Bihar And Orissa

Sometimes our parents inspire in us hopes, dreams and visions;
sometimes they extinguish those youthful assets with thoughtless
cynicism and world-weariness. I was lucky in that my father was a
dreamer and weaver of magic spells, even in the humdrum life of our
small Yorkshire town and I well remember that day during the summer
holidays over thirty years ago when he first took me down to our local
railway station for the morning. The station was situated down a lane a
short distance from the town centre and was built on a triangular
basis, the main straight platforms serving the long-distance trains
from Manchester to the Midlands and beyond. A second set of platforms
provided connections for the stopping trains to Leeds, the third side
being largely unused by passengers. Just beyond the station on the
Sheffield side stood a small locomotive shed and goods yard and we were
sitting on the station platform watching the shunting engines sidle up
and down the yard when Dad nudged me and pointed to the semaphore
signal controlling the Sheffield line which had just been raised.

"Something coming!" he announced.

The Manchester line plunged into a tunnel shortly beyond the platform
end so it was impossible to see oncoming trains, but the sound of a
steam engine hard at work could clearly be heard, and I almost fainted
with excitement when a passenger train burst out of the tunnel at speed
and clattered through the station, the green locomotive whistling
shrilly and the lined red carriages thumping past one after the
other.
He told me that this was the London express, no ordinary train but a
train filled with dreamers, from the fat businessman travelling first
class scheming of the deal to end all deals which he was going to pull
in the City that day down to the hopeful young actress in third
fantasising of stardom and billboards with her name written
large.

"And did you get the number?" asked Dad.

"45581," I replied. "It was a namer, though I couldn't read it."

"Bihar and Orissa," declared Dad. "Jubilee class 4-6-0, probably from
Newton Heath shed in Manchester." A nine-year-old's Dad knew
everything.

"Who's Bihar and Orissa?" I asked.

"Not who - where!" he corrected. "In India."

His prolific imagination then drew a portrait of steaming jungles
filled with gaudy parrots and deadly cobras; through these jungles
stomped a proud, decorated elephant with a bejewelled maharajah sitting
on its back, using a rifle to shoot a man-eating tiger which had been
terrorising the bamboo-hut villages. He also told me of the time in his
boyhood when the above engine had also been young and fresh and shiny
and, like the rest of its class, bore the name of a part of the world
in which the British Empire held sway. I tried to imagine a time when
the King's rule had been so vast that two territories had had to share
one named locomotive. From that day I began to love trains and
prevailed upon Dad to buy me a spotter's book. Bihar and Orissa was the
first engine that I underlined.

I began to hang around the station with a group of young boys who, like
me, were avid trainspotters; the railway staff tolerated us and our
parents never considered that we would be in any kind of danger. The
Leeds trains soon converted to diesel multiple-units, which we regarded
with utter contempt, for there was still plenty of steam on the main
line.
Dave, the oldest boy in the group, bought a railway magazine each month
and was very knowledgeable; he told us when the return working of the
London train would pass through our station and we endeavoured to be
there for it each evening, schoolwork and meals permitting.
However, by the time I reached ten years old it was clear that the
local railway scene was changing for the worse; the shed's locomotive
allocation dwindled, the yards became quieter and one day we turned up
to find an eerie silence, the wagons all gone and the few remaining
locomotives dumped in a siding. A few weeks later a diesel loco
appeared from the Sheffield direction; the crew coupled the old
steamers together and dragged them away to the scrapyard, rusting
motion squealing in protest like piglets on their way to the
slaughterhouse. Diesels had also commandeered the principal main line
trains, and the train of dreams now burst out of the tunnel with a honk
and a cloud of blue exhaust fumes. Realising what we were losing, we
cheered the increasingly filthy and leaky steam engines and roundly
booed their shiny green diesel usurpers.

One Saturday in the summer of 1966, soon after my eleventh birthday,
Dave rang us up and told us to be down at the station by midday as
there would be something worth seeing. We turned up in ones and twos
until there were a dozen of us hanging round the main-line platform. It
was one of those still, sultry days that seemed so common in the
sixties; a haze of indolence hung over man and machine alike, and the
station was devoid of movement. The only activity was provided by the
bees, which dipped in and out of the ragwort and rosebay willow herb
which adorned the abandoned sidings. After half an hour the Leeds train
puttered in, a few people alighted, the driver changed cabs for the
return journey and the unit set off again. The station returned to its
slumber. We grew restless and began to ride around on the parcel
trolley, causing the stationmaster to come out of his office and tell
us off; we could easily have ridden over the platform edge. A puff of
smoke from the Sheffield direction heralded the arrival of a coal
train, headed by a grime-caked freight engine that hissed and wheezed
slowly through the station and shuffled into the tunnel; there was no
urgent demand for coal in this weather. The stillness descended again,
and when the signals were pulled off for a train from the Manchester
direction the old semaphore made a startlingly loud noise. A
tiff-tiff-tiff noise could soon be heard within the tunnel; a steam
train, clearly at speed! With a banshee howl of the whistle, Bihar and
Orissa burst out of the tunnel as she had three years ago, pulling a
long rake of carriages from which many tousled heads poked out of the
windows to be showered by soot and sparks from her chimney. We cheered
wildly; perhaps British Railways were seeing sense and restoring the
surviving steam passenger locos to their former glory, this one was
certainly spruced up to a degree rarely seen at that time. The train
swayed across the triangular junctions, past the abandoned yards and
disappeared round the bend. But then Dave spoke:

"That was a railtour special. The line's closing tomorrow."

