PAST THE 'BIG-FIVE -0'? THIS PAGE IS FOR YOU...
THE 'SWINGING' SIXTIES...
TRAIN SPOTTING AT THE DEAD OF NIGHT!
I'm a sucker for collecting railway memorabilia, but I can think of no rational explanation for keeping a red, lined exercise book from the 1950s. Had it been an old essay book from school, then fair enough. I think most people enjoy harking back to the merry-go-round of school days, but squirreling away an old spotting notebook is quite another story - a list of loco numbers
counts for little on its own, but if I cast my mind back to a wet, miserable night in May 1959, the numbers in the back of the book mean another thing altogether. As spotting trips go, it had 'kamikaze' stamped all over it. To put it bluntly, my spotting pal, Bonzo, was playing silly buggers. It was the crazy way he looked at the signal box opposite us. A flicker of wild courage? I couldn't quite put my finger on it, but that look meant something to me. Such things always did. When Bonzo was in one of his arrogant moods, he was capable of anything.
There’s a name for this in psychological circles. It's called a narcissistic personality; Bonzo demanded my constant attention and I was a fool for giving in to him. Whatever compulsion drove him to press the self-destruct button, he wasn’t the only victim. He was taking me down with him, and who in the world needs a friend like that? Yet he was a more contradictory person than his swaggering persona would have you believe. Since his 15th birthday, he was no longer a boy, nor a man; he was a rabble-rousing reprobate somewhere between the two. He seemed driven by a passion to collect as many engine numbers as possible, and if that meant spending the night in Calverley & Rodley’s carriage sidings, then so be it. Trouble 
is, Bonzo's high-octane plans had landed us in trouble before, so his fooling around made me jittery. Had only he paused long enough to think it out, then a mote of common sense would have told him that standing at the carriage window in full view of the signalman bordered on lunacy, but would he listen to me? Not him! But then, the difference in our ages (I was two years his junior) meant my opinions carried no clout in his company. But if there is one thing for certain, Bonzo's spotting credentials were not to be sniffed at. Not only had he 'copped' twice the number of engines than me, he knew all along that the railway sidings at Calverley and Rodley would be filled with empty coaching stock, and in his scheme of things the London Midland Region had unwittingly provided us with a roof over our heads for the night.
Okay, it seemed a good idea at the time. It was a whole lot better than spending the night out in the open, but the only reason we had taken possession of a railway carriage in the middle of the night was to spot a
couple of boring diesels! - and that, to coin a phrase, brings me to the nub of the matter...the steam versus diesel debate. For it was the BTC's perplexing and, some would say, chaotic rush to get rid of steam that divided the spotting community into two factions - the pro-steam lobby and the die-hard diesel fans. Bonzo fell squarely into the latter. His enthusiasm for train spotting was infectious; his ambition was to ‘cop’ as many of the pilot-scheme diesels as possible, including the new Co-Bo diesels, numbered D5700-D5719 in the fleet, but as the 20 locomotives were allocated to Derby (17A) for working the London St Pancras-Manchester Central service, they rarely visited Leeds. Then on March 16th 1959, six members of the class were assigned to Cricklewood on a rota basis for working the double-headed ‘Condor’ overnight express freight from London to Glasgow via Leeds...Bonzo was buzzing - ‘They’ll be great cops for the both of us!’ he said.
