by Nick Pigott
Introduction
We launched Tracks through Grantham in April 2016 with an invitation to a meeting held at the Grantham Railway Club the following June. Our regular twice-yearly gathering on 15th April 2026 therefore took on a special significance because it marked our 10th anniversary.
To help us to celebrate the occasion we were honoured to introduce Nick Pigott, editor of The Railway Magazine between 1994 and 2015. Nick grew up in Grantham from the age of five. Since 2008 he has been a good friend of the project that ultimately evolved into Tracks through Grantham. Nick kindly agreed to share with us how the seeds of his career in railway journalism were sown in the town, and how he became what the Grantham Matters website has described as a ‘Professional Locospotter’!
Nick's address to the meeting is reproduced in full below, accompanied by a selection of appropriate images.
Thank you, Nick, for all your support.
John & Mel
Wednesday 15th April 2026 at the Grantham Railway Sports and Social Club
"Good afternoon everyone. It’s a pleasure to be addressing you for the first time since 22nd November 2008, when I spoke in Grantham Museum at a meeting held to gauge what level of support there might be for get-togethers such as this.
That meeting was part of a programme of events the Museum arranged in support of an exhibition about the history of the railway in Grantham held between 26th July and 29th November 2008. The following year The Railway Magazine published a gallery of photos by John’s father, Cedric.
I was editor of the magazine in London at the time, having previously edited Steam Railway and Traction magazines, and a few months ago John and Mel thought it would be an idea to ask me to briefly explain how the seeds of that career in railway journalism were sown here in the town and how I became what the Grantham Matters website has described as the professional trainspotter!
It actually began a few dozen miles north of here, on the East Coast Main Line near Retford, and some of the very first sounds I heard would have been Great Northern whistles, for I was born within earshot of the line at Barnby Moor. That was 75 years ago when numerous different classes of former GN motive power were still in service.
A Great Northern Railway 'large Atlantic' locomotive, LNER No. 4454, departing from Barnby Moor and Sutton station with a local passenger train in 1936. The station suffered an early post-war closure to both passenger and goods traffic in November 1949.
This and other photographs are available from Rail-Online: left click on the image.
Of course, to many of you here I’m a relative youngster, but it’s nevertheless sobering to think that when I came into the world, there were still a few people alive who’d been born before Grantham had any railway at all!
Those early sounds at Barnby Moor & Sutton station might have been sufficient to give me a lifelong empathy with trains, but the impressions were engrained even further when my parents moved in 1953 to Diss in Norfolk where, as a toddler, I would have had distant views of ‘Sandringhams’, B12s and newly-built ‘Britannias’ as they crossed a bridge on the Great Eastern main line.
Witham is about 46 miles beyond Diss on the Norwich to London Liverpool Street route. This locomotive was recorded at a speed of 85mph when passing through Diss in the 1950s.
From 'The Railway Magazine', November 1959, page 785.
My mother told me many years later that she sometimes left me on the pavement in my pushchair while she popped into a friend’s garden for a chat (you could do that in those days!) and that when she returned, she would find my pushchair two or three doors down the road! Apparently, I’d worked out that if I rocked backwards and forwards sufficiently hard, I could ‘otch’ it a bit closer to the bridge, a few inches at a time!
Even so, I was too young to fully understand what it was I was actually seeing and it wasn’t until my parents moved to Grantham in the Spring of 1956 that the railway bug really began to bite.
The house we moved into was on the south-east side of Gonerby Hill and had distant views from the bedroom windows of Belton Lane bridge and the section of line between there and the grounds of Arnoldfield House.
Unfortunately, it was too far away to make out any cabside numbers, so for the first couple of years I remained blissfully ignorant of things such as classes and wheel arrangements and concentrated instead on other interests such as Dinky toys and Wild West comics - but one day Lady Luck was to take a hand.
It was a Saturday morning and mum had taken me into town to go shopping. Such trips were always the same routine of grocers, post office, newsagents and suchlike and unless our bus happened to coincide with a train passing over North Parade bridge it was always a rather boring trip. But one day, a woman’s journal mother wanted was out of stock in the town centre shops. She was, however, informed that there was a bookstall on the station and that she might be able to buy one there.
So, somewhat unusually for her, she decided to venture off her normal beaten track and off we set to walk through the narrow alleyways of Grantley Street and Railway Terrace – all uncharted territory for me at the time.
The bookstall on platform 2 on Thursday 18th April 1963. Viewed across the main lines from platform 3.
