Are there any trainspotters about on ET? I don't really know what they collect the numbers for. I can just about understand being enthusiastic about trains though! Ad astra per aspera
The main London-Leicester line went by the bottom of the school yard and cricket nets at the grammar school I went to. About a third of the classroom windows gave a good view of the trains going by. Every boy in every junior class (first and second, third forms, after that it was beneath our dignity) was a crazy trainspotter. We had little books you could buy with all the classes and numbers and names of the locos, and you underlined them when you saw them. These were steam trains of course, and you could hear them coming from afar. At the instant one came by, all the boys (not the girls, it was beneath their dignity) would rise in their seats to get a look, take the number, look round at each other, make a face (Malta Great Crate again, or some other pet name we had for the passenger locomotives that were often on that line and we saw too often...)
The teachers made out they didn't notice. They had a collective policy that it wasn't worth trying to fight it.
We'd always come back late and ride through clouds of midges backlit by the setting sun. You can't be me, I'm taken
An American base put a lot of stuff in local circuits. I still wish I could have those white Sea-Island cotton shirts from Saks of Fifth Avenue again, best shirts I ever had, found their way out of the back of the PX somehow...
It seems Bruntingthorpe's a museum now.
I never practised such numbers-checking (expect recording the data for trains I photographed), but some memories come up.
When I was a small kid holidaying at my grandparents', my ex-railroadman grandfather would tell me when each of the 8-11 pairs of express trains pass by, and I wanted to see all of them each summer. Now there was one train that passed at night in both directions. However, there were streetlights on the street between the garden and the railway, which illuminated trains at some spots. So one day, my grandfather woke me up at 3am, and we went out, under a heavy barrage of curses from my grandmother at my grandfather for doing such a thing to a child and himself... *Lunatic*, n. One whose delusions are out of fashion.
I am probably completely wrong.
Thanks for all the comments and questions. Let me attempt to tackle a few of them.
"Railroading" refers to the practice of operating a railroad (or railway, if you will). The jotting down of names and numbers is "trainspotting," which we call "railfanning." Many of the Metra locomotives are named (primarily for Illinois politicians or for towns and counties along the right of way, e.g. 170 "Village of Winnetka."
The timekeeping does matter. Burlington used to ask train crews to explain any delay exceeding thirty seconds. The intermodal train is too tall and too heavy for European track structure, and it is gutsy of the dispatcher to run it through the beginning of the dinky parade in that way.
The weight of the rail is in fact stamped into the rail, but I pay that even less attention than I paid to the names and numbers on the diesels. It's probably 132 pounds to the yard. (The U.S. is unlikely ever to go metric as the yards and miles are literally part of our geography. Anywhere from Pennsylvania west you are likely to encounter what we call "mile roads" (that "Eight Mile" movie about Detroit invokes such a road) surveyed in the late 1700s to map what we then called the Northwest Territories, now Ohio, Michigan, Indiana, Illinois, and Wisconsin. Stephen Karlson ATTITUDE is a nine letter word. BOATSPEED.
