History

I’m writing this after rereading Kenneth Alsopp’s classic Hard Travellin’ after a gap of some nearly fifty years. It is, needless, to say, a book of its time but what a poetic piece of extensive research it is. It’s a piece of Americana but the book also opens up the question in the title above. I suppose ‘riding the rails’ has happened in an almost obscure and virtually unrecorded way in this country with children and trainspotters. Steve McQueen’s film The Blitz features children and evacuees sort of stowing away and my mate has written down his memories of ‘riding the rails’ in his 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...