The train-spotter has been one of the most demonized figures of recent culture, and Nicholas Whittaker, in the course of this apology-cum-autobiography, is conscientious in his logging of those slights. Jasper Carrott, the Sunday Times, Richard Mabberley and others are marked down, though Whittaker misses Glyn Maxwell’s “Curse on a Child” – “May his anorak pockets grow heavy with jotters, / Noting down numbers of trains that he saw” – and Irvine Welsh’s peculiar metaphor in his novel on heroin addiction, Trainspotting. Nick Hornby’s mission to explain the fascination of Arsenal seems simple in comparison with Whittaker’s stab at redemption for the derided figure of the train-spotter, improbably described by the book’s subtitle as a “twentieth-century hero”.
Like Hornby’s book, and a wagon-load of imitations in which men’s once shameful hobbies and obsessions are recognized and redefined as perverse virtues, Platform Souls combines its description of an enthusiasm with a portrait of the enthusiast. Whittaker is not in the same stylistic league as Hornby, but his sketches of a boy’s childhood in the 1960s seduce one comfortably from a gurgling disbelief every time the phrase “only natural” appears to a warmer understanding of “the gaberdine camaraderie”. It becomes possible to understand how Crewe Station, a godforsaken nightmare for travellers, could offer “absolute railwayness” to the passionate fan.
The book is also an elegy: for the steam trains already vanishing when Whittaker’s hobby began in 1964; for the short-lived diesel age which followed; for an era of near-innocence. Whittaker notes how the names of the engines changed; once redolent of imperial romance, they became a vehicle for commercial sycophancy (“Rugely Power Station, Blue Circle Cement, The CBI”). The Combine, listing the numbers of trains for spotters to notch up, became slimmer each year as decommissioning accelerated. This theme is neatly handled, as is the appeal to the sheer romance of railways, the poetry of trains. It is Whittaker’s sensitivity to this atmosphere that he feels distinguishes him from mere number-crunchers; and it is not uninteresting that he feels the need to make such a distinction. Yet he also patiently re-creates the code and protocol of the spotters’ subculture, its innocence and, sometimes, its classlessness.
This presentation of the activity is successful; Whittaker’s more strident defensiveness less so. For a man who concludes “I couldn’t give a cuss what anyone else thinks of trainspotting”, he spends a great deal of time shooting down alleged canards; the sexual inadequacies (or not) of the fraternity are stiffly and hotly debated on several occasions. Various quasi-anthropological explanations for taxonomic zeal are tendered, some of which are more spurious than others; the tour de force comes in a passage where Whittaker rebuts in their own terms those who pathologize train-spotters. “These detractors have got the anorak to get them going, but their obsession blinds them to the fact that that’s all it is, a coat with a zip. Like all fetishists, just like those men who steal women’s knickers from washing lines, they desperately want the clothing to contain the object of desire. But there is no nerd with glasses or pudding bowl haircut or four different-coloured biros. The anorak is empty.”
Whittaker fills that anorak in delightful and unexpected ways. It is difficult with many of the funnier lines – and this is a book to make one laugh out loud – to tell whether the humour is intentional; it is as if Fever Pitch had been written by Terry Major-Ball. One priceless moment concerns Whittaker’s account of train-spotting in, of all places, King’s Cross during lonely London nights. Wary of the men around him, but prepared to be civil to fellow spotters, Whittaker was approached by one whose questions seemed creepy and clearly batty. “I was just plucking up the courage to be rude to him when I happened to glance at his Combine. The pages were totally unmarked, except for three diesel shunters I knew perfectly well were based in Swansea. Immediately alarmed, I understood then that I was in the presence of somebody quite deranged.” Well, quite. It’s one thing to be simply a lurking pervert, but quite another to be logging the wrong trains.