My story

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These days, my interest in trains is strictly limited. While modern trains are very practical, they are so boring despite being cleaner, faster and more comfortable than the old puffers. However, I still enjoy reading about the old days and listening to songs about trains. Those books and music provide enough material to justify this mini-blog.

As a child, I was fascinated by trains - initially model trains but later the real things. In 1965, I joined up with a crowd of train spotters at school. Train spotting has a very nerdy reputation but when I joined that crowd, it was as much a social thing as anything else. We often went to the local station in the evenings and played cards (I remember that "Cheat" was the usual game) only interrupting the game when a train came in. In the fall (autumn) of 1966, I moved to another town and gradually lost touch with the crowd I'd been with. Although I maintained an interest in train spotting for a while, it wasn't the same without the crowd (and therefore easy to see it as nerdy) and lost interest in it, but I remained interested in other aspects of trains long after I gave up train spotting.

I never succeeded in learning to drive a car although I tried, so trains became my mode of transport for long-distance journeys, as well as for commuting to work in some jobs. In the first few years I enjoyed those train journeys as I could always find plenty to observe but with ever-greater standardization, I found less and less to interest me. So now my interest in trains is limited mainly to nostalgia although I'm always interested to hear about major new developments such as the Channel Tunnel link to St Pancras. In 2011, a couple of visits to London gave me the chance to look around the revamped St Pancras, and very good it looks too.

Leicester, which has been served by trains to St Pancras since the mid-19th century, is a good place to wallow in nostalgia. There is plenty to see of the former Great Central line. A section to the north of the city has been preserved, while much of the route through the city is easily traceable with the southern section being converted into a footpath and many remnants of the northern section (originally built on a series of viaducts and bridges) still clear to see. Remnants of other closed lines can also be found in and around Leicester. Some of these remnants will disappear as further developments take place.

The disused bowstring bridge, which had been in a bad state for many years, was supposed to be demolished in 2008, but because of the legal battle to save it, demolotion was delayed. A new leisure centre is now being constructed on the site.

The future of rail transport in Britain looks bright with lots more long-overdue electrification planned, but the price of train journeys is a major deterrent to those on low incomes.