Until sufficient numbers of the larger and more powerful Type 4 'Peak' class locomotives became available to the operating department, the twenty t
roublesome Metro-Vick Type 2s were a regular sight on the MR main line between Manchester and Derby.The fleet was allocated to Derby 17A, but after a short period in service, their Crossley power units developed problems on a large scale and the class was put into store, awaiting a decision on their future. Smoking badly - a characteristic fault of the Metro-Vick Co-Bos - Nos D5705 and D5714 head a 'down' express at Great Rocks Junction on June 16th 1959. Photo © ER Morten
Following refurbishment at the manufacturers works at Dunkinfield, the fleet was eventually assigned to work secondary passenger and freight duties in the Furness and West Cumberland areas of the MR, all based at Barrow, but with a few sub-shedded to Workington operationally. The original wrap-round windows were a neat detail design of the Co-Bos, but these were later replaced
by a flat screen mounted in rubber mouldings to reduce maintenance costs. The modification can be seen in this view of No D5701 awaiting departure from Workington with the 15.12 to Liverpool Ex. on August 14th 1963. Photo: © IS Carr
Great cops!...I didn’t share Bonzo’s enthusiasm for spotting the Co-Bo diesels! In my view, anything that made such a racket couldn’t be all that big a deal. Every night their rasping exhausts could be heard miles away as they headed along the Aire Valley line not far from where we lived. But that wasn’t enough for Bonzo. Not only was he determined to push the ‘cop’-rate as far as he could go, he wanted to see the Co-Bos close up, and so having persuading my parents I’d been invited to sleep overnight at his house, then telling his mum he was stopping over at my place, he told me to pack a duffel bag full of sandwiches, crisps, a bottle of pop and a torch - and, daft as a brush, I did whatever he told me.
In those days we had a tacit understanding: He was the 'brains' behind our spotting trips, and I was his obedient lackey at his beck and call. Before every trip he had an orderly list of things for me to do, which I found overbearing at times, yet I had always accepted it as such because without Bonzo I would never have 'copped' anything like the number of engines in my abc Locospotters book - and for that I could forgive him anything.
Although the reliability of the Co-Bos saw an increase in availability figures, the rationalisation of the traction fleet had already been decided upon and the early withdrawal of the class was inevitable. The end of the Co-Bo saga is epitomised in this view of Nos D5712/17 on the scrap line at Carlisle New Yard on April 2nd 1969. At the same time, eleven of the ill-fated class awaited disposal: Nos D5701/2/6-8/11/12/14/16/17/19. Following withdrawal in the first week of September 1968, the locos were stored inside the old Kingmoor steam shed 12A, then moved to Carlisle New Yard in February 1969, where they remained until departure for scrapping at J Cashmore of Great Bridge the following Autumn. The locomotives left in the following convoys; September 15th D5701/2/6; September 16th D5707/8/11; September 17th - D5716/17 and Nos D5714/19 left on September 18th. For some reason No D5712 did not go until November, then it too made its last journey for scrapping. Also stored at Carlisle was a large group of Clayton Type 1s in the D8500-34 number series. Some of the Claytons were subsequently reinstated for further service in Scotland. For the record, D5701 was the only Co-Bo to receive the BR blue livery at Crewe works in 1967. For those mourning the demise of the Metro-Vicks are reconciled with the thought that at least
one (No D5705) is still in existence and undergoing restoration. The locomotive survived thanks to it being taken out of stock by BR's Derby Research Unit in January 1969. It spent many years as a carriage heating unit on the Western Region before finally being rescued for possible preservation. Photo (and full caption details) © A Whitaker
Blow me!...I keep banging on about boring 'square boxes on wheels', and within a couple of years I find myself photographing nothing else but diesels! In the days before the Beeching axe cut a swathe through the railway landscape, I was a cocky, self-assured reprobate, who thought it was ‘cool’ to swagger around the school playground and slouch o
ver his desk in class. I had the zany notion that it somehow exuded a raw, male animal magnetism that girls found irresistible. In between listening to Cliff Richard’s ‘Bachelor Boy’ on Radio Luxembourg and ‘zapping’ yellow pus out of spots, all my spare time (and paper round money) was spent photographing trains in the Leeds area. I had no idea that the villainous Dr Richard Beeching was about to shape the rest of my life. Alarm bells had been ringing, of course - in 1963 hundreds of station closure notices were issued throughout the Yorkshire region, but the 
Beeching proposals seemed so preposterous, and so far ahead, that it scarcely merited contemplating. Needless to say, had I known then what I know now, I’d have taken a lot more photos of stations under the threat of closure. Sadly, I missed a golden opportunity and I’ve regretted it ever since. Still there is nothing to be gained by picking over what one should have done or didn’t do. I suppose it's better to have photographed something of the declining rail network than nothing at all...