Photograph by Cedric Clayson.
If the bookstall had been in the booking hall concourse rather than on the platform, I might not be standing here now. If there had been a few minutes of relative inactivity between trains while she paid for her purchase, I might not be standing here now.
But by a massive stroke of luck and serendipity, the solitude was suddenly shattered by a loud rapidly-approaching pounding sound punctuated by the ear-piercing shriek of a high-pitched whistle! Turning round to see what on earth was happening, I stood rooted to the spot, half in utter disbelief, half in sheer terror, as hundreds of tons of engine and train thundered towards me at breakneck speed and flashed past just feet away from me.
Just a few years after transforming Nick’s perspective on life, class A1 No. 60134 'Foxhunter' again thunders through Grantham station under power, its crew preparing for the final five miles of ascent to Stoke summit. The train is 'The Queen of Scots Pullman', southbound on the evening of Thursday 24th May 1962.
Photograph by Cedric Clayson
The ground seemed to shake and loose papers on the platform fluttered in the draught as a seemingly endless procession of coaches swept past. When they’d gone and the assault on my senses began to ease, I was left with the sweet aroma of warm oil and coal smoke in my nostrils.
Mistaking my look of shock and awe for one of fear, my mother quickly whisked me off the platform and back into town. But it was too late… I was hooked!
She too had been startled by the cacophony of sound, though, and had turned around to witness the spectacle… and as I gibbered excitedly all the way home, she said she’d glimpsed a word at the front of the engine - ‘Foxhunter’.
That first experience of the phenomenal power and sound of express steam at close quarters was literally to change my life.
For when I got home, I begged my parents to be allowed to walk through the fields next to our home (which were farmed by Jeff Thompson’s father). Unlike John’s dad Cedric, my own father had no interest in trains and thought my school work would suffer if I spent too much time on them, while mum was at first reluctant to let me out on my own. But after a few days, they relented, knowing little harm was likely to become of me in what at that time was still peaceful open countryside.
So it was that I arrived by the lineside near the site of the former Peascliffe signalbox with nothing more than a mental picture of Foxhunter in my mind’s eye. I hadn’t been there more than a few minutes when I was treated to a totally different shape of engine – my first streamliner.
The Capitals Limited leaving Peascliffe Tunnel and approaching the site of the former Peascliffe signal box. Hauled on this occasion by class A4 No. 60024 'Kingfisher', this train ran non-stop between Edinburgh Waverley and London King's Cross.
Photograph by Humphrey Platts.
Its name, Miles Beevor, seemed a peculiar one and meant nothing to me, but this time I noted a number, 60026.
“If that one’s got a number as well as a name, perhaps they all have,” I thought to myself. “I’ll wait to see what the next one’s called.” Well, the next one turned out to have no obvious identification whatsoever – and it wasn’t until I described it to a schoolfriend the next day that I realised it had been a WD or O2, so filthy its number was virtually invisible!
This is the meadow between Grantham and Peascliffe Tunnel where Nick spent many happy locospotting days in the late 1950s and early 1960s. The O2 locomotive, whose number cannot be identified through its coat of grime, is in charge of a northbound ironstone train heading from Highdyke to Frodingham, near Scunthorpe.
Photograph by Keith R. Pirt
Not daring to stay out too long on that first excursion, I headed back home but resolved to return to the trackside as often as I could. The determination to do so became even greater when my pals showed me their Ian Allan number booklets and when I saw Foxhunter listed as an A1 Pacific, No. 60134, everything suddenly became clearer and began to fall into place.
My next task was to save enough of my 6d-a-week pocket money to buy a two & sixpenny Ian Allan booklet of my own and a visit to Harrisons’ stationery store on the corner of High Street and Finkin Street saw me become the proud owner of a Summer 1959 Eastern, North Eastern and Scottish Regions edition.
My younger brother Geoff and I soon established a lineside ‘den’ and on warm summer days would spend hours playing cowboys & Indians or cops & robbers in and around this den, all the time waiting for the telltale whistle or chime that would tell us another train was on the way. Then it would be a quick dash to the fence to ensure we were as close to the action as possible.
I also began wandering further afield, taking a packed lunch and walking over the top of Peascliffe tunnel to Barkston Junction, where engines from the London Midland Region would sometimes appear on the Nottingham-Sleaford line.
