People all over the world have some strange hobbies, and one of the most unusual in Britain is train spotting. It’s usually men over the age of forty, but not always. You’ll see them standing around at railway stations and other places where trains pass by, and you’ll see them taking photos and exchanging notes with each other.
collectors
So, what are they doing? Well, they’re collecting information about trains – the numbers on the front of the trains, or the make and model of the locomotive – the part of the train which pulls all the other parts. In the same way that some people collect toys or stamps, these men collect and exchange all kinds of details about trains and railways.
TOO MANY QUESTIONS
The idea goes back as far as 1942. That year, a young man named Ian Allan was working at Waterloo railway station in London. It was his job to answer letters from people about trains, and quite a lot of the questions he received were very similar. He found himself getting a little annoyed at sending the same replies to the same questions, so he had a word with his boss. He asked if he could write a booklet giving the answers to the most frequently asked questions – an early version of the FAQs you see on websites nowadays. His boss said if he wanted to waste his time on such a project, he should do it in his own time. So he did.
A PHENOMENON
The first two thousand copies were all sold in days, and by the 1950s, a million copies of British Railways Locomotives were selling every year. Ian Allan went on to become a successful publisher, and got an O.B.E. from the Queen in 1995. He died in 2015, but his train spotting hobby lives on.