Platform Souls: The Train Spotter as Twentieth-century Hero

Platform Souls: The Train Spotter as Twentieth-century Hero

by NicholasWhittaker (Author)

Synopsis

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

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More Information

Format: Paperback
Pages: 256
Edition: New
Publisher: Phoenix
Published: 10 Aug 2000

ISBN 10: 0575400110
ISBN 13: 9780575400115
Book Overview: On the Indigo launch list The first insider's view of the strange but passionate world of trainspotting The male obsessive is a defining contemporary figure. This is an analysis of the original enthusiast - the spotter's spotter Nicholas Whittaker is a regular columnist for the Guardian 'Whittaker writes with humour and considerable evocative power ... For anyone who will admit to having had a childhood brush with this now derided hobby, Platform Souls brings it all rushing back' Independent 'Destined to become the Fever Pitch of the sidings and embankments ... it is the aching nostalgia, hanging like smoke from a Stanier engine on Shap Fell, that lingers most in the mind' Publishing News

Author Bio
Nicholas Whittaker is the author of Platform Souls: The Trainspotter as Twentieth-century Hero, Blue Period: Nots from a Life in the Titillation Trade, Sweet Talk and Toys Were Us. As well as single-handedly writing the 1984 Pontin's brochure, he has contributed to a wide variety of magazines and newspapers, including Company, Arena, Punch, the Guardian, the Sunday Times, the Daily Mail, the Daily Telegraph and the Express. Nicholas Whittaker lives in north London.