As we climbed inside the carriage, though, I had grave doubts about my sanity. It was like an ice box in there, and I was immediately struck by the stillness that fell over the compartment - an eerie silence that scared the both of us. Then it started to drizzle outside, which somehow made our actions more defensible. On the contrary, we were bang out of order and Bonzo's smoking didn't help either. The compartment was thick with smoke and my biggest concern was the tell-tale wisps curling through the open window vent. Worse still, his dodgy petrol lighter leaked and his clothes reeked of petrol fumes, which together with his nicotine habit made a lethal combination. It was like sitting next to an incendiary bomb which could spontaneously combust at any second.
But I had my own phobia to deal with first because a fear of the dark can be the biggest enemy of any youngster, especially in unfamiliar surrounding where even the most innocent shapes can be altered so believably in the dark. In my vivid imagination, Bonzo's shadowy form had turned into the 'Creature From The Black Lagoon'. It was a weird apparition; it looked so real. Either he was trying to scare me, or he was battling his own fear of the dark? Whatever the reason, in between a couple of trains - both 8Fs on freights - it never dawned on me that his eerie appearance was an exact mirror image of my own and we were scaring each other silly for no good reason.
Minutes later, I heard the bell codes in the signal box, but Bonzo wasn't interested in a scruffy Ivatt Mogul rattling past our window; he was too busy tinkering with his lighter, shaking it, turning it upside-down and adjusting the wick. Then, aggravated by his nicotine craving, he slammed it hard on the floor and a flame the size of a blow torch shot up his nose. Talk about Olympic high jumps! - he was all over the place. His 'hands-knees and bumps-a-daisy' took pain-relief to a whole new level. He howled like a wounded prairie dog and I was certain someone must have heard him, but the signalman was warming his backside by the fire, and thinking the crisis was over, we settled down again for the night.
Another hour passed and I was beginning to think our outing was a complete waste of time. Apart from 'Jubilee' class No 45594 Bellerophon, nothing else of any note came through and, feeling drowsy through lack of sleep, I wasn't sure if the heebie-jeebies were playing tricks again, or had I really heard men's voices outside? I listened more closely and sure enough - somewhere in the distance a voice called out - 'It came from that one over there...' Seconds later, I saw two men crossing the main line - one from the signal box, the other from the goods yard - both men heading towards us in a pincer movement. I jumped to my feet salivating like a halfwit.
'Stop dribbling!' Bonzo grumbled. Stop dribbling! I was mortified. My parents had brought me up to respect authority, which might sound hypocritical coming from someone who habitually trespassed on railway property, but it hadn't always been that way. Before I met Bonzo, I 'kippped' a few apples from the vicar's orchard and knocked on people's doors and ran away, which is hardly a hanging offence. I'm harking back to a more innocent age, when police cars were fitted with bells instead of sirens, when women PCs wore skirts instead of trousers and local bobbies plodded the beat with whistles. No, Bonzo had gone too far this time. His harebrained scheme for train spotting at the dead of night was not my bag and I was about to tell him enough was enough, when I heard the 'clunk' of a door opening in the next carriage. Bonzo's eyes goggled like dinner plates - 'Oooer!' is all he could say.
I sat perfectly still - smooth and ordered on the outside - chaotic and trembling underneath. Surely Bonzo knew what to do next? He hadn't the foggiest! He began searching the compartment for a place to hide - the luggage rack and under the seat - he even tried climbing through the window vent. The situation seemed irretrievable; he hadn't a hope of blagging his way out way out of trouble this time - 'What're we going to do, Bonzo?'
