This film contained my favourite line ever in the cinema.
Jack Warner played the engine driver who lived with his family right next to Euston station. One morning, his wife tells his daughter she´ll be late for school, to which the daughter replies that its only 8.30. With that a train whistle blows in the background and Jack Warner looks at his watch and utters the immortal words:-
"8.32! There goes Charlie on the Manchester!"
Absolute classic!
I loved this film.Cant get enough of early British films
shareJust read this,I work on the railway and it is true that for many of us the world revolves around the railway.
If I am walking in the country near a railway line I have to try and work out what the train is if it passes me.
It is all about time.
Lost on people to whom the railway is not their way of life. Indeed life blood.
I have very little to do with it nowadays. But as the orphan of a footplateman killed in a railway accident. I travelled extensively on it when I was a boy. Frequently on my own using my railwayman's family pass. Starting school was an unwelcome interruption. But I worked it out. I would frequently accompany one of my two maternal uncles to the running shed before school. And head for there afterwards. Kept this up until I enlisted during my teens.
I feel sorry for children today. They are so detached from the railway. And frequently that can lead to them being contemptuous of it with disastrous consequences.
Unlike my late father. In all my encounters with rolling stock I never had so much as a near miss. I retained my healthy respect for all the hazards.
Never became a footplateman or indeed worked on a railway. But I feel as though I did when I recall my idyllic childhood. So different to my army service.
You are ever so right Keith.I am an 86yr old from County Durham Tyneside and worked in the shipyards and I loved to have a ride on a train whether it be a smokey old coal engine or later on the electrics. I now live in tropical North Queensland and while it is not everyone's cup of tea it suits my old bones after spending a few years in New Zealand.
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