Friday 19 January 2024

On a railway station ......... 1978

It is a scene that was once replicated on countless railway stations with slight variations for over a century and a bit.

We are on Victoria Railway Station sometime around 1978 with me and a Pentax K1000.

It was a smashing camera, so much so that I bought two.

You could take them anywhere, and I did, from Greece to France and plenty of other places.  It didn’t mind the heat survived plenty of rough handling and just bounced when I dropped it.

I had wandered into the railway station looking for the ordinary and humdrum.

Today forty years later, it and the other photographs I took that day seem less humdrum and more a set of images out of a museum.

Location; Manchester

Picture; loading the luggage, Victoria Railway Station, 1978, from the collection of Andrew Simpson

2 comments:

  1. Memories indeed, as a born Manchester lad living down south, at 16yrs old the day after leaving school I joined BR in May 78, and saw this sight and participated daily, the loading of Mail, the feel of the rough hessian woven sa ls, emitting their own unique smell, almost damp, and combining with the aroma of creosote from inside the wooden wagon walls, dark and mysterious, a faint glimmer from an incandescent bulb above, only 3 per wagon, as the batteries ran row, the wagon shown is a southern wooden panelled NQV, and had no.doubt travelled thousands of miles around the network un noticed and un loved, except by the people who worked with her

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