Platform Souls: The Trainspotter As Twentieth-Century Hero

The sight of Britannia 70004 roaring through Burton-on-Trent one summer afternoon in the mid-sixties would have provided a suitable baptism for any youngster on his first trainspotting jaunt. For Nicholas Whittaker it was the beginning of a thirty-year love affair with the railways. Platform Souls is his personal odyssey through the changing world of this most English of pursuits. '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 . . . This theme is neatly handled, as is the appeal to the sheer romance of railways, the poetry of trains' TLS