We crowded onto Tyldesley Station, all us schoolboys, after school, to collect the “namers’ that came through our little station, at four fifteen and four thirty every day. We were ten and eleven years of age, and trainspotting was our new love. We collected all the numbers that were painted on the sides of each engine, and marked them in our special books, and we collected the special prizes, the ‘namers’, all those engines that carried names on the side of their boilers, or on the shields that adorned their fronts.
Our station was part of the LMS line, the London, Midland and Scottish line. Trains on our line came through from Manchester Exchange and went on to Wigan, where they joined the great West Coast Line that carried trains from London to Scotland.
At weekends, on Saturday mornings, my friend, David and I, would get an early train into Wigan and spend the day collecting train numbers and namers. That was a whole day’s outing, but the easier game was to go up to our local station, after school and collect those two special trains before going home for tea. It only lasted a short while. Before too long we moved on to other interests, but for that short period in our lives, trainspotting was the thing.
There were boys from others schools on the station with us, boys we didn’t know, and it didn’t take long for rivalry and bragging rights to break out. Boys that age like to let their peers know how much they know, and to be the first to spot the name or number of a train.
One day a train was coming along when a boy I didn’t know shouted out. He was telling the rest of us what this train was, and he wanted us to know that he had recognised it first. “Hey lads,” he shouted, “Look out, here comes ‘Sassparella’.”
The train came whizzing through the station and I looked hard at the name on its side. I couldn’t make it out clearly, but it didn’t look like ‘Sassparella’. Anyway, ‘Sassparella’ was a fizzy drink and they wouldn’t call a train after that, would they?
The following day the train came through again. This time I was ready to collect it, and sure enough there were not enough ‘s’s in it to make ‘Sassparella’. In fact it wasn’t an English word at all. It was French. A few more trips through the station by that train and I had the word, or words, to be precise, written down. The name on the side of that train was ‘Sans Pareil”.
It was sometime later, when I was at High School, learning French, that I discovered that these words together mean ‘Without Equal” or “Peerless”. And down the years the memory comes back to me of that boy, with his strong Tyldesley accent, peerless and without equal, shouting the odds and telling the world that, wait for it, “Hey lads, look out. Here comes Sassparella”.
Erris Poetry 