Summer Saturdays were of course the best times at Barkston, where Skegness excursion trains from the Midlands would pass under the ECML. Thanks to an occupation bridge, it was possible to gain access to a little field within the triangle from where I could see trains on both lines with ease as well as those that crept around the south-to-east curve. There were sometimes so many train movements on a Saturday it was difficult to know where to look!
[Mike Bacon shares his memories of Barkston Junction in the 1950s on our page Trainspotting at Barkston Junction and Grantham.]
I was by now becoming quite knowledgeable about the locos that passed through Grantham, so when one morning my mother called down from an upstairs room: “Nicholas, there’s a blue engine passing”, I was convinced she was mistaken. A decade earlier, perhaps, when there were a few blue or purple Pacifics around, but not now when everything had been green or black for years, so I was confident in replying “No, mum, it won’t be blue”.
“It is!”, she insisted. So I raced upstairs just in time to see a flash of bright blue and yellow before it shot through Belton Lane bridge.
It was, of course, the prototype ‘Deltic’… but I didn’t know that at the time as I had no idea in those days that there were specialist magazines that gave notice of such things in advance.
The unique blue 'Deltic' stands at the south end of Grantham station. Built in 1955, 'Deltic' worked on the Eastern Region of British Railways throughout 1959 and until November in 1960, mainly between London King's Cross and Doncaster.
Once the production ‘Deltics’ were in operation, I would often lie awake in bed listening to their extraordinary sound as they slowly left the station on late-night trains and accelerated towards Peascliffe, their unique marine engine sound resounding over the countryside and then suddenly ceasing as they plunged into the tunnel. I would then count the seconds of eerie quietness until the sound came rolling back again on the still night air, this time much fainter, as the train emerged and headed for Barkston.
A regret in the 1950s had been the inability to see trains on the Grantham-Nottingham line from the playground of my first school, Gonerby Hill Foot Primary. A shallow cutting there frustratingly obscured the view, so all I could see was smoke, steam and carriage roofs, but there was to be compensation in spades a few years later when mum began letting me travel with her whenever she went by train to Nottingham. Several of the services were still worked by Thompson L1 tanks and I would peruse the locoshed yard at close quarters while we awaited departure time and then be allowed to stay on the platforms of Victoria station for a couple of hours while she went shopping.
I consider myself so fortunate to have experienced the sights, sounds and smells of that vast and incredibly atmospheric ‘cathedral of steam’ – so different from Grantham yet just as thrilling in its own way. I was even able to add some Midland Region ‘namers’ to my notebooks once ‘Royal Scots’ began working the GC main line.
Rebuilt ‘Royal Scot’ No. 46163 'Civil Service Rifleman' departs from the Up Goods line at Nottingham Victoria on 3rd August 1964. This cavernous station had a total of 12 platforms covered centrally by three bays of a vast train shed which had canopies extending outward. The tracks were well below street level; trains arrived and departed through a tunnel at each end.
Victoria left an indelible mark on me and gave me a lifelong interest in the railway’s infrastructure as well as its traction.
My next two schools, Little Gonerby and the National in Castlegate, were totally hopeless from a railway point of view, but the latter did at least have a playing field alongside the main line, close to North Parade bridge, and I distinctly remember playing cricket there one hot summer afternoon when a spark from an A4 started a small fire on the tinder-dry embankment and our teacher stopped the game for a few minutes and got the fielders on that side of the pitch to climb through the fence and stamp it out with our feet!
Imagine that happening in the litigious risk-averse world we live in today! Parents would probably sue the school for putting their little Johnnys’ lives in danger!
Despite all this exposure to trains, I was still relatively naïve when it came to ‘the big picture’ and I was to get a second ‘blue Deltic’-type shock a few months later; I was standing on Belton Lane bridge (you could do that before it became Grantham’s “northern bypass”!) and was peering towards the blackness of Peascliffe tunnel when suddenly I thought I must be hallucinating, for out of the darkness emerged a pure white engine!
That, of course, was the prototype Lion – a machine I hadn’t even realised existed.
Seen here on Thursday 3rd October 1963 at Grantham, train 1B21 was the 15:20 from Sheffield Victoria to London King’s Cross, 'The Sheffield Pullman'.
The locomotive, No. D0260 'Lion', is a unique experimental design of 1962 which was a partnership between the Birmingham Railway Carriage & Wagon Co. of Smethwick (chassis and body), Sulzer Bros. of Switzerland (the diesel engine) and AEI of Sheffield (generator and motors). It carried ‘…a unique, and startling, all-over white livery with five narrow gold bands running along the lower half of each bodyside, gold cabside numbers, and a distinctive nameplate incorporating the names of the three companies involved in the project in etched black lettering.’
