An accidental expertise

In the days when I used to sit in the old cafe at the railway station, reading the morning news, I was often struck by the phenomenon known as Gell-Mann Amnesia. Once in a while I’d come across an article on a subject I knew about. I mean really knew about, a subject where you know what you know, but also the limits of what you know, you are confident about your level of expertise. We all have them, a trade, a craft, a hobby. Practice and or qualifications collected over the years makes us think, this article has factual errors, or perhaps more often it leads you to say to yourself; ‘You’re missing the point mate, that’s not the issue, you don’t get what this is really about!’ We know we could have written a better article. Then we move on and return to that state of mind which, in the absence of evidence to the contrary, accepts everything else in the paper as fact, we take it at face value. That’s the amnesia. But of course, just occasionally you find yourself staring out of the window wondering, if I had specialised knowledge of all this other stuff, would I be thinking it was all just so much nonsense too?

What I want to write about is a particular form of expertise, an accidental expertise. In part it’s a product of age, of simply having been around longer than most of those around you. Often it is expertise based not so much on past interests but things you’ve simply been witness to. Or events you grew up around. Maybe for a while you lived in an area famous for a particular activity, at a particular time, and simply couldn’t help adsorbing your surroundings.

I was never was a train-spotter, although I’ve met a few! By which I really mean it was never the technology that fascinated me. But I’ve always enjoyed train travel and there are family connections too. So, in recent years, when sat in the old cafe at the station, I’ve often been distracted from my reading of the papers - the free ones available on my mobile - by ill-informed talk about the railways. From the historical, some nonsense spoken in response to the passing of an occasional steam special, to the very extent of the network itself, I learnt the geography of my own country from being a passenger! (And by country, I mean the whole of the British Isles, the network makes no sense unless you include ports, ferries and all the islands of the archipelago.)

All trains go up to London, or down from London. London trains leave from the Up platform, trains from London arrive on the down platform, which in the case of the GWR (God’s Wonderful Railway) is always platform one. In fact, with a few notable exceptions, odd numbered platforms always held down trains; even numbers, up trains. And already the past and present tense is confusing, because that’s the way it’s been, since about 1850. It’s a Victorian network. And hence the premier platform in the entire country (Empire?) is platform one at Paddington. The Great Western Railway built the line to Windsor and Eton. Ordinary couples may have met under the clock at Waterloo, royalty stood under the clock on platform one at Paddington - when they weren’t using Queen Victoria’s Waiting Room that is. Platform one at Newton Abbot looks today like a side platform for up and down local trains, it’s not. It is the principal down platform, because the principal main line always was, despite being in part a single track, the line to Kingswear, that is Kingswear for Dartmouth Ferry. Dartmouth station was the only station in the country with no trains, only a ferry. But you could buy a ticket to anywhere, because Dartmouth was home to the royal naval college.

However, before 1850 and the dominance of passenger services, the hub of the railway network was York. My father was born in York, his father worked first for the NER, then the LNER, mainly at York station. He was a railway clerk and worked in the office responsible for timetabling. That's the operating timetable you understand, the timetable the railway runs by, as opposed to the passenger timetable which is a kind of promise to travellers! Trains run on fixed, parallel lines, a relatively closed system and therefore partially predictable, it attracts those who believe they think and act rationally. Grandfather, father used to recall, when travelling by train with the family, using the benefit of the family pass, would, when another train passed, take out his silver railway watch from his waistcoat, and announce to the carriage at large; ‘Huddersfield train is running five minutes late’, or whatever. The first rail journey I recall was Newcastle Central-York, when I was about five years old, say 1964. I spent most of the journey sat on my mother’s knee, in a window seat facing. I recall her pointing out Durham Cathedral high on the river bluff above the town, the railway runs along the opposite hillside, quite the best view. At some point father showed me around the original York railway museum. So, when Andrew Martin, in the opening chapter of The Lost Luggage Porter, gave a long description of York Station circa 1906, I was right there. 

Do I remember the age of steam? Well kind of. The one rail journey we made on anything like a regular basis was when in half terms and holidays mother took us up to Newcastle on a shopping trip and we opted for the train rather than the bus. We travelled the circular coast line, up one way, down the other on the first-generation of diesel multiple units. They afforded the best views of any train I’ve known, especially once the upfront sections near the driver lost their First Class only designation, and were open to all. But the line occasional had freight and maintenance trains hauled by steam tank engines. It happened that our house bordered on to the railway, with a garden which backed on to an allotment on railway land. At night, when I had the back bedroom, they appeared as fiery monsters from time to time.

For a number of years in succession, we used the train to go on our summer holidays. Twice in the nineteen thirties my father and his brother had travelled from York to Leeds to join a cross-country train that went all the way to Bristol, Exeter and Kingswear. But they travelled in daylight. We drove to Newcastle Central in the evening, surrendered the car to British Railways, who drove it onto a two-tier converted carriage, then proceeded to a sleeping carriage and took up residence in two compartments, each with bunk beds! I remember waking-up at first light, turning up the corner of the blind, and seeing a sign that read Bristol Temple Meads, it was cream lettering with a chocolate background, I was used to seeing signs on an orange background. On a couple of those holidays the train terminated at Newton Abbot. The car was driven off on one of the platforms that used to serve the Teign Valley line. We’d just enjoyed one of the most scenic routes in the country, from the Exe estuary along the sea wall via Dawlish, Teignmouth and up the Teign estuary. With the car back we then proceed to enjoy ten days or so at a rented holiday cottage. Looking back today one might think, a huge expense for a holiday, but no, not really. You needed to be middle class to afford it, for sure. But the rich, they travelled abroad!

Then father got a new job, we actually moved to Devon and everything changed. I thought I was on one long holiday, sometimes I still do. It was wet lunchtimes spent in the library at school that did it. Looking for books with lots of pictures, I was not a skilled reader at the time, even for my age. I found a wealth of books on the Great Western Railway, and not just recalling it (before 1947 and ‘nationalisation’ and the creation of British Railways) but celebrating it! The pre-war railway companies had been great rivals, I discovered. Previously I’d been in LNER territory, now I was in that of the GWR. The Great Western had a certain prestige over all the others, and with good reason I was to discover...

(Oh, dear! I’ve got to almost fifteen hundred words and I’m only twelve years old - or maybe that’s the point!)