Trainspotting is considered mainly a post-war hobby, with
the 1950’s and 1960’s as its heyday, although the earliest reference to
trainspotting, found recently by the National Railway Museum in York, is of a 14
year old girl named Fanny Johnson in 1861, whose notebook of Great Western
Railway (GWR) trains at Westbourne Park station, London, is mentioned in a GWR magazine
of 1935.
The young lad who once owned this book marked the engines he
had seen, though it is not clear what the difference was between the ticks and
crosses. Few of the engines listed in 1921 survive. A famous one that does is
City of Truro, here numbered 3717, but today carrying its original number when
built in 1903 of 3440.
As a private company, the GWR was free to name its engines
as it chose. A certain eccentricity therefore crept in. The name Lalla Rookh is
the title of an early 19th century novel. Katerfelto, is another now
obscure novel. And quite why you would call an engine One-and-All is a mystery.
Several, it is evident, were named after Directors of the Company; men whose
names have long since faded from public recognition, such as Francis Mildmay, Charles
Grey Mott and Sir Massey Lopes.
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