Photograph by Cedric Clayson
I thus resolved to make myself more aware of the big wide railway world beyond Grantham and Nottingham. Until then, I’d been making do with Trains Annual and Locospotters Annual every Christmas but as they naturally contained no news, I managed to persuade mum to buy me a year’s subscription to The Railway Magazine, Britain’s oldest and best-selling rail journal, published continuously since 1897.
Little could I have imagined that three decades later I would take its regulator myself and become its longest-serving editor!
The RM opened my schoolboy eyes to the vast and bewilderingly varied nature of railways not only beyond Grantham but throughout the world.
Its photographs depicting trains, stations and engine sheds in the ‘Big Four’ and ‘pre-Grouping’ eras made me realise how much I didn’t know. In fact, the more I think about it, the more I think it was the frustration of wondering what I’d have witnessed had I been born 50, 10 or even a mere 5 years earlier that manifested itself in a burning desire to “discover what I missed”.
For example, I recall being shocked to find out that Nottingham Victoria was barely 50 years older than me, that there’d once been another Grantham passenger station on the wharf and that even the main line through the town – which as a boy I’d always thought of as ‘prehistoric’ – had yet to reach its centenary when I was born.
I also learnt that Grantham MPD was home to the very last Great Northern large-boilered Atlantic, No. 62822, and it was perhaps written in the stars that in the 1980s another Grantham link would be forged when I discovered the boiler, firebox and smokebox of two such locomotives. They were lurking as stationary boilers in a disused factory in Essex and one of them has happily been used by the Bluebell Railway to re-create No. 32424 Beachy Head – a member of a class of Atlantics considered twin sisters of the GNR types.
No.62822 is at Platform 5, known as 'the western platform', possibly with a train for Lincoln.
Photograph by Peter Wilkinson.
Sadly, I was born too late to see 62822 in action, but for the glorious years of 1961, ‘62, ‘63 and even partially into ‘64, I enjoyed the magnificent sights, sounds and scents of Pacifics, V2s, B1s, O2s, O4s, L1s, WDs and 9Fs, along with the Class 55s and all the various Type 2, 3 and 4 diesels allocated to East Coast diagrams.
Unlike many of my fellow spotters, I preferred the A3s to the A4s; Don’t get me wrong – I idolised the streamliners too but there was something about the graceful lines of an A3 that captured my admiration, especially those fitted with double-chimneys and German smoke deflectors. I copped almost all the Eastern Region examples but my favourite A3 was the one I ‘cabbed’ inside New England shed in 1964 – No. 60062 Minoru.
Here No. 60062 is passing alongside platform 2 at Grantham station In July 1964.
Grantham 'Loco' having been closed for nearly a year, No. 60062's home shed at this time was Peterborough New England, where Nick cabbed it. In 1964 one of New England's A3s was still regularly sent to Grantham to lay over in case of a loco failure on the main line. 'Minoru' may be returning to Peterborough following one of these standby turns.
No.60062 was one of the last of these 'racehorse' rescue locomotives in active service, being retired in December 1964.
Photograph by Cedric Clayson
Unlike John’s dad, my father had no interest in railways and when it became clear that my ‘one-track mind’ was starting to affect certain aspects of my schoolwork, my parents decided I needed to be sent to boarding school, where I could learn without distractions. However, I don’t think they can have done their own homework very well…. because the school they chose was in Bromsgrove!!
My first term there coincided with the last year of steam on the Lickey Incline and it wasn’t long before I was sneaking out of the school grounds whenever I had no lessons to witness the spectacle of banked freights on Britain’s steepest main line incline.
One train - three locomotives; a spectacular sight and sound near the top of the two-mile 1 in 37¾ grade, a rise of about 280 feet in altitude.
This and other photographs are available from Rail-Online: left click on the image.
Bromsgrove enabled me to improve my knowledge of Western and Midland Region motive power and that, coupled with what I was learning about railways elsewhere in the country and overseas though the pages of The RM, began to give me a comprehensive all-round grasp of the vast industry that has given almost everyone in this room either a living or a hobby. (Thankfully, my academic results also began to improve, especially in geography, so everyone was happy!)
English was my strongest subject and when I left school in 1968, I became a news reporter on The Lincolnshire Standard.
