Just an odd train of thought

THERE was a time, you know, when small boys more or less agreed upon which were the most desirable careers, and it was a
toss-up between being a fireman or a train driver, and by “a fireman” I don’t mean the bloke, the stoker, who used to shovel coal into the fire box on a steam locomotive. No, I mean a fireman who wears a wide-brimmed hard-hat and drives a big red truck with bells and sirens.
The dorp that I grew up in didn’t have a fire department, let alone a fire truck, let alone a fireman. I think there were a couple of red fire buckets full of sand hanging on hooks at the town library, and that was it. But then, you know what, I can’t remember us having
fires either. I have no recollection of a house burning down in our dorp.
The first real fire station I ever saw was when I was living in Chelsea in London in 1979, and I had to pass the Chelsea fire station to get to the underground tube station at South Kensington. I never saw an actual fire engine come out with bells and sirens going, nor a real fireman with or without bells (although I did see one with a J&B, ha, ha).
But the dorp in which I grew up did have a station, a railway station, and in them days, my child, the railways was a proud institution even if it was largely steam driven. We had an affinity for trains which was bred into us from an early age.
I don’t know if it is actually true, but it seems to me now that very often the railroads of Africa ran parallel to the roads in them days, and standard procedure when you were a child in a car, and you saw a train on the nearby track, which ever way it was going it was normal to wind down your window and wave to the train driver. And when they waved back, all those anonymous, probably now-dead Sporries okes, I tell you the kids in the car were as thrilled as they’d have been if the soot-encrusted driver was
Santa-bleeding-Claus.
We didn’t have TV in them days, and as a lad, me and my pal ol’ Garry would hop on our bikes and go up to the station to check out the trains passing through. The trains had to stop. They were steam locomotives, hugely inefficient machines, and they had to take on water which was fed to them from a big sloppy canvas hose hanging from an overhead gantry.
Boy, those locomotives were monsters. I know nothing about trains, but I understand that they are described by their wheel configurations, and those old Garrett locomotives were something like 4-6-2+2-6-4, or I think some of them were even 4-8-2+2-8-4, which means in effect (and as I understand it) that they had up to 16 driving wheels, each one taller than me and Garry.
These old Garretts were made that way in order to allow them to more efficiently take corners, being thrice articulated. I remember them as being well looked-after machines, mostly a glossy black and with all their brasswork polished.

They had a red, I don’t know what you’d call it, almost a fascia board at the front just behind the coupling mechanism (Garretts could go backwards and forwards it seemed with equal efficiency – you’d quite often see one going backwards pulling its
carriages or trucks), and they had one big “evil eye” headlight stuck in the middle of the front tender. They also had their number on a big solid red-embossed oval plate stuck just below the window from which the driver used to wave at passing kids in cars.
We didn’t really appreciate them then, these old locomotives. I did a number of long journeys on trains pulled by a Garrett, sometimes Garretts in tandem, and all you really got to see as a passenger was coal smuts in your eyes if you were stoopid enough
to stick your head out the window to look, and if you scratched your nut… your head I mean, you came out with tiny bits of coal behind your fingernails. If you wore a white shirt, after a day on the train your collar looked like it belonged to a coal miner with a
laundry problem.
In Eshowe back in the very late 1960s and early ‘70s, steam engines still used to chug up Eshowe Hill, although those might not have been the really big Garrett locos. But I mention them because I had a mate in Eshowe who was a stoker on the railways
then, ol’ Gumpy Meyer. Stone me, I haven’t thought of ol’ Gumpy Meyer for years and years.
His real name was Eric, and he was an odd chap who used to play in a band in Eshowe which included the town’s health inspector, one Jack Groenewald, who I also haven’t thought of for years. Last I heard, now 30 years ago, Gumpy was a lay preacher at the Catholic Cathedral in Durban, so maybe life on the footplate was not all we thought it would be when we were kids.

What made me think of trains and being an engine

driver? I have no idea.