Although I don’t know the exact figure, I must have travelled millions of miles on trains in Britain. Many of them in my early years as a spotter but then even more from 1975 to the present date.

1975 was a crucial time for me because, having cleared all BR locos for observation in 1972, I still retained an interest in railways but needed a new challenge – and haulage bashing was to be that challenge. Thus 1975 was probably the first time I travelled on trains simply because of what was hauling it. 

 

Fortunately I had always recorded the loco in charge of my train but only as incidental. However this did mean that I could backtrack through all my old notebooks to determine my haulage records. Many of them were of course diesel-hydraulics from my local spotting trips.

‘Haulage Bashing’, as it is called, suddenly became far more interesting than anything previously and was very addictive. It meant that I needed to travel much further afield from my home in Torquay to track down rarer motive power such as 26s, 37s 40s, 55s  etc. By the summer of 1978 I was regularly using 1E61 the Friday night 1800 Penzance-Leeds to get myself in position to capture loco types unheard of in South West England and a whole group of likeminded individuals would regularly gather at Chesterfield around 6am on the Saturday morning to attain the gen for the day. In total I used 1E61 more than 100 times over the years until it became a parcels only service in the early 1980s. At this point it suddenly became much more difficult to travel overnight by train to Sheffield so an alternative plan using the 2100 Penzance-Paddington sleepers to Reading for the 0550 Paddington-Manchester was used as the next best alternative.

 

I had bought several all-line railrovers in previous years but these again proved to be very useful together with local runabout tickets.

 

Below then are some recollections from those trips which hopefully will be of interest. The dates are selected mostly at random from the 1970s & 1980s (and even occasionally the 1990s). Hopefully they give an insight as to what was involved in some of those trips.