'Shut your cake'ole!' he ordered, which was typical of him, but having a go at me wasn’t going to help anyone - and that, I have to say, was his biggest failing. He might have revelled in his role as the mastermind behind our spotting trips , but in a moment of crisis, he turned into a cowardly custard. Well, the big show-off had gone too far this time. This was not some childish game of peek-a-boo! We were seconds away from getting caught and Bonzo was all over the place! His bombastic attitude was the first strident warning of the rebellious youth culture about to emerge in the Sixties. It was a decade dominated by all-powerful trade unions and wildcat strikes that brought major ports and car plants to a standstill. At the same time, banner-waving 'Ban the Bomb' marchers were determined to challenge the Government at every turn.
The impression most writers give of the ‘Swinging Sixties’ is one of rampant teenagers indulging in an uninhibited orgy of sex and drugs. Rubbish! The nearest most kids came to taking drugs was a Vic Inhaler, and the so-called ‘free sex’ had more to do with the 
San Francisco hippie community and their 'make love not war' mantra. Here in Britain, the girls we fancied had little in common with their flower-power sisters overseas and the very mention of a quick grope behind the school bike shed ended up with your face being slapped! It didn't help that a new range of affordable clothes hit the high street including Mary Quant's mini skirt that had no waistline and liberated girls from the voluptuous to the matchstick-thin. As hemlines soared to new heights, however, so too did boys' pulses. The pelmet-sized micro skirt left nothing to the imagination, and I wasn't the only red-blooded adolescent not to have ogled a pretty girl tottering up and down stairs on double-decker buses, albeit much longer than decency required. You didn't? It must've been just me, then?... In 1964, the cover of the Beatles album started a new trend in men's polo neck sweaters and the Rolling Stones epitomised the rebellious Sixties. And the other Sixties ic ons? They're too numerous to list here, but I must mention the eye-popping 'Pan's People' who shimmied like crazy on BBC's ‘Top of th
e Pops’. Check out the BBC's website...nostalgia at its best.
For most teenagers, the ‘Swinging Sixties’ really started when the 'Mersey Sound' exploded onto the scene. All at once, working class talent was in - David Bailey, The Beatles, Tom Jones, Michael Caine and Twiggy were crowned the new aristocracy and, just as quickly, a more permissive culture had arrived. Out went shapeless women's sack dresses and men's suits of the Fifties; and in came a new era in fashion. By 1966, 'Swinging London' was reaching its height, and so too had girls' hemlines. The mini skirt not only rejected conventional clothing rules, it spelled the end of sexy lingerie and for the first time a boy could ogle a girl’s visible panty line, hitherto seen only on the hosiery pages 125-132 in a mail order club catalogue. By the end of the decade, the new-style 'baby doll' hemline had reached unprecedented heights - and, at the rate it was rising, a charge of public indecency was surely not far away.
Bill Wright's colour photographs of steam in its twilight years (right and below
left) are a poignant reminder of a decade when the flood of new new diesels and electrics had a huge impact on the railway scene. BR's steam fleet went into free-fall, so even though it was good to see the occasional immaculate steam loco hauling one of the popular 'farewell' rail tours, it did little to compensate for the filth and negelct to be found at steam sheds. With only a few years to go before the cessation of steam in 1968, there was something of a doom-laden atmosphere hanging over steam shed yards filled with shabby engines - indeed, unless their chimneys were covered by sacking, it was difficult to tell which were in working order and those that were not. Check out Bill Wright's page for more colour shots of steam's demise.
As for men's fashions? Burtons the Tailors had a range of off-the-peg suits, slot-in breast-pocket handkerchiefs mounted on cards and trendy drip-dry shirts with matching clip-on ties. Then, as the Flower Power revolution bloomed, the toe-crunching ‘winkle-pickers’ and soft, suede 'Hush Puppies' gave way to Jesus-style sandals. And still to come? - teenagers smoking pot in darkened bedrooms and the 'make love not war' mantra of the kaftan-wearing hippies. It somehow reflected the psychedelic melting pot simmering away – joints, joss sticks, bean bags, flower-power, mournful lyrics by Bob Dylan and long-haired hippies chilling out in a state of amorphous spirituality. For the most part, though, the male gender fell into two categories - 'Mods' and 'Rockers', although most teenage boys opted for bum-freezer suits and black polo neck sweaters, so the term 'mod' could
be applied to most tailored youth fashions at that time. The latest dance craze was Chubby Checker’s 'Twist' followed by Little Eva's 'Locomotion', and couples no longer boogied together on dance floors. Instead girls pranced around a pile of handbags like squaws around a totem pole and boys circled the perimeter like predatory apes awaiting Tom Jones's 'Green Green Grass of Home' or Englebert Humperdink's 'Last Waltz' which were the final 'smooches' of the evening - it was the last chance a boy had of ‘pulling’ a bird and walking her home. Perhaps zoologist, Desmond Morris was watching from the sidelines, because in his book, 'The Naked Ape', published in 1967, he likened human behaviour to that of the apes - which, I have to say, is a little unfair on apes...
