UNCOUPLING

"Jes, for God’s sake you’re going to get us killed!"

Aloft on his mountainous machine the tractor driver bobs along obliviously like only a tractor driver can, while all around him lose their heads and blame it all on him.

I pull back in behind and thump the wheel. We’ve been stuck behind him for 10 minutes! What idiot has fields so far away from where he keeps his tractor? And with all that power why can’t he find a couple of extra gears to make the bloody thing go faster than 35 mph! Can’t he bob any quicker!

‘We’re going to miss this train!’ I vent.

'It doesn’t matter, just be careful!'

It does matter. The fact we’re not going anywhere on it makes no difference. At this moment in time, while looking at the back end of this agricultural road block for the eleventh consecutive minute, getting to the station is the most important thing in the world.

You see, the Flying Scotsman is coming to Dunfermline and we have to be there. Why? Because we go back a long way. When we lived in Yorkshire we’d go and see it often, in pieces, being lovingly restored in the National Railway Museum. Now we live in Scotland and it's coming to see us. When he was two, the eldest fell in love with the thing, and slept for years with a small replica next to his pillow. We pulled it off the cover of the first edition of Great Locomotives of the World. Special offer; the best 99p we ever spent. Such was his devotion that he took the bold move of introducing the Brio version into Sodor, the only non-fictional vehicle on the network.

The same child, now larger than its mother, seems to have forgotten all this.

"Dad, it's only a train for God’s sake!”

No it’s more than a train. It’s a paragon of pure power capable of propelling itself and a dozen coaches at a hundred miles an hour without an electric motor or internal combustion engine in site. It’s a thunderous sound, a tantalising smell, a spine tingling feeling that no human boy, or someone who’s ever been one, can resist. Of this I am sure.

I picture the crowds, the bunting, the souvenir mugs and waving flags, as young and old flock to celebrate this engineering marvel that once tore back and forth across the border, a testament to what can be achieved in the name of bringing us closer together, not wrenching us apart. If ever there were a symbol of the enduring strength of Our Great Union, it’s this. I just hope we can find somewhere to park, and get close enough to catch even a fleeting glimpse.

At last the tractor driver bobs off into a yard, and I race to make up time, anticipating further delays on the clogged approaches to the station. I’m hoping the police have made provision for extra parking, and somewhere to put the coaches. If the worst comes to the worst we’ll have to park in the housing estate round the back and sprint across the footbridge...

As it happens we arrive at the station ten minutes early and park in the middle of a largely empty car park. A dozen or so people are making their way quietly towards the platform. No kids, mainly senior citizens. Many infirm.

"Where are the crowds?" smirks the eldest.

"There’s still ten minutes. Lucky we’re here early to get a good place." 

We choose one of very many empty areas of the platform and wait. And suddenly it’s here, sliding into view around the corner, no announcement, no fanfare. It coasts past, no steam, no sound, no smell. We catch a glimpse of champaign-sipping revellers around ornate table lamps before they're dragged creaking around the corner and out of site. And the Flying Scotsman is gone.

We file back to the car and sit savouring the anticlimax.

"Is it still a steam engine?" asks the youngest from the back seat.

"Think so."

"Why was there no steam?"

I don’t know. Perhaps they've fitted a catalytic converter. I have no answer, but because it’s a steam engine, and I’m nearly 50, I have to offer an explanation.

"It was going down hill,” I fictionalise. "Not throttling, just coasting."

The carpark empties and I contemplate extinction. You can keep restoring a thing like the Flying Scotsman indefinitely, but you can’t restore the people who like it. They’re going to grow old and die, like church goers. How long will it be until this great symbol of British ingenuity tours the provinces to be greeted by…precisely nobody. 

Beside me a wheel chair user slowly levitates before disappearing into the back of a Peugeot.

"That was lame," comments the youngest, prodding his phone in pursuit of stimulation. 

So when all us Flying Scotsman devotees are dead, what are we left with? A generation desensitised to the point where an encounter with the world’s most famous steam locomotive hardly registers. They say drama is life with the boring bits edited out. Video games are life with the bits that don’t send you into an adrenaline pumped frenzy edited out. The beautiful thing about life - real life that is, beyond the edges of the touchscreen - is that it has the capacity to disappoint. And does so frequently.

Our generation was lucky. Boredom and disappointment were as much a staple of childhood as Cod Liver Oil. And very itchy jumpers. I remember my dad entertaining me in church by tying knots in his handkerchief. Seeing a photograph of the Flying Scotsman would have been almost too much to bear. Especially if it were in colour. I wonder if the urge to expose my children to tedium wherever possible really is for their own good. Or a form of revenge.

We pull out of the station and join the steady flow of traffic heading towards the motorway and, it would seem, self-determination. By now the Flying Scotsman will be thundering lamely across the Forth Bridge into Edinburgh, before hurtling uneventfully back home across the border. Will it return? On the evidence of today’s showing, I doubt it. 

What is gone, is gone. 

@jesoverthinksit 




For more thrills and spills on the railroad please alight at:

Ticket to Success

Mind The Gap
Angel Road