We could hardly believe our ears; we knew things were bad on the
railway front, but we never expected a main cross-Pennine line to
disappear from the map. Apparently at that time there were considered
to be too many cross-Pennine lines for the available traffic, and ours
made the biggest losses and therefore had to go. We trudged off home
disconsolately.

There isn't really much more to say; for most of us, train spotting was
finished as a hobby. One or two of the lads kept it up, travelling to
Leeds or Doncaster at the weekend. Dave, who always had the most money,
chose to capture as much as he could of the final year or two of steam,
in photographs and memorabilia such as number plates and old station
signs which now sell for unbelievable sums. But for the rest of us, new
collecting hobbies such as stamps or birds eggs were found or, for the
young teens, girls, clothes and pop music; this was the sixties, after
all! As for me, soon afterwards my family moved to a village in Dorset
well away from the railway; I kept my spotters books for a year or two
in case we went on holiday to any interesting rail-served resorts, and
then put them in the bin.
According to my Dad, who had spoken to an old friend in Yorkshire, the
old station had been flattened soon after our departure, one bare
platform being retained for the Leeds trains with a bus shelter
replacing the ancient waiting room; the stationmaster and his few staff
were made redundant the day after our final visit. This arrangement
lasted for four or five years until the Leeds trains also ceased and
the whole site became derelict. 45581 Bihar and Orissa, although in
perfect working order, was put to sleep a few weeks after her railtour
run.

And that would be the end of the story, except that last week I had
cause to visit the Huddersfield branch of my current company and took
it into my head to visit my birthplace. I had left my car at home in
Southampton and travelled north on the train so I had to make my
pilgrimage by bus, a meandering journey which took nearly an hour from
my hotel in Huddersfield town centre.
As I approached the site of the former station I was struck by the
almost complete absence of any evidence of the railway, save for the
bricked-up mouth of the old tunnel. There had been talk of relaying the
track and reopening the Leeds branch, but it was clear that the former
main line would never be reopened, the trackbed having been breached by
a new industrial estate. All the former railwaymen's cottages had been
pulled down, leaving only the Station Hotel standing in isolation.
Except it was no longer the Station Hotel but an establishment called
Studz, which was disfigured by a large illuminated notice proclaiming
BARS! DANCING!! LATE NITE LICENSE!!!. I thought I might as well call in
for a beer before I took the bus journey back to my hotel; there was
clearly nothing else to see or do.
The place was empty apart from two lads playing pool and a pair of
girls, who may have been their associates, sitting at a table drinking
lager straight from the bottle. The girls blatantly eyed me up and down
then, evidently finding me wanting, returned to their beer. The barman
was also young; when I tried to initiate a conversation it was evident
that he knew and cared nothing about the old railway and was far from a
genial host. I felt uncomfortable and out of place, maybe out of time
too, and I drank my beer quickly; I then realised I had committed the
cardinal sin of travelling by public transport, namely to fail to note
the time of one's return journey.

"Anybody know what time the next bus to Huddersfield comes?" I asked
without much hope.

The effect was electrifying, as if I'd stumbled upon a rich and joyous
form of comedy as yet undiscovered.

"Har! Har! Har!" chortled the barman.
"Hoo! Hoo! Hoo!" responded the pool players.

The girls giggled and looked at each other pityingly, as though they'd
been propositioned by a retard.

"There's no buses at this time of night," explained the barman when he
regained his self-control. It was around quarter past seven in the
evening.

"You can ring for a mini-cab from here though" advised one of the lads,
slightly more kindly. I did so.

The mini-cab driver was a taciturn Asian whose only response had been a
quick grin of pleasure when he realised that he would get a fare all
the way to Huddersfield. I wondered whether I could draw him into
conversation more easily than I had managed with the barman.

"Ever been to Bihar or Orissa?" I asked.

He grunted. "Where's that then?"

"India. North-east," I explained.

"Not bloody likely. You've more chance of getting there than I have,"
he countered.

"Why's that? Don't you have a passport?"

"I've got a passport all right. British one too. But I'm a Pakistani. I
could marry the Queen, they still wouldn't let me in. Not that I'd want
to, it's a right shit-hole."

"Oh." I imagined the Queen and a Pakistani minicab driver, arm-in-arm,
arguing with Indian immigration: a weirder and more exotic dream than
even my dear Dad could conjure up.

I rang Dad from the hotel that evening. He's now retired and maintains
an avid interest in the world in general and the doings of his
favourite son in particular.

"So you've been up North! Go anywhere interesting?" he asked.

I considered my reply.

"Not really, Dad" I said.