every year, during the school summer holiday, my mother and I, together with my younger brother, would travel to stay for a month or more with my grandparents in County Down. My father would follow later, when he had his two weeks off in August.
Our journey started from either British Railways' London Midland region’s New Street Station or the Western region’s Snow Hill Station.
The platforms at these busy stations were fascinating. There were always crowds at the times we travelled on a summer Friday evening. There were hundreds of people going on holidays overloaded with cases and bags, sweethearts saying tearful goodbyes or delighted hellos, latecomers running to get their train at the last minute. Porters would be helping with luggage or driving electric tractors along the platforms pulling two or three trailers piled with mail bags and parcels and horns blowing to clear people out of the way. Everywhere there was the noise of whistles being blown, trains arriving and departing, loudspeaker announcements that no-one could understand and hustle and bustle and all the more exciting for that.
One of the pleasures of train travel in the 1950s for a young boy or girl was the fact that you could stand by the door and open the window. This was done by lifting the thick leather strap off the brass pin that held it in place and letting the window down as far as you wanted before clipping the pin onto another hole. The problem was the weight of the window, which made lowering it easy but closing it again another story entirely. Once the window was open, you could put your head right up to the gap and feel the air rushing past. As the train went round a bend, you could get smoke and even cinders blown into your eyes. This was not pleasant.
Most times, before you enjoyed the excitement for long, a grown-up would come along, close the window and spoil the fun, telling you not to lean out of the window unless you wanted your head knocked off by another train passing in the opposite direction. Or, if you were on a mail train, as we usually were, knocked off by the sack of mail that was hanging from a scaffold-like affair by the edge of the platform, waiting to be automatically collected by a scoop net extending from the mail van as your train thundered through a station without stopping.
Even the sounds made by trains were different to those made today. There was a lot more clanking of carriages. Unless you were in the first carriage after the locomotive, there was not so much engine noise as there is today in diesel trains which have the engines under the carriages because all the power was provided by the steam locomotive at the front of the train. But when you were moving fast, there was the constant diddle-ee-dee, diddle-ee-dee as the wheels crossed the short expansion gap between each length of rail (the rails were not welded in long sections, as nowadays) and the deeper diddy-dee-dum sound as they crossed over the points onto another track. But, wherever you were on the train, there was always the swaying of the carriage (much more than nowadays) and the piercing noise of the engine’s whistle.
