Alex Coomber
Here's a story about this Steam Locomotive. This Steam Loco is a unnamed Britannia Class 4-6-2. The photograph was chosen for its ethereal beauty. This Brit is on the platform at Crewe with a night parcels train. It is 1966 and the engine has already lost its nameplates while the driver in his cab illuminated by the open firebox chats to a member of staff on the platform. A typical evening scene at Crewe Station before the end of steam. Many enthusiasts with flasks and sandwiches have sat on a cold platform waiting for just such a sight. Crewe Station was always a popular trainspotting venue and as this photo shows there was much to be seen at night. So groups of young enthusiasts also called platform enders could be seen in the early hours. Ian Allen ABCs in hand sitting on whatever they could find including the many railway trucks that in those days proliferated on the platforms. Sustenance in the late 1950s and early 1960s was an old gas mask case containing a bottle of pop and butties prepared earlier by their mum who had no worries about them staying out all night with their friends to await that unrecorded cop.
