A Film Called Happiness

A Film Called Happiness by Jon Seagrave / Jonny Fluffypunk
You are fifteen years old. It is 6 in the morning and it is February; it is pitch dark and freezing cold, and you are huddled foetal, shivering in a thin sleeping bag on the seat in a compartment of an ancient railway carriage parked up for the night in the deserted, unlit platform at Thurso station. The end of the line, the far north of Scotland, the most northerly point of the British railway network. And don’t you know it- the sky is blacker than black, the windows of the carriage rimed with ice, inside and out.
There are four of you. You broke into this train at midnight; four fifteen year olds, full of chips and glowing from under-age beer drunk in a pub that couldn’t care less, in possession of a purloined carriage key. You came up here yesterday, across the vast and empty moorland on this train, and you will head back south on this train at daybreak, and now you are sleeping on this train, or trying to sleep in the bitter chill. For the past four days trains have been your home; they will be your home for the next three, too. 650 miles away, on the outskirts of London, your mother is wondering where the hell you are and what you are doing.
And what you are doing is bashing, which your mother finds difficult to understand. This is your life. You are a Basher, and you are in the (self- appointed) top tier of railway cranks. To the outside world- the normals- you are just another ‘trainspotter’, but you are not a trainspotter. Merely seeing trains and noting their numbers is not enough. You are a basher, and you are all about haulage, about riding behind a locomotive, about racking up the mileage; the beast has to work for you to earn it’s red-pen underline in the hallowed BR Motive Power Pocket Book. And it doesn’t stop at that underline, oh no: clear that loco for 100 miles, for 500, for a thousand… there is no end to this chase, no end to life on the bash.
And here in Thurso, at the head of the short rake of carriages, silhouetted a English Electric Class 37 diesel-electric locomotive. Nicknamed ‘Tractors’ for their throaty, throbbing engine sound and their suitability for any job, from express passenger to Welsh valleys coal train. Twenty-two-year-old filthy blue-and-yellow beasts like this are your passion. You travel the length and breadth of the country in pursuit of them. It is class 37s that for now bring the thrills, the joy, the let-downs and the heartbreak that soon enough will be brought by girls and bands and politics, but not yet. You don’t know it, of course, but you have 10 months left to go before this all becomes your slightly embarrassing past.
In half an hour the Thurso train-crew will arrive; they will nod you a gruff hello. They know you’re not meant to be here, but in 1985 railway cranks are part of the everyday of rail-workers’ lives; you’re eccentric but harmless- dossing on locked-up frozen trains is just the sort of thing you do, and for the most part no-one gives a toss, and you’re just left to get on with it. And soon enough daylight will grow in the east, and the engine will splutter and cough into life, and the steam-heat will drift up from under the seat to slowly warm your frozen body, and then passengers- the normals- will invade your little world and then- with a horn-blast and a roar of engine-thrash- you’re away, with you hanging out the front window, filling your hair with diesel-smoke. And four hours later you will be pulling into Inverness, and you will have racked up another 150 miles behind a class 37, and it will all have been worth it.
Your passion is relentless. Day after day, train after train. You make desperate leaps between split-second connections, endure rancid ‘festers’ in cold waiting rooms, all in pursuit of more Tractor mileage in the book. You get word-of-mouth info from other cranks. You make calls from remote phone boxes to contacts in BR Control. You are ever- hungry for the golden prize of insider knowledge- the ‘Gen’. And when you’ve got the gen, then it’s out with your ‘Bible’ (the two-inch-thick British Rail 1985 All Line Timetable, 4-point font on rizla-thin paper). Then the frantic working out of ‘moves’, whole working timetables etched into your memory. Then scrambling at a moment’s notice from Exeter up to Edinburgh, from Bridge of Orchy down to Bristol, all because some monstrously ‘big’ freight-only 37 has wound up diagrammed on a summer cross-country relief. And when that thrashing, growling monster pulls into the platform there will be dozens and dozens of you who have made it there from all corners of the country to greet it, all alerted through some magic of pre-digital bush telegraph, all succumbing to the irresistible pull of itsblack-hole gravity.
In 1985, there are thousands of people like you. Tens of thousands, even. They are not all old men in anoraks, like the few cranks you still see occasionally in 2025- the last dying remnants of railway enthusiasm, gamely clinging to what-once-was against the backdrop of a ravaged and decimated privatised rail system. In 1985 you are for the most part young and you can be anyone- there are cranks who are punks, cranks who are skinhead bootboys, cranks who are soul-boys, mods, or footie casuals, cranks who are metal-heads or goths. There are black cranks and Asian cranks and female cranks, though admittedly they are few. But even amongst the vastly-predominant Young White Males, all the outside-world rivalries- all the divisions of music and class and race and sexual orientation, of north vs south, all are put aside in pursuit of trains. Gen, moves, carriage compartments and waiting rooms are all shared freely, regardless of haircut or accent or tightness of trouser.
