Railway Crossing

Some of my very earliest memories are of the train bridge in the village where I grew up. I was three, maybe four, and would be taken to see my aunties that lived at the other side of the village, and to get there, we’d have to cross the bridge.

Being a train freak, as my mother would later put it, I would insist that we stayed on the bridge long enough to see at least one train go by. What seemed like hours would pass while I stared hopefully down the track willing the bright headlight of a distant train to appear.

I have long since embellished the memories of passing trains with additional details that I can’t have known at the time, but the core memory remains accurate. The sheer joy of it, and the tangible relief from my mam, that we could continue on our journey.

I don’t live there any more, but when my own kids were little we lived by the railway and had a crossing on our door step. Had my own children shown the slightest interest in trains I can imagine myself too, standing at that crossing, waiting, longing, for something to pass. It would have been a long wait though.

At this crossing you could wait all day for a train and not see one, except perhaps at half eleven in the morning, and then again at about twelve, passing by on its once a day round trip to the harbour and back. Or on a Thursday when the nuclear flask train made its once weekly return trip.

Thats a hell of a wait for a little one, but us train freaks, waiting is part of the fun.