In which we buy a station

I'll put my cards on the table here, right up front. I'm a trainspotter. There; I said it. To be fair, I don't go and sit on stations with a notebook any more. I own neither an anorak nor a selection of Ian Allan railway books. I'm not even particularly interested in modern locomotives; things have moved on, and I simply don't recognise most of them. 

Neither am I a steam nostalgia junkie. Steam was already a fading memory when I took up the hobby, back in the 70s. No, those were days of the diesel locomotive, and the first tentative trials of the Intercity 125 High Speed Train. For me, trainspotting was the mighty English Electric Deltics thundering up the East Coast main line, the evocatively named Class 44 'Peaks' - Whernside, Ingleborough and Skiddaw - running container freight through Beighton, the vast sprawl of Tinsley marshalling yard with its Class 13 shunters. Whilst most of my contemporaries never travelled further than Skegness, I was  exploring the far-flung corners of Britain in search of obscure locos. If Crewe can be considered far-flung.

That's how I've always justified it, anyway, in the face of the inevitable mockery; a healthy life of fresh air and travel, satisfying the y-chromosome's joint cravings for machinery and tick-lists. A time comes, however, to put away childish things, particularly those childish things that provoke derision in the opposite gender. And so my days of huddling on freezing stations (why are stations always so cold?) are long gone.

But trainspotting is one of those things which, once begun, is almost impossible to stop. Even now, I could no more see a train and not make a mental note of its number than I could, I don't know, stop blinking indefinitely. Too many misspent days frantically scribbling down carriage numbers have created in me a kind of reflex, an involuntary twitch of the eyes towards the number on any piece of railway rolling stock. And the love is still there, in the blood. When I heard that a couple of Deltics were coming down to Sussex from their preserved home at Barrow Hill, yes, I turned out to see them. And yes, it was freezing cold. And yes, they were still magnificent.

So it is with a mixture of shock and excitement that I can announce, here today, that we are buying a station.

That's right. We are buying a railway station.

Okay, it's not an English station. It isn't on a working railway line, so there are no trains. But it's still a station, and therefore very special.

As I write, we are still jumping through the inevitable legal and financial hoops, but things look good. Barring major catastrophes, we could be in by Christmas. This Christmas, as in 'less than a month away.' Oh, and I've just bought a new anorak.