I am now 70! I have several happy childhood memories; but if one train has to "encapsulate" my childhood it would be a 14xx plus auto trailer working between Monmouth and Ross on Wye.
We lived in Monmouth from 1957-1959. Both our home in Dixton Close, and our primary school on the way to Dixton, enjoyed intermittent views of the Ross line, among the trees (not too many of them then) on the other side of the River Wye. Our primary school had a most enlightened head teacher, Miss Evelyn Bowers. During November - December 1958, after the closure from early January 1959 had been announced, she stopped the lesson when a train was due to leave Monmouth May Hill, invited us all to watch it from a large bay window overlooking the valley, explained that this was a joy about to be taken away from us, and gently expressed some righteous anger that we were growing up in a world where such barmy things as closing a railway could happen.
In the week of the closure, she had the following poem published in the Monmouthshire Beacon:
A Small Train Thinks
(in a Very Small Way)
I'm out of date, and out of place,
I've wasted public money,
They'll need it all for Outer Space -
So that's not really funny...
They're shooting rockets at the Moon
Like coconuts at Sally,
Day-trips may run to Mars quite soon -
But no more to my Valley.
To see me puffing down the line
Caused Them a deal of worry.
Yet in that one-track world of mine
What need had I to hurry?
Past hoary rocks and ancient chase,
By heron-haunted streams,
I chugged along my antique pace
And stopped for timeless dreams.
I whistled long around each bend,
My smoke stretched in a cloud;
But now I've reached my journey's end
No longer I'm allowed.
To spend my days in sweet content
In puffing down the line,
My way of travel was not meant
For nineteen fifty-nine.
But when They've scaled the lunar heights
And circled every planet,
And broken all their days and nights
in record speed to span it;
And when their greater roads They've planned
For lesser men to travel by,
Will any find a fairer land
Than I found down the Wye?
E.M. BOWERS
I think my mother took me and my brother for two return trips to Ross, and one to Chepstow with pannier tank haulage. At Ross we saw "big trains on the main line" and never imagined that it too would close within seven years. The trip to Chepstow was just for the ride before closure, and I think the turnround time there must have been very short, as I do not recall watching any other trains on the main line there.
I think one of the return trips to Ross was in a streamlined diesel railcar, at a time when I think half the journeys were diesel and half steam. I can't remember much about the railcar but I know I didn't enjoy it so much - it seemed to be full of fumes.
My first ever cab ride (I have made very few in my life) was on a pannier tank at Troy station, into the tunnel and back again, I think just for my entertainment! I thought (and still do) that the pannier tanks looked more beautiful than the 14xx 0-4-2Ts, but the latter were the usual steam power for the Ross line.