Rhyl memories

As likely as not, I was not one of the three lads walking away in the photograph of Rhyl shed (SR553). Most of us trainspotters in the town had a pretty good idea of what was there – we’d seen all there was to see so often and the use of the adjective ‘desultory’ could have been used well into BR days but wasn’t then part of our vocabulary. Summer Saturdays were a slightly different matter, when specials arrived at Rhyl hauled by previously unseen locomotives from distant cities – ‘B1s’ from Leeds, ‘Crabs’ from Manchester, ‘Black Fives’ from Birmingham – all to be underlined in our Ian Allan Abc Combined Volumes when we got home later. And in those trains came lads whose trainspotting tales left us in deep envy: ‘…five more ‘Jubs’ and two ‘Scots’ and I’ve seen ’em all …’. Insufficient pocket money and lack of age meant that such a situation was merely to be a dream for us. Even the ‘big engines’ were somewhat disappointing. Why was it that the only ‘Brits’ we saw on the ‘Irish Mail’ were the unnamed ones from Holyhead?!

What struck me too was the photograph of

No. 52119. Seventy years later, that number is still engraved in my mind as is the likelihood that it was used to loose shunt goods wagons at silly o’clock in the morning, waking the good burghers of Rhyl as wagons clanged together to form short goods trains to Denbigh or Dyserth.

In the photograph, there is a stone wall. Just at the edge of the photo is one end of a metal fence about the width of a double gate. At the other end of that fence, unseen in the photo, is a similar stone wall, which was the favourite place for us to sit to watch the trains. The topping stone was worn shiny smooth by the countless backsides of young lads. It wasn’t just shiny; it was highly polished. A year or two back, I revisited the wall and to my deep sadness that top stone had been replaced with a stone as sharply pointed as any stone age artisan’s flint. Oh, the sadism of local councils, or was it Network Rail? Rev’d Dr John Parry, Manchester