My Story - Part Two
North London Main Lines

My Dad used to walk me along the North Circular to Tottenham Hale station, to watch trains on the Liverpool Street to Cambridge line. I have a vivid memory of the floods in the Lea Valley in 1948 when the winter snow eventually melted.

A couple of years later he bought a motorbike and sidecar – a BSA Golden Flash (GPU 667 I think) and once he’d rebuilt the engine and all the mechanical bits, under our glass lean too next to our outdoor lavatory, we could travel further. Me in the sidecar at first, and later sitting behind him on the pillion.

Our favourite spots were on the former Great Northern line to the north from Kings Cross, and once we’d moved to the northern edge of Chingford next to the King George V reservoir, we often went to New Barnet for an afternoon on the platform, and sometimes got on an N2 hauled train for the short trip to Potters Bar for a change of scene. Just once we went to Elstree on the Midland main line out of St Pancras.

I was given a Zeiss Contina 35mm camera with a fastest shutter speed of 1/300 to take on a school trip to Switzerland in the summer of 1959 - by then, diesels were infiltrating everywhere that I went spotting. These are some of the first photos I took with that camera – and it shows!

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All Photographs by Alan Lewis Chambers ©