Rails of inner London - a photo on Flickriver

            My late mother, encountering friends and neighbours on our way to the shops, would routinely spend twenty minutes "yapping" with each.  I recall the agonising tedium of these occasions for, when you are a child, twenty minutes with nothing to do is an ordeal by boredom.  In later life the time flies by so fast that it's often difficult to pin down an event to within the correct decade.  I would not be able to date this photograph in the absence of corrobarative information.  To me it has a 90s feel, but there is the silly "London Eye" ...now, I suppose, a permanent or at least long-term addition to the capital's skyline... and the picture was taken with my first digital camera, bought in July 2002.
The train would have left Charing Cross a few minutes before and is seen entering Waterloo East.  I hadn't set foot in Waterloo East for years, possibly since the late 60s, and remembered sooty London brick, wooden footbridges clumping with the feet of Kent commuters, peeling posters, Payne's Poppets and the rumble, clatter and slamming doors of green Southern Region electric trains.  I always enjoyed this little bit of line through inner south London, by way of the infamous bottleneck at Borough Market Junction, and enjoyed the views of slipping slates, grubby net curtains, pidgeon-fouled brick backyards and chimney pots.  Then, suddenly breaking out into the light, you were on the Hungerford Bridge, with its panorama of the sparkling Thames, the South Bank and the gilded pinnacles and crockets of Westminster.  Most of this London poetry had, by the early 2000s, been dispersed by such innovations as fluorescent light, the unpleasant modular roof on the footbridge in the background, these sleek, garishly-painted trains ...and the London Eye.
   

Taken on: September 14, 2009

Tags:

Waterloo East

Waterloo Station

Southern Region

emu

electric multiple unit

electric train

London railways

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Sets appears in: • Modern Railways

Groups appears in: • train stations -+- gares -+- bahnhöfe • trains more » • Railway • Trainspotting • Railscape • Traintrack • Intensive Training • UK Railways « less

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