Here's part of Nick's report for 'The Sleaford Standard' of a football match between Grantham and Gainsborough Trinity on Thursday 19th November 1970. Their 2-1 victory set Grantham up for their first-ever FA Cup victory against a Football League side in the next round.
That led via various other regional newspapers to Fleet Street, where I spent a decade and a half on national daily papers before switching to specialist railway publications as editor of Steam Railway in 1988.
That job took me all over the world, including to Australia in 1989 to report on the journey of Flying Scotsman from Sydney to Alice Springs and to track down three Robinson 2-8-0s of Great Central design, virtually identical to the ex-LNER O4s I’d seen rumbling through Grantham and Nottingham Victoria, so that was a wonderfully nostalgic experience, especially as no Gresley 2-8-0s have survived.
The issue of 'Steam Railway' for October 1989 features Nick's 'on the spot exclusive' from Alice Springs.
Photograph by Nick Pigott
After four years in charge of Steam Railway, I was invited to conceive and launch Traction, a brand new magazine covering a hitherto untapped aspect of the market - classic diesel and electric locomotives, and I was then asked to take over as editor of The Railway Magazine. To edit the magazine I had subscribed to as a small boy was a dream come true for me and by staying there for 21 years from 1994 to 2015, I became the longest-serving editor in its 100-year-plus history.
That wonderful job also took me all over the world, including a ten-day marathon on the Trans-Siberian Railway and journeys to China and Cuba to report on the last working steam there. It also gave me the opportunity to meet and interview many of the leading lights in the rail industry, including James Sherwood, owner of the Great North Eastern Railway (GNER) franchise that operated the main line trains through Grantham between 1996 and 2007.
The event I was most proud of during my time on The RM, though, was persuading my publishers to become official sponsors of the Grantham Festival of Speed in 2013.
That extravaganza was staged to commemorate the 75th anniversary of Mallard’s world record-beating speed achievement and the 50th anniversary of the closure of the engine shed.
For a Grantham lad, helping to get the iconic A4 and a ‘Deltic’ to the old up goods yard was a dream come true and I’m thrilled so many of you were able to visit it and show your families and grandchildren the sort of motive power you once worked on.
Back row (L to R): Syd North, Phil Cunnington, Steve Taylor, John Plummer, Maurice Massingham, Don Wade, Roy Veasey, Arthur Curtis (8)
Front Row (L to R): Tony Stevens, George Fielding, Mick Gibson, Roy Vinter, Alan Grummitt, John Michael, Ken Willetts, Boris Bennett (in front), Nev Eldred (9)
Photograph by Nick Pigott
It’s a pride I know I share with John and Mel. At the event they had a stand in one of the marquees where they worked hard to make contact with ex-railwaymen and others, helping to form the wonderful community spirit we see here today.
It’s sad that many who were present on that unforgettable weekend are no longer with us but, thanks in particular to John and Mel, their memories live on.
[Steve Philpott shares his experience of the Grantham Festival of Speed on our page A Recollection of the ‘Mallard weekend’ in September 2013.]
As part of the event, Grantham Civic Society asked me to unveil a commemorative plaque on platform 1… and I’m delighted to say that its presence well over a decade later continues to enlighten residents and passengers as to the rich and enduring history of the town’s railways.
Long may it continue to do so.”
This is the photograph and headline above Nick's editorial piece in the November 2013 issue of 'The Railway Magazine'. Drawing on the example of the Festival, Nick enthusiastically champions how celebrating local history can reconnect people and communities, fostering identity and a sense of place.
Nick Pigott
Nick has also contributed a page titled Grantham's Place in Rail History to our website.
Absolutely brilliant article. I too grew up on the east coast main line. I spent all my school holidays with my grandparents whose garden backed on to the line, and over the garden fence was my grandad's beloved allotment. I spent hours with him and his strawberries and garden peas, we also would extinguish small fires with a stirrup pump and water bucket. The highlight for me were the A4s and to this day they remain my favourite locomotives. So many wonderful memories.
Thank you for a fantastic website.
Regards, David.
I enjoyed reading about Nick Pigott’s talk. I was Nick’s postman in Leicester for several years until I took early retirement in 2007. He was living only a few hundred yards from the remains of my favourite railway, the Great Central. Many happy days were spent spotting there in the late fifties and early sixties when so many different classes of locomotive could be seen. From Gresley Pacifics to Western ‘Halls’, the motive power was so varied. There are some great photographs of the area in the three wonderful books about the rundown of the Great Central by Colin Walker.
Best wishes to you all.
Bob