Why did I never become a trainspotter?

DID you know that Dvorak was a train spotter? Apparently he was a pigeon fancier too, but it was the thought of the composer hanging around Bohemian railway stations, collecting the numbers of early locos – I looked it up and the first steam-hauled service in his neck of the woods began in 1839, two years before he was born – that caught my imagination.
It’s funny how you come across such titbits of information that send your mind wandering in all directions. In this case I was listening to Classic FM competing with the Mickleover dawn chorus – why are early birds so noisy? – and thinking about getting up, when the posh disc jockey came up with that little gem about the man who wrote the New World Symphony.
Just before that moment, I’d been wondering if Mrs R would remember that today was the day on which I’d promised to cut the privet hedge. She wasn’t expecting topiary, you understand. No peacocks or heraldic interpretations; just the usual short back and sides (it’s still a job I dislike, not least because I keep cutting through the cable).
But then this Dvorak thing came up and I put aside all thoughts of decorative hedge clipping and, instead, began to wonder why I’d never been a trainspotter, especially as in the 1950s Derby offered up plenty of opportunities.
For a start, there was the Midland station as we still called it, despite the fact that the LMS Railway itself had disappeared under nationalisation in 1948. Then there was Friar Gate, where we used to catch the train for day trips to Skegness. As it does today, Pear Tree and Normanton boasted a station. And there was also Nottingham Road station, near the Racecourse. Not to mention the Loco Works, where shiny new steam monsters were born in those days when Derby still boasted a huge railway industry.
So I should have been interested. Somehow, though, I never succumbed to the lure of those Ian Allen ABC books. Today, of course, you never see even a single schoolboy collecting loco numbers on Derby station. The few trainspotters still lurking about station platforms are now men in their late middle-age, all probably pining for a 4-6-0 (bit of a defensive line-up, I always thought).
Personally, I can’t recall the Age of Steam being all that pleasant. My earliest memories of train travel centre on those summers each year when we journeyed to my grandmother’s home in Lincolnshire. Every time we went into a tunnel, someone had to jump out of his or her seat to pull up the carriage window, otherwise the compartment would have been filled with smoke.
It probably didn’t matter. The carriages were usually so dirty that when anyone sat down, clouds of dust billowed up from the upholstery anyway. On one occasion, a previous traveller had whiled away their journey with a pencil, decorating the carriage ceiling and walls with obscene graffiti, explicit drawings and all. The train was packed and there was no opportunity to move, so everyone just sat there and tried not to look. For many, though, there was something magical about a steam train and it is an appeal that, for some, has endured.
It’s not just trains, however. The other day, I was almost bowled over by a bloke running along the Morledge. He was trying to photograph one of Trent Barton’s newest. Later, I overheard him discussing chassis numbers with a bus driver.
Apparently, bus spotting is a pastime in which one seeks to see all buses in a particular fleet or those produced by a particular manufacturer. No harm in that, I suppose. But you do wonder …