The most money I've ever seen in one place was in a briefcase that
my Grandad handed over to my Dad sometime in the mid-1980s. It was an actual
suitcase of cash and it elicited the same sort of thrill that you might expect
if you were in the presence of a suitcase of cash representing ill-gotten
gains. I was about 13 and I was seriously impressed.
But this was no Great Train Robbery. The large sum of cash was
needed to secure the purchase of an actual old train (perhaps one that hadn’t
seen active service since the time of the Great Train Robbery, but that’s a
fanciful detail I’ve just conjured up).
Right now, I expect you’re thinking something similar to what I
was back in about 1986. Dad’s buying a steam train and it’s going to be
amazing. Cue images of gleaming locomotives powering down the Great Western
tracks, thick grey steam pouring out the top.
It wasn’t that unreasonable an expectation, either. My Dad’s train
obsession goes beyond most people’s. By my teens he’d taken us on hundreds of
photo reconnaissance missions in which he’d abruptly stop the car by the side
of a bridge, hare up the side of the embankment and disappear for an hour with
nothing but a camera for company. We’d go to monthly rail enthusiast meetings
at which the members would pore over photos, project slideshows and show
archive steam loco footage. Swap-meets for Hornby carriages and Dinky vehicles
were used to furnish the meticulously assembled track layout in the loft, fully
landscaped with its own handmade Forth Rail Crossing.
Every holiday managed to include visits to goods yards and
preserved railway lines. (It still does, though these days my Mum also gets her
fair share of wild flower stop-offs.) My Dad would always go beyond the public
areas and make a nuisance of himself, nosing around where he wasn’t supposed to
be. He wanted to know where ‘the good stuff’ was – the stuff that hadn’t been
prettied up ready to be shown off.
Dad’s insatiable curiosity was legendary even in the 70s, when he
got involved in the Isle of Man Railway. Even though we lived 200 miles away in
the south of England, Dad managed to get himself, Mum and a toddler me to the
island at least twice. He took a leave of absence to work the cranes there and
made sufficient impression to be caricatured in a comic book about the island
and its railway. My then two-year-old brother has never lived down his
distressed reaction when ‘Kissack’ let off steam three yards away from him.
You see, my Dad doesn’t just spot trains – though his love of
steam is meticulously recorded in many 1950s and 1960s notebooks. He chases it
obsessively, and internationally. In the case of his very own steam train, he
tracked it down to an obscure goods yard in Belgium. I can almost hear the
story deflate as I write. Yet Dad and two other enthusiasts who wanted to
salvage a piece of industrial history weren’t to be deterred by their quarry’s
unglamorous resting place. They bought it, insured it and arranged for it to
cross the Channel to Norfolk and be transported on the back of a flatbed lorry
to a tiny hamlet where they could begin to cherish it.
Her name is Cockerill and she’s a hulking great steam tram. Back
when I was still 13 and Dad and his cohorts were still full of enthusiast
vigour, I helped scrape off all the grot and grease from her brass plate ready
for it to be painted and her to be ceremoniously rechristened.
We thought it would be a few years before she would be ready to
show her face to the world again, but probably no more than three, or perhaps
five. In fact, she’s been tucked away in
a private station yard in the middle of Norfolk for the past 25 years. She was
always at the back of my Dad’s mind (he’s worse than me for guilt-tripping
himself about not making time to do absolutely everything he wants to), but
periodic visits to tinker and do essential maintenance inevitably had to give
way for more pressing visits to ageing parents.
By 2010 when my Grandad died, it was time to decide whether to let
Cockerill go or make a go of a project we’d all hoped he’d have been able to
see come to fruition. Time for a big push.
Lou and I went to visit her the day after my Grandad’s memorial
lunch. She’s a big rusty beast, far larger than I’d ever realised. She’s an oversized
Toby The Tram Engine, as it turns out,
rather than a gleaming Gordon or James. In fact, she’s the closest cousin still
in existence to the J70 tram that inspired Rev Awdry to create the Toby tram
character.
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| Cockerill Steam Tram on show at Dendemonde-Puurs, Belgium Photo copyright: Vitaly Volkov (http://commons.wikimedia.org/wiki/Category:Steam_locomotives_of_Belgium) |
Amazingly – and despite living a day and a half’s drive from where
Cockerill is based in mid-Norfolk – my Dad has managed to keep the steam train revival
dream alive. Between my Dad and Mervyn, the other remaining owner and an
accomplished engineer and industrial boiler repairman, Cockerill has been
slowly brought back to life. Last week she passed her boiler inspection,
meaning she’s officially able to steam again.
This Friday, if the paperwork, road transport, insurance and a
dozen other things get sorted out, Cockerill will have her first public display
in the UK. She’ll be on show as an invited guest at the Mid-Norfolk Railway Steam
Gala Weekend from Friday 27 to Sunday 29 June. We’re even holding out for
her being able to haul carriages or wagons up and down the track.
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