IT'S HARD TO SAY WHAT awakened my interest in railways, although living almost adjacent to the former Cleckheaton Central station as a young child might have had something to do with it. Then again it might have been the Tri-ang 2-6-2T goods set which I got for Christmas when I was seven which started it all off.
The line past our family home saw everything from Diesel Multiple Units (DMUs) through to steam hauled goods and mixed traffic engines as well as the new diesels. There were also express engines such as Gresley ‘Pacifics’ - these went past on a Sunday when the East Coast Main Line from Leeds was out of action.
When the Beeching proposals were published I was devastated, and I can clearly remember looking at the list of stations that were to go and feeling quite sick. Although I was only very young, I vowed then to record and remember as much of what remained as possible. From that moment my love of the history of railways grew continuously.
Growing up through the blue diesel era I seemed to become more interested in buses and fire engines, but it was the arrival of the idiosyncratic Class 141 ‘Pacer’ units to West Yorkshire which got me hooked on railways once again. There it was, a combinati…