(Below Right) During the Sixties, full-time employment stood at almost 100 per cent and credit was easy.
The 'buy now-pay later' era led to vastly increased spending power and everyone was going for it. If you fancied a trendy Vespa scooter or 3-wheeled bubble car, both were cheap to buy and economical to run. They probably didn't have the same snob appeal as a Triumph Spitfire or Austin-Healey frog-eyed Sprite, but it was a whole lot better than hopping on a bus. By 1959 the bubble car's bubble burst when the BMC mini car came onto the scene. The new mini featured a revolutionary transversely-mounted engine and front-wheel drive which made a huge impact on automotive engineering. Costing a little over £526 on the road in 1961, the car became globally famous after appearing in the smash-hit film, 'The Italian Job', starring Michael Caine. Alas, five hundred quid was a lot of money for a hard-up teenager, yet the dream of becoming the proud owner of a Mini Cooper 'S' always made us smile. In those days, youngsters possessed a tenacious self-belief in their future which sums up the general attitude of the 1960s. Perhaps we had a lot more going for us than today’s teenagers?
As for dating girls? Back in 1959, I had always dreamed of going out with Sonia Barker. She was the best-looking girl in my school and every Romeo had fallen for her, so it was obvious that a little squirt like me (hindered by an ill-fitting dental brace and chronic slavering) came way down the pecking order. But I was hopelessly in love - and, in a moment of madness, told Bonzo. Cruelly, he said that she fancied me too - 'Posh totty like a bit of rough!' he said, 'She’s gagging for it!...'Gagging for it? In all the time I had known Bonzo, he had never mentioned Sonia Barker in quite the same way before. And why did he have that strange, rapacious look in his eyes; the kind of sardonic smirk that a mugger might regard his next victim?' - Give me ten bob and I'll fix you a date,' he promised...Oh yeah? I knew he was desperate to replace his out-of-date 1957 Ian Allan abc combined volume...
Okay, I couldn't trivialise the fact that I was desperate to go out with Sonia Barker, but the princely s um of 10/- was four times the wages I earned from my morning paper round, and I had no plans on frittering it away on some stupid dating game - unless Bonzo was right, and she really did fancy me. And why ever not? If I wasn't very much mistaken, on the last occasion I bumped into her accidentally on purpose, hadn't she been letting me know of her sexuality in those s I hadn’t a clue what to make of it. She could have been choking on a gob stopper for all I knew, but in Bonzo's scheme of things, she was crazy about me, only too timid a creature to make the first move - 'So put the poor girl out of her misery,' he said.
