The Bridge - a memory of my train-spotting days, 1962 - 66, Andy Newbery.

Waking to the sun shafting through wrinkled curtains, and sparrows chirping around my window, I would eagerly leap from my bed, full of anticipation of another day at the cutting in the sun and the possibility of plenty of "cops".

Summer holidays were times to savour, normal breakfast of cornflakes gobbled down or a hastily prepared slice of burnt toast, but we were off school for seven weeks! And it was like another world.

I will never forget the sense of excitement at breakfast times during those seemingly endless summer weekdays. Breakfast gave way to "kitting up" for the day - notepad, shed-book, pencil and well worn blazer covered in dry grass.

At last Wilf would arrive on his bike. Hello Mrs. Newbury - he would politely say at the door - is Whiff there please?   It was like an angel's voice to my ears. Okay Wilf, come on then!  Onto my rusting Hercules bike with Wilf following on his gold Triumph with clanking chain-guard, we would head off along the Courteenhall Road in the direction of our days pilgrimage - "Black Bridge".

Black Bridge - a sight that needs no further description except in the way we would experience it at first sight. An eternity of ten minutes from home would find us dropping bikes at the far end of the parapet, leaping the fence and then down onto the steep grassy bank of the cutting.

I shall always remember how, with the early morning sun in our faces, the bridge seemed peculiarly massive, dwarfing everything around it, giving the whole place a feeling of exhilaration and excitement. The evocative aroma of sulphur and steam smoke would hang heavily on the dewy dawn air, evidence of trains which had already broke through the day's first light.  I will never know what kept the two of us so spellbound, sitting on that verdant bank, but there we would sit for the whole day - time would stand still for us!

Wheezing goods engines laboured their way beneath us up the bank from northampton with trains of coal, ore and chalk filling the still air with swirling smoke, the blast echoing back from blackened arches of the bridge. The main line had its own mystique - along its metals ran the fast and famous expresses, "The Royal Scot", "The Midday Scot", "The Caledonian" and "The Lakes Express", all graceful, swift and powerful.  Headboard up front on a gleaming "Duchess" bursting with power. Then a tailboard behind the last coach took the magic into the fading distance.

Wilf would by now be catching grasshoppers in the long grass or blackberry gathering from the bushes on the slope if it were autumn. Hard work this but we were totally engrossed. Quick, there is one coming!, a distant whistle and the roar of a rapidly approaching engine would bring us scampering down the bank, pencils out, books open ... A grimy Scot. Can't see the nameplate! Under the bridge at 80 with a trail of white smoke drifting down the cutting with a wake of maroon coaches ... Copped it! Must be a special! ... back to the grasshoppers.

So it went on, hour by hour brought moment upon moment of thundering, rumbling, speeding, grinding procession of men and machine passing on their way before us, leaving their presence in our hearts and above all, like a silent sentinel, the bridge.  The day would draw to its inevitable close, the trains hissing, snarling and barking onwards, their work never done. We, our cups full, our hearts content, would pedal our weary way back in the dying light of evening, our books full of the day's tally.

So would pass each summer day in those long lost days of youth.

The bridge watched over it all, and still watches as we journey on, out of the halcyon days of boyhood into the harsher reality. But the bridge knows the blissful hours that Wilf and Whiff shared under its solemn arches. What we shared was no less a reality - perhaps the purest kind - that of sheer joy and beauty of existence in two innocent hearts.