Inside-world rivalries, of course, abound: train spotters are the pits, you’re all agreed on that, all you who have turned your back on the static passivity of the platform end in favour of the Great Hunt, the intoxicating chase of bashing. But then what to Bash? You, you’ve self-identified as an English Electric man, through and through, committing to the pursuit of locomotives built by that stalwart Newton-le-Willows manufacturer, with their distinctive engine sounds and classic stylings not just class 37s, but also class 20s, 40s, 50s, and that refinement straightaway puts you way above the bash-anything-that-moves ghettoes of the NED (‘New Engine Desperado’) and the Insect (all day back and forth the same few miles between Birmingham’s New St and International, or Edinburgh’s Waverley and Haymarket), slaves both to the red pen underline, to quantity over quality. And- in your mind at least- it puts you way above the ‘Peak’ bashers, the ‘Rat’ bashers, and all others dedicated to what you-correctly- perceive as lesser breeds of motive power. And above all of you, at the top of the tree, the ‘main men’, the ones who’ve been at it for years, for decades even, men who started on steam; the 24/7 train-tramps, perpetually on the move, with wild hair and unidentifiable income-streams and airs of rightful superiority, the ones who’ll talk to no-one with less than a quarter-million miles on the clock, the Kings of the Rails.
And you dream of being a Main Man one day, with a beard and an eccentric overcoat and your life in a battered Gladstone bag, but for now you’re still one of the aspiring rabble, one of the thousands, with your Adidas bag graffitied with the numbers of your fave machines and stuffed with your Bible, your moves books, a jumper or two and a pair of pants. Day after day of strip- washes in swaying train bogs, snatched sleep hunched in seats under strip- lights, 3am ‘bailing’ at some freezing junction followed by a hellish ‘fester’ on a windswept platform; this is how you live. Hanging from carriage door droplight windows, drunk on the roar of engine-thrash, flailing arms, bellowing whoops in salute to the thundering machine up front.
You’ve had 37’s to Skegness. 37’s to Aberystwyth, 37’s to Blackpool and Yarmouth and the Devon coast. You’ve had 37’s to Mallaig and Thurso and Wick, to Oban and Ayr. In 1985 as a 15 year old boy you rack up 35,000 miles on the rails. Every school holiday is a week’s All-line Rover here, a Freedom of Scotland ticket there (sixteen quid for the latter; unlimited travel for  even days); every weekend you’re off and away. Rail travel’s cheap in ‘85, but for you it’s even cheaper: the basher is a black-belt at ‘effing it’, a dab hand at the art of dubious validity, and you are no exception – deftly doctoring date-stamps with brake-fluid and milk. On a crowded summer Saturday express, with an overworked guard and every vestibule chocka with window- hanging bashers, then a quick flash of an out-of-date North Wales Rover will get you all the way to Newcastle.
Well, most times it will. But just as every cartoon hero must have their nemesis, so yours are the TTI’s, the Travelling Ticket Inspectors, all big black overcoats and hawk-eyes, the gestapo of British Rail. Like you, perpetually on the move. Like you, wedded to the rails. These are hardened men, veterans who give no quarter; grim-faced, vengeful men, primed to spot your fudged date-stamp at 100 yards.. They hate you, all of you, and they want you off their trains. All have nicknames: Loose- Irons. The Purple Mask. Granville of the London Midland, who’d once spot-fined his own mother, and once went rogue in a Welsh market town, storming out into the street, demanding valid tickets from a chip-shop queue. You fear the TTI’s. You all do. You have had a TTI rip your dodgy Scottish Rover to bits in front off you, then throw you out in the rain at Falkirk High, a teenage boy, ticketless and skint and hundreds of miles from home.
But does it put you off? Not for a minute. It’s all part of the great railway adventure, and you wouldn’t swap it for anything. None of it- not the TTIs, the freezing nights, the dossing in your clothes, the filthy hair stinking of diesel fumes; not the diet of chips and Travellers-Fare sarnies, not the fitful sleeps, not the ‘leaps’ for connections at three in the morning. It’s all worth it, all of it, every glorious moment. For you don’t know it yet but you will come to think of these days as some of the best days of your life, your most favourite days, your carefree days, the days before girls, the days when joy and despair were in the hands of simple lumps of metal, and you rattled through the summers with the windows down, your head sticking out, you drinking in the distant engine-thrash, the engine-thrash that could be the soundtrack to a film you could make of all of this, a film you’d call, simply, Happiness.