Awwww Shucks. I am just an old fool reminiscing but thank you all for your feedback. My career grew out of my boyhood trainspotting obsession. I was born and raised in Bury St.Edmunds and just managed to catch the last whiffs of steam on the Eastern .......... as it then was. The high spot of my month was the publication day of Trains Illustrated (which became Modern Railways) and I made sure that I had 2/0d in my pocket when checking out W H Smith's which was located in the under croft of BSE station. Every issue would contain a feature on a foreign railway theme and it nurtured in me a determination to one day visit these exotic locations. My physical horizons were rather limited but my imagination was not so encumbered. Some of these articles had a profound affect on me especially the in depth studies of G. Freeman Allen and I have scanned an article from the June 1963 issue of Modern Railways:
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Modern Railways June 1963 issue for which I paid 2/6d, a week's pocket money (if I wanted more I had to earn it). I have scanned the full article as a pdf file and if I will attempt to post the file here once I have worked out how to do it.
This was a 7 page article and this young 13 year old was fired with an ambition to one day go spotting in Germany .............. the rest is, as they say, history.
Years later and I finally upgraded to slide photography; still a spotter at heart but now a 38 years young professional railwayman. It's 1988 once again and we have moved north of Harburg, through Hamburg Hbf and alighted at Hamburg Dammtor. Twenty five years on from reading about the success of diesel - hydraulics in Germany I am happily making some half decent images of what those early prototypes had developed into.
Hamburg Dammtor, 11/04/88 at 15:24 and 218-461-2 is running through the station from the east with a postal train destined for Hamburg Altona.
More to follow. Advice on how to embed a pdf file in these posts would be welcome.
Best regards ................. Greyvoices (alias John)
) whereby I caught the 8.30 semi fast to Norwich then got on a 2-coach DMU to take me via Wymondham, reversing at Dereham and along the lovely little branch through 'Narborough and Pentney' to Kings Lynn. Here I got on a 3-coach train to take me via Wisbech to March. I had to wait for an hour at March before departure of the afternoon train to Cambridge. I saw the ragtag collection of stock being prepared, and it probably had two parcels and a of Thomson and Gresley stock with Brush 2 at the head. We meandered down the branch to Chatteris and St Ives stopping everywhere and thence to Cambridge, where I caught a fast back to London. This was the day that still stands out to me, that little branchline trip from March behind D5581 (from memory) being the highpoint.