On a lighter note, the biggest influence in the Sixties came from the medium of television, since most of our memories have their roots in what we saw on TV. We witnessed the building of the Berlin Wall; the frame-by-frame scrutiny of President JF Kennedy's assassination in Dallas, Sir Alf Ramsey's stiff upper-lipped celebrations after England won the World Cup and Neil Armstrong's first steps on the moon. Meanwhile, in Gotham City, Commissioner Gordon is in urgent talks on the Batphone to the cape crusader. The Joker is threatening to
destroy City Hall with a gooey slime. Back at millionaire Bruce Wayne's luxury mansion, Batman's teenage protégé, Robin, slams gloved fists together in anger, 'Holy grease nipples!' he gasps - 'That dastardly Joker is a slimeball!' Bruce Wayne pauses wistfully for a long moment - 'You're right, Robin. To the Batcave...and quickly!..the good citizens of Gotham City are in a sticky situation!' Okay, I made the dialogue up, but the deadpan humour and corny fight sequences - Zap! Kapow! Crunch! Sock! made the 1966 series part of TV legend. It also created a host of TV merchandise including this rocket-firing Batmobile introduced by Corgi
Toys. In 1963, a series of sci-fi anthologies, 'The Outer Limits' was first aired on British TV - ‘There is nothing wrong with your television set,' droned a deep voice from the corner of our living room - 'Do not attempt to control the picture. We are controlling transmission. We will control the vertical...we can change the focus to a soft blur or sharpen it to a crystal clarity. We will control all you see and hear!' And they did!...scary.
But not as scary as the 'BOOM-BANG-A-BANG YEARS!: In the days before television turned
THE COLD WAR Perhaps the most awesome images of the cold war was the Berlin Wall. The German city became divided in 1961 when the Soviet premier Nikita Khruschev - humiliated by the thousands of refugees fleeing East Germany’s communist dictatorship into West Berlin - ordered all major crossing points to be closed along the border. During the early hours of August 13th, a 103 mile barrier of barbed wire was hastily erected. Then, a few weeks later, the frontier began to take
AMERICAN U-2 RECONNAISSANCE PLANE
us into a nation of couch potatoes, the local cinema was the 'in' place to go. The majority of films had a certain feel-good factor about them (big-budget musicals mainly) but Hollywood also made its fair share of 'x'-rated alien-invasion movies (sparked off by the Communist threat). The scariest films for me, though, showed the deadly effects of radiation which somehow transmogrified even the most placid nuclear physicist into a crazed mutant. It imbued a lot of people with a genuine fear of nuclear power which still exists today. Odd then, that the mushroom-shaped clouds billowing above nuclear test sites looked strangely beautiful in a perverse sort of way - but beautiful they were not. They were a constant reminder that thousands of missile systems were in a perpetual state of readiness on both sides of the Atlantic, and in the event of a nuclear strike there'd be no collateral damage - the bomb would take out everything...
on a more sinister appearance when two high walls of reinforced concrete were built, dotted along its length with watchtowers, searchlights and machine gun bunkers overlooking a barren no-man’s-land (sown with mines) and patrolled by armed East German Grepos (border police) and Vopos (security police). Over the years, the Berlin Wall became something of a tourist attraction for Westerners, including President JF Kennedy who visited Berlin in 1963. During his rousing speech on June 26th – a rallying cry to a divided Germany – he inadvertently told the cheering crowd – ‘Ich bin ein Berliner’ - (I am a doughnut!) when he really should have said – 'Ich bin Berliner' (I am a citizen of Berlin)...
For many Sixties teenagers, the first tangible fear of a nuclear confrontation came in May 1960 when the USA launched ‘Operation Overflight’ using a Lockheed U2 spy plane – a hybrid of a jet and glider – capable of flying over 3,000 miles and, at a height of 75,000ft, higher than any other plane. Its mission was to photograph every inch of Russian soil in search of military installations. But it was a risky venture, particularly as the U2 was encroaching upon the air space of a country capable of launching a satellite called 'Sputnik' into Earth’s orbit. Sure enough, the plane was shot down by Russian ground-to-air missiles, yet President Eisenhower denied all allegations of spying, saying it was a weather research aircraft. It was a lame excuse to make, and it didn’t fool the Russian premier, Nikita Khruschev, who hotly refuted the claim - and he had good reason...as it turned out, the US pilot Gary Powers had failed to self-destruct the plane, therefore the Soviets had ample evidence of spying paraphernalia being found in the wreckage. It gave Khruschev a wonderful propaganda opportunity to expose the ‘Imperialist’ Americans as the villains of the piece and - waving the damning evidence on the world stage - he stormed out of the Paris Peace Summit with self-righteous anger and, just as quickly, the world became a more unsettled place in which to live... 