The fascination of Railways.

Image via Wikipedia

At  Birminghan City F. C. in the old days behind the Railway End, not surprisingly, there ran a railay track which used to belong to the London Midlands and Scottish Railways.
It is alleged that on a match day, when Blues were defending that end, and coming under pressure from the opposition then an urgent phone call would be made from St. Andrews to British Rail and a steam train would be sent to emit clouds of smoke which would roll over the pitch. This unsighted the opposition, who had no clear view of our goal, and sent the home fans into ecstasy with the unique smell of that heady mixture of steam and smoke and the satisfaction that the opposition, at least temporarily, had been thwarted. I have been there on too many occasions to state that it was nothing other than fact and not some urban myth that has been passed down through time.
When I was a boy I used to spend hours on Wootton Bassett railway station transfixed by the KINGs, Castles, Halls and Granges of the Great Western that used to pass through and occasionally stop. On rare occasions, the engine driver of a goods train would invite us on board the footplate and sometimes would take us a mile or two down the track to Dauntsy before dropping us off for the long but elated walk home. Can you imagine what the helth and sefty police would make of that these days.
Then along came Doctor Beeching with his Tory axe and tore the heart out of the rural railway system and Wootton Bassett railway station was no more. This was surely the greatest act of folly that was committed against the British transport system in the last century and has left us with a terrible legacy of choking roads and pollutted air. Business as usual looking for a short term fix at the cost of enormous long term problems both socially and financially.
Steam, unfortunatey has also passed away, but this man's father used to hitch a free ride on or in a train as he journeyed through America and wrote some legendary music along the way. Arlo Guthrie, however, carries on the tradition:-

The Good Companions and football.

Perhaps the finest piece ever written in English Literature on football, when it was still a working mans sport, was written by J.B. Priestly in his novel, "The Good Companions". The extract follows. It needs no further comment, except to say that I can just remember going on to THE SPION KOP at Birmingham City F. C. in the 1950's and feeling the same camaraderie and spirit:-

"To say that these men paid their shillings to watch twenty-two hirelings kick a ball is merely to say that a violin is wood and catgut, that Hamlet is so much paper and ink. For a shilling the Bruddersford United AFC offered you Conflict and Art; it turned you into a critic, happy in your judgement of fine points, ready in a second to estimate the worth of a well-judged pass, a run down the touch line, a lightning shot, a clearance kick by back or goalkeeper; it turned you into a partisan, holding your breath when the ball came sailing into your own goalmouth, ecstatic when your forwards raced away towards the opposite goal, elated, downcast, bitter, triumphant by turn at the fortunes of your side, watching a ball shape Iliads and Odysseys for you; and what is more, it turned you into a member of a new community, all brothers together for an hour and a half, for not only had you escaped from the clanking machinery of this lesser life, from work, wages, rent, doles, sick pay, insurance cards, nagging wives, ailing children, bad bosses, idle workmen, but you had escaped with most of your neighbours, with half the town, and there you were cheering together, thumping one another on the shoulders, swopping judgements like lords of the earth, having pushed your way through a turnstile into another and altogether more splendid kind of life, hurtling with Conflict and yet passionate and beautiful in its Art. Moreover it offered you more than a shilling's worth of material for talk during the rest of the week. A man who had missed the last home match of "t'United" had to enter social life on a tiptoe